The Secret Service – 12. May-Day, May-Day!

The episode opens on a desert road. Once again, the car in use is the adapted version of Sam Loover’s car from Joe 90 which has been seen frequently throughout the series but is probably most commonly associated with Agent Blake. Personally, I’m not sure a saloon car with suspension that low is much use for traversing the desert sands, but what the heck do I know? Also, I can’t help but notice that the episode The Cure opened with pretty much the exact same kind of shot.

“An ARAB KING and his brother, PRINCE ELRAHIM sit in the chauffeur driven car,” is how the script describes this scene. I’m pointing that out because the finished episode isn’t actually all that clear about how these two men are related. Also, the name of the Prince is never given on-screen… and it looks like the name of the King is never given at all. In fact Kesten’s script doesn’t put much effort into naming the guest characters unless it’s absolutely necessary. The costumes are superbly detailed, but as with many, many, many other aspects of this episode they’re borrowed in-part from the Joe 90 episode King For A Day. Even the tiger print seat covers are seen in that episode.

One notable performance from May-Day, May-Day! is the voice of the King, which is provided by none other than David “Nosey Parker” Graham. He goes uncredited for his contributions to this episode and the next one, More Haste, Less Speed. Why was David Graham brought back for what was evidently the last ever Supermarionation voice recording session held by Century 21? We don’t know for sure. It’s possible that he might have been brought in to replace David Healy, who only provided voices in five out of the thirteen episodes. Maybe he was specifically chosen to voice characters in these last two adventures in the same way that Liz Morgan was brought in to voice a single character in the Joe 90 episode Viva Cordova. Whilst David Graham had been a stalwart of Supermarionation voices from Four Feather Falls through to Thunderbirds, he was noticeably absent from the casts of Captain Scarlet, Joe 90, and the earlier 11 instalments of The Secret Service. That being said, he was never far from the studios having also contributed voices to Thunderbirds Are Go (1966), Thunderbird 6 (1968), and a whole host of other Thunderbirds ephemera such as narrating some Century 21 mini albums released in 1967. 

While we gaze at this stock shot of the palace from King For A Day and enjoy music also heard in King For A Day, let’s talk about the general premise of this episode. The King wants to go to London and sign an oil concession and use the resulting funds to build schools, hospitals and irrigation schemes. His brother the Prince doesn’t want that, but because the King is the King he’s the boss… while he’s alive. So that’s the setup for who’s going to assassinate the other taken care of. It’s not a carbon copy of King For A Day, but you’ve got to admit a junior member of the royal family going to extreme lengths to gain power is a common dramatic theme. Indeed, Shakespearean levels of treachery within the royal families of Middle Eastern countries does seem to be a bit of a preoccupation of Western storytelling in general… probably because it would be treasonous to tell those sorts of juicy stories in a modern British setting.

A cheeky sausage on the roof of the palace has a rifle ready to shoot the King through the heart. 

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Fortunately, a royal guard is ready to punch a few bullet holes through the palace’s ancient masonry which definitely isn’t just a thin sheet of cardboard. The day is saved. And you better believe that giant door behind him is from King For A Day as well.

The Prince takes this as an opportunity to put a stop to the King’s visit to London. But an insignificant little assassination attempt ain’t gonna scare this King and the trip will proceed as planned. After all, a holiday is just the thing you need after a near-death experience.

The music and the extreme close-up indicate that the Prince is displeased. Obviously, he was the evil so-and-so who orchestrated that assassination attempt. The question is whether he actually planned to kill his brother, or just to scare him. The shooter was definitely aiming for his heart so I’m going to say murder was on the agenda, and scaring him was just a back-up scheme. Either way, he’s failed. Nice sunglasses though.

And then, for once, we cut to the opening titles exactly where the script suggests.

The working title for this episode on the front of Kesten’s script was “Bomb’s Away” for reasons that will become obvious at the climax of the episode. May-Day, May-Day! is certainly a more unusual title, particularly as it should actually be “Mayday, Mayday!” without the hyphens. The emergency distress signal originated in the early 1920s and stems from the French phrase “m’aidez” meaning “help me.”

The version of the script available in the Network DVD’s PDF archive apparently belonged at one stage to a “Mr. Kingham.” This was likely Bernard J. Kingham, whose grand job title, at least during the production of Space: 1999 was “ITC executive in charge of production.” It’s unclear whether this was a position he held as early as 1968, but he was still probably someone reasonably high up at the organisation who wasn’t directly employed by Century 21. An indication if one were needed, that ITC were in some capacity aware of the content of the series’ scripts, and certainly weren’t oblivious to what was going on with The Secret Service before they suddenly “cancelled” it as the stories claim.

The Bishop is briefing Father Unwin, and bringing the audience up to date too. Unwin is due to join the King’s retinue (a fancy word for squad, posse, or gang) to keep an eye on things until he reaches New York. Oh, okay, I guess he’s going to New York after his visit to London. Never mind the four assassination attempts, this guy’s an unapologetic jet-setter. 

The script for this scene originally suggested that Matthew stands next to Unwin to overhear the conversation taking place. Since Matthew has his own version of the hearing aid radio, the director, Alan Perry, has made the sensible decision to sit him as far away from Unwin as possible in a comfy chair. Much safer. There are a few other changes to this scene when comparing it to the original script. Some rather clunky dialogue is trimmed to establish that Matthew will be doing the same thing he always does. There’s also an instance in the script of Father Unwin referring to Matthew as “my boy,” which suddenly puts a weird parental spin on the relationship between the two agents that I can’t say I like much and I’m glad they changed it. The men are colleagues and equals – just because Matthew is younger and gets shrunk down by Unwin on a regular basis, doesn’t mean he should be talked to like a child.

As Unwin pulls the Minimiser from the bookshelf, there’s a particularly odd musical track playing. I think it’s a heavy re-edit of an earlier Barry Gray cue from something like Fireball XL5, but it could be several things stitched together. Barry Gray enthusiasts, please investigate!

For the final time in the series we get to watch the process of the Minimiser shrinking Matthew down to fit inside his case. Yes, we’re into the territory of “final times.” You won’t have to listen to me whitter about this ruddy show for much longer.

More unnecessary business is trimmed from the script. Kesten obviously thought that moments from the pilot episode such as Unwin and Matthew checking sound and vision inside the case were still integral to this sort of sequence. Tony Barwick and/or Alan Perry knew better and cut it out.

Gabriel launch sequence time. Unwin doesn’t even have time to pause and check there’s no traffic coming. He just drives out into the road blindly. No mucking about. Footage we’ve seen previously including Gabriel arriving in London is stitched together in a nice “stuff is happening” montage. It’s worth noting that shooting on this episode started around December 18th, 1968 according to a note on the front of the script, so if a location looks remotely sunny, it’s safe to say it was filmed months prior.

One significant change between the finished episode and the script is the swapping of this whole nighttime sequence at the hotel, with the scene at the workshop involving the toolmaker and the Prince. It was obviously felt that the pacing of the whole episode worked better if the hotel scenes appeared first. This establishing shot of the building is borrowed straight from the Joe 90 episode Viva Cordova.

Enjoying the comforts of his hotel suite, apparently the King isn’t in the slightest bit baffled by a country vicar joining his official party. In fact, he welcomes having “a man of intellect” along for the ride. That might be a bit of a generous description. But seriously, ain’t nobody going to question this setup? The whole point of the series’ format is that people call out just how odd it is to have a priest doing the work of an intelligence operative. If you aren’t even going to play into that a little bit, what’s all this been for? Sure, the King doesn’t know everything about Unwin’s undercover operation, but he doesn’t even seem slightly suspicious about why he’s there in the first place. In fact he welcomes the vicar with open arms. No wonder so many people have tried to kill him, he seems like a soft target.

From the comfort of the case, Matthew is able to look and listen in. We learn that the oil agreement with Britain has been signed successfully. Yup, the West just loves getting their grubby mitts on all that Middle Eastern oil. It turns out the upcoming trip to New York is to visit the King’s four-year-old son who lives out there… which isn’t a million miles away from the young Prince Kahib attending boarding school in England in King For A Day. Western education is often sought out for the children of the rich and famous in the Middle East, so it’s not necessarily surprising that the script is playing into that stereotype. 

With the King tucking himself into bed, it’s time for Matthew to make an appearance. Unwin assigns him to the first watch, and plans to take over at 2 am. Nice to hear the vicar actually plans to do some of the work for once.

Later that night, the King is being haunted by the grotesque mini-mini faceless Matthew goblin doll which I despise with all my heart. This is the one-ninth scale version of Matthew used to show him interacting with the puppet sets while in miniaturised form, despite the format of the show being constructed around the fact that no such shot should ever actually be needed. Makes my blood boil every time I see it because it’s yet another clear indicator that the show’s premise doesn’t really work. When you’re making a puppet of a puppet because the puppet show you’re making is based around puppets not being puppets but being miniaturised people, but your puppet needs to interact with other puppets while still being puppet-sized but hopefully not looking like a puppet then SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT HERE.

Oh yeah, of course we have a perfectly good close-up of the real Matthew puppet on a live-action set. Look how smug he is.

Up on the roof, a gentleman named Achmed is giving an assassin instructions. If you’re thinking there’s trouble afoot, you’d be right. But you don’t get a gold star for figuring that one out.

It makes sense that you’d have this scene come before the revelation of the bomb-in-a-teddy plot. If you’ve already got a bomb-in-a-teddy plot set in motion, why would you also attempt an assassin-at-the-window plot? You can’t possibly be that uncertain of your assassin-at-the-window plot succeeding that you have a bomb-in-a-teddy plot waiting on standby. So, by placing the assassin-at-the-window plot in front of the bomb-in-a-teddy plot, the story is a little bit tighter. Is that clear?

While the assassin is lowered down to the King’s room, Father Unwin is doing what he does best… sleeping in his daft hat.

Man appear at window. Matthew alerted. But Matthew tiny. What Matthew do?

Well, calling on a snoring, elderly priest to help is one option. Once he actually wakes up, Unwin is quick to jump out of bed. But will he be fast enough?!

Of all the puppets they could have picked to play the part of the assassin, it seems entirely fitting that they went with the puppet originally seen as the Director General from the Captain Scarlet episode Winged Assassin… who was also nearly killed by a man appearing at his bedroom window during the night. It’s surely just a coincidence, but it doesn’t exactly help this episode out on the originality front.

Apparently this man has the absolute worst peripheral vision I’ve ever seen as he completely fails to spot Matthew until the miniaturised agent says something. To be fair, the script specifically says Matthew should be “sitting on a straight-backed chair”, and that would have made him much harder to see than the relatively low-backed chair he’s standing straight up on in the finished episode. 

In a classic case of stereotypical “aren’t Middle Eastern people superstitious” business, the assassin immediately believes that Matthew is a supernatural being and gets very scared. The scripted dialogue has him say, “Ah ben su daken. A demon.” I assume that the first bit of that line is meant to sound Arabic, but it’s actually just nonsense. So, what does the hardened, knife-wielding thug do when confronted by a “demon”?

Jumps out the bloomin’ window like a right muppet, that’s what. Presumably he was reaching for the rope but failed in his panic. Matthew is keen to point out that they’re a long way up. I think the man who climbed through the window knows exactly how high up he is, thank you Matthew.

We aren’t treated to the sound of man hitting concrete so I’m sorry to disappoint you there. But don’t worry, Unwin has arrived. In his rush to SAVE THE KING’S LIFE, the vicar felt it appropriate to take his sweet time PUTTING ON A DRESSING GOWN AND HIS SHOES before coming to help. Seriously. It just wouldn’t do to see off a villain without being properly dressed first. Matthew has also managed to make himself completely vanish which is jolly convenient. Then, to add insult to injury, we get our prescribed dose of Unwinese for the episode as the King questions Unwin about the incident. Rather than getting angry with the vicar bursting into his bedroom without a decent explanation, the King considers Unwin to be some sort of good luck charm and goes back to bed, having just found the assassin’s knife and not been that bothered by it. 

Can someone smack me around the face? I think I’m hallucinating. None of this makes much sense. The characters are just doing what they need to do and say to keep the plot moving forward without taking a moment to do anything they realistically should do in this situation. Unwin should be rushing off to check with the authorities, or at the very least the hotel staff. There’s a dead man on the floor downstairs, after all, and a fellow conspirator up on the roof. Heck, Unwin doesn’t even shut the bedroom window. 

If you’re thinking that the location unit slapped a hastily assembled sign on any old chain link fence just outside the studios on the Slough Trading Estate for this quick shot… Well, you’re spot on. This shot was likely filmed from the very end of Stirling Road, looking at the north-western-most Century 21 building which primarily housed the special effects department at this time.

The frowning Captain Blue head is back to play another clever science type person as per Recall To Service. He’s made a 3-hour timing mechanism for the Prince and Achmed. The script suggested there should be a chauffeur standing in the background of this scene too but he’s not around in the finished version. Obviously he had better things to be doing.

Not at all concerned about drawing attention to himself, the Prince suggests they test out the device right there and then, unveiling a teddy bear with a horrifying chest cavity. The toolmaker is understandably alarmed by this development. Why put the instrument for a timebomb inside a teddy bear? I know the song goes, “If you go down to the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise,” but I wasn’t expecting the teddy bears’ picnic getting infiltrated by a suicide bomber!

Achmed is left to pay the man for his services. He does so with all the warmth of a man who’s just spent the previous night scraping the remains of an assassin off of some concrete.

Back in their car, the Prince suggests they have the nervous toolmaker followed and “taken care of” if he does anything he shouldn’t do. Sure, that sounds like a good idea, but a better one would have been WAITING UNTIL YOU GOT IN THE CAR TO PUT THE BOMB COMPONENT IN THE TEDDY BEAR AND THUS AROUSING NO SUSPICION WHATSOEVER. I mean, for goodness sake!

Heathrow Airport. Where all your dreams are delayed for three hours in an overcrowded terminal building.

The special effects team have put together this lovely shot of Royal Muldova 1 on the tarmac along with heaps of bits and pieces such as luggage and two tiny figures to represent the King and the Prince. They’re remarkably detailed, even down to the sling on the King’s arm.

Incidentally, Muldova is a fictional country which shouldn’t be confused with Moldova which is in fact a real country. Geography win.

So apparently the departure of a Middle Eastern King from Heathrow Airport is worth televising. The walls of this set are pinched straight from the nursing home seen in The Cure. The television set previously belonged to Ralph Clayton in the Joe 90 episode, See You Down There.

Apparently the toolmaker, who we now learn is called Joe, is spending some quality time with his father/friend/uncle/cousin/a random stranger. They’re getting ready to watch “the big match.” It’s a bloomin’ odd moment because… well… Supermarionation characters aren’t known for sitting down on a Saturday afternoon with their mates and watching the footie. It’s too darn British, and too darn relaxed. You can even tell that Jeremy Wilkin and Keith Alexander aren’t entirely comfortable saying this kind of dialogue out loud. They’re not used to it. I’m not used to it. This scene makes my teeth itch. Those armchair patterns make my eyeballs scream.

Joe must be doing reasonably well for himself, owning a colour television set in 1969. The news is good enough to be broadcasting live from the runway, and even has a microphone trained on the King and Prince in order to perfectly capture the fact that the teddy bear is being handed over as a “gift” for the King’s son. Phew, I bet the news crew were glad to get that historic moment on tape.

Wow, they’ve even been good enough to get an extreme close-up of the box so that our friend Joe can recognise it and move the plot forward. Look, I know I’m being facetious and irritating, but I’m being genuinely honest when I say that I’ve always found this scene rather odd, and it’s only when I break it down like this that it becomes clear how thoroughly convenient and slightly weird all of this is. 

Joe runs off to the police station to let them know about the bomb… when he could have picked up a telephone and called them… although I guess running next door would have been quicker… assuming he lives right next door to the police station… which would be another jolly convenient thing about this script. Meanwhile Joe’s pal/relative/lover/carer/bank manager is suitably baffled. 

According to the script, the original intention at this point was now to cut back to the aircraft preparing for takeoff. Instead, the finished episode sticks with Joe and his heroic attempt to find an honest bobby…

You might recognise this set as a slightly redressed version of the front doors of Dr. Newman’s office in Copenhagen from the Joe 90 episode, Double Agent. They’re probably used elsewhere too, but that’s the main appearance I can remember. Yes, my brain actually retains some of this nonsense. I’m a hit at parties.

Today, for a very brief bit of location filming, we’re in Beaconsfield roughly where Windsor End meets Hedgerley Lane… conveniently just down the road from The Greyhound pub.

Joe has his blinker head on all of a sudden. I wonder what’s about to happen to him. Again, despite being in something of a rush to alert the authorities, he’s still taken the time to PUT ON HIS OVERCOAT BEFORE LEAVING THE HOUSE. Heaven forbid you should get a bit cold while an assassination plot unfolds.

As the car drives by, the script specified that it should be an “ARAB aiming his gun out of [the] window.” Since the Century 21 team weren’t in the habit of practising blackface, they just stuck with using a white man in a suit, and filmed it nice and fast so we wouldn’t notice. If you’re interested, the car is an Austin Princess.

I don’t know about Joe but the set sure gets torn to shreds by the gunfire. To be completely honest, this scene is made just a bit comical by the fact it’s a live-action car shooting at a puppet. They really should have stuck to one or the other for the whole scene. That said, I can understand why filming a man getting shot by a drive-by assassin might have been problematic for the location unit… although frankly they’re a film crew so I don’t really see why it would have been a problem. This is actually part of what I struggle with regarding some of The Secret Service’s location footage. It has something of an amateurish, guerilla feel to it. As if they had just a couple of people to quickly set up a shot of cars going by or what have you without anyone seeing them. Of course, that’s probably true in part. We’ve already addressed The Secret Service’s much lower budget than previous Supermarionation ventures, and I can’t imagine Ken Turner had much time available to achieve his shots on location. Plus, he was in the bizarre position of having to make his footage as inconspicuous and undetectable in the final edit as possible. He couldn’t direct the skeleton location crew to do anything too ambitious or dynamic because it would have drawn attention to the fact it wasn’t filmed inside the studio like the rest of the scene. 

Nevertheless, the gunman really commits to the part and keeps on firing as the car speeds off down the road. Anyone watching the filming taking place must have been a little concerned that the mafia had come to Buckinghamshire.

So, that’s Joe dead or something. Maybe he put the overcoat on to avoid getting blood on his nice shirt.

Back at the airport, RM1 is preparing for takeoff. As mentioned, this sequence was originally scripted to be seen before Joe’s untimely death. Father Unwin has joined the party and the King is pleased as punch. Seriously, why do you like this guy so much, your majesty? He’s not that great. The interior of the plane is the exact same set that we’ve seen countless times before in previous Supermarionation shows, but most recently it was used in The Cure.

The pilot is waiting on the co-pilot to bring the weather charts before they can take off. I’m on the edge of my seat.

On the King’s orders, a stewardess silently takes the teddy bear box back to the luggage compartment. Yes – another rare sighting of a woman in The Secret Service. We should have her put in a frame. Mrs Appleby is absent from this episode once again which means Sylvia Anderson had no characters to voice in either May-Day, May-Day! or the previous episode, School For Spies. She’s also absent from the next episode, More Haste, Less Speed so I guess that’s Mrs Appleby gone for good now. Maybe Matthew finally got sick of her having a go at him. She really didn’t have a lot to do for most of the series because the representation of women across the whole series is just plain rubbish. Maybe Tony Barwick and the writers felt that the character had run out of interesting things to do – but it’s more likely Sylvia Anderson was too busy working on other things to attend the last recording session.

Unwin keeps his case nearby, no doubt with Matthew tucked away inside, ready at a moment’s notice to use his demonic powers and force an assassin to fall from a great height again.

With the box safely stowed at the back of the plane, it’s finally time to get this show on the road.

This scene was scripted to take place next to a car on the runway, but the action has instead been moved to the gate inside the terminal building. That chap pretending to read in the background is clearly listening in on the Prince and Achmed’s conversation.

We learn that a canister of some sort has been fixed in the cockpit which will activate for 10 seconds once the pilot switches off the automatic pilot. The Prince proudly declares that “if the bomb fails to detonate we will still succeed.” Wow, this guy really does enjoy a back-up plan and coming up with creative new ways to kill his brother. Why would you plant a bomb in (almost) total secrecy, and then go waltzing into the aircraft’s cockpit in broad daylight and install a suspicious device in the autopilot system? Surely you’d just feel bright and confident about your teddy bear bomb and leave it at that? Then again, your highly trained assassin did throw himself out of a window last night so maybe it is better to be safe than sorry.

As the plane takes off we’re assured that the autopilot is currently switched off for the moment. Unfortunately, the teddy bear has gained sentience and has broken free from his box in readiness to tear someone’s throat out. Look at his eyes. Those vicious, vicious eyes.

Time for a commercial break.

Some time has passed. Father Unwin is enjoying the flight and the King is fast asleep. In the original script, he was wide awake at this point. In the cockpit the pilot and co-pilot seem fine, but the autopilot is switched on, so here’s hoping they don’t plan to switch it off and try a loop-the-loop any time soon. What a bizarrely specific plan for Achmed to rig up his device to trigger once the autopilot is switched off… it’s almost as if it’s been done for the convenience of the plot more than anything else.

The Bishop has news, and it isn’t about Father Unwin’s nomination for Priest of the Year… probably because Matthew never bothered to put it in the post.

No, no, the news is that there’s a bomb on the plane. Yes, apparently Joe survived that pesky bullet wound to the heart for long enough to tell someone all about the explosive device and presumably that he’d seen it being handed over to the King on live TV… but he did fail to mention the crucial part about the teddy bear. Apparently his last words were “sewn into…” Now, I’m not one to get snippy with a man at death’s door, but I would have led with the fact it’s inside a teddy bear. That’s the unusual part about this whole situation, Joe. If nothing else, that’s the detail which nobody else would manage to figure out easily.

So, with everyone except the King aware that there’s a bomb on board, Unwin is keen to know what the pilot is planning to do. Well, don’t worry because the pilot is already on top of it for the benefit of the plot. With the nearest landfall in Iceland still two hours away, and only one hour until the bomb explodes, he’s basically planning to ditch the plane in the sea and evacuate in the middle of the Atlantic in half an hour’s time. Gosh he sure came up with that whole scheme quite quickly. 

He’s even made contact with a nearby weather ship to help them out. I talked about weather ships in quite a bit of detail during my review of the Stingray episode, The Invaders, but basically they were manned ships stationed across the waters of the world designed to monitor global weather patterns. They were made redundant by the 1980s when technology was able to offer up more remote, automated means of tracking the weather. I won’t bore you with any further details but frankly you should have known they were coming.

Anyway, with all that said, it’s time for Matthew to leap into action and go hunting for a bomb in the luggage using “the mine detector from the case.” Yes, apparently the case has a mine detector. Never heard about that before but I imagine it would come in quite handy during a story about finding a bomb in an unlikely place. What a convenient solution.

Over in the cockpit, the lads are keeping an eye on the time and also chatting with the weather ship Markham – presumably named after the city in Ontario, Canada.

There was a deleted scene from the script prior to this which would have shown the King wide awake, and Father Unwin having to use Unwinese to explain away exactly why he’s seemingly talking to himself, and also to cover for Matthew while he hops out of the case. Instead, the King is kept asleep because my goodness all that sounds quite tedious.

Someone called “Master” aboard the Markham is heard faintly over the radio. Apparently the weather is quite stormy and not suitable for ditching an aircraft in. In fact we’re told the waves are 30 feet high… I don’t know what you think, but those waves sure don’t look 30 feet high! Maybe the effects department didn’t get the memo? Maybe this shot was filmed for something totally different? I can’t say I recognise it from anything else but heck, I can’t know everything.

He’s behind you!

A passage of time. Look, if you ignore the big fat plot holes, all of this is reasonably tense. Knowing there’s a bomb but not being able to find it is rocket fuel for any dramatic situation, really. Maybe if we as the audience hadn’t been told exactly where the bomb is, and that there’s a device inside the autopilot system, this might have been even more exciting. Right now we’re just waiting for characters to slowly figure out things we already know.

In the script, this next bit follows immediately from the news that the waves around the Markham are 30 feet high which is why the pilot suddenly declares that they’ve got no alternative after what appears on-screen to be 15 minutes-worth of complete silence. Presumably Tony Barwick or Alan Perry felt that a passage of time needed to be shown in order to build the tension a bit more and make it realistically feel like time was running out. After all, at 11:00 the Bishop said they had 30 minutes to find the bomb before they were going to ditch into the ocean. The scripted version goes from 11:00 to 11:30 in the space of about one minute of screen time, so it needed to be padded out a bit more to be credible.

Anyway, now that the pilot has run out of patience, he has the autopilot switched off and we get to watch two puppets choke to death on some nasty-looking fumes. Yum.

Because the crew of RM1 are now rather unresponsive, Markham contacts flight control to let them know something ain’t right. Interesting that the weather high up in the clouds is absolutely lovely compared with the stormy, grey ocean below. 

In no time at all, Markham has contacted flight control, who have contacted the Bishop, who has contacted Father Unwin and asked him to go and take a look in the flight deck. Now that’s some efficiency. My wife has to shout up the stairs at least three times to get me to do anything. The King is still sleeping quite happily. He’s probably on some really strong painkillers for that gunshot wound.

Father Unwin’s reaction to finding out he’s trapped on an out of control aircraft carrying a bomb with both pilots out for the count is, and I quote, “Oh dear. Oh this is awful.” The worst part is, “Oh this is awful,” wasn’t even scripted. Also, I do have to highlight that young Joe McClaine found himself in a similar pickle in the Joe 90 episode Splashdown, although I can’t exactly call that the origin of all “unconscious pilot” plots either.

Here we are in Iceland – not a location we visit often in the realm of Supermarionation. I’ll say one thing for this episode, it’s got a much more international flavour than any of the other Secret Service offerings. Although you might be forgiven for thinking that this model set is just the London Airport set we saw earlier with some snow thrown on top of it… because it is. The plane seen in the foreground is the lovely Helga, which featured prominently in the pilot episode, A Case For The Bishop.

The set for the airfield control room can be dated, at least in part, all the way back to London Airport as it appeared in the first episode of Thunderbirds, Trapped In The Sky. It’s been updated several times for appearances in Captain Scarlet and Joe 90 and at this point, the only recognisable element from the original set is the window frames. Even the glass has been swapped out for something considerably more green.

Meanwhile, David Graham is doing his absolute best stab at an Icelandic accent. If anyone other than an actual Icelandic person can get close, it’s David Graham.

Well this is going to go exactly the way you think it’s going to go.

Told you. Poor Matthew gets thrown to the floor while Unwin struggles to get control of the aircraft and the flight controller is yelling down the radio. Hey BISHOP, d’you still think using completely untrained priests as secret agents is a good strategy?

Again, we’re running with a familiar theme here. Father Unwin can’t drive a car safely. Father Unwin can’t stop a train. Father Unwin can’t ride in a boat without falling out the back. And now Father Unwin can’t fly a plane without making a dog’s dinner out of it.

Fortunately, things do calm down a bit as Unwin gets the plane back on course. Can’t imagine the King managed to sleep through all that rough flying though…

Oh he did. Yes, while Matthew is about ready to throw up in a suitcase which isn’t his own, the King has been snoozing this entire time. Again, the script doesn’t actually specify that he’s asleep through any of what we’ve seen so far, but the finished episode keeps him totally knocked out to avoid any awkward questions. With ten minutes to go, things are still looking rather dodgy.

Some good news at last. Matthew has found the bomb inside the teddy bear. His mine detector looks suspiciously like a food mixer up close. The teddy bear doesn’t look too thrilled by the prospect of being probed by a kitchen appliance.

Getting the bear out of the plane isn’t going to be a simple matter – not a sentence I ever thought I’d be using. Unwin is informed he’ll need to descend to 5,000 feet before opening the hatch, otherwise the depressurisation will kill them all. Current air safety practice suggests they’d be able to breathe perfectly well at 10,000 feet, but maybe things were different on planes in the 1960s. I’m not a physics teacher.

With just a few minutes left, Unwin forces the aircraft into a dive to lose height as fast as possible. Matthew cuddles the teddy bear while still trying to look as heroic as possible. In a line not present in the original script, Matthew mentions having to watch the slipstream once the hatch is open. The jet engines are mounted at the very back of the plane, so I don’t think slipstream is quite the thing he needs to worry about. Again though, I’m not a physics teacher.

Unwin does a blunder and over-corrects when it’s time to level out, throwing poor Matthew to the floor again. Clock is ticking here, mate! We don’t have time for the silly old vicar act right now!

Unwin’s flying is now officially bad enough now to wake up a jet-lagged old King dosed up on painkillers.

With barely a second to spare, Matthew chucks the evil teddy bear out of the plane with a cheerful, “Bombs away!” 

This is what you get when you ask the Century 21 effects department to make a model of a yellow teddy bear for the express purpose of being blown up. It ain’t pretty. The fact it sits in mid-air perfectly static while the sky backdrop rolls past behind it doesn’t help to make the thing look more realistic.

Not a particularly dignified way to go.

All done and dusted then and the day is saved! Well, not quite. There’s just the small matter of landing the plane with an inexperienced pilot in command. 

By the way, what the heck happened to that stewardess we saw earlier?

Time for the Unwinese to come thick and fast as Unwin explains to Sleeping Beauty what’s been happening. I love the little improvised mutterings offered by David Graham as the King attempts to understand the gibberish being thrown at him. Apparently the King has some mysterious feeling that he can trust Father Unwin to land the plane safely. Clearly, he didn’t watch last week’s episode when Unwin threw a highly volatile explosive substance out of a window and was surprised when it brought half the building down on top of him. The man is not to be trusted with anything. Ah well, we’ve had Matthew do something heroic, so it’s time for Unwin to do something heroic to bring a fair sense of balance to the episode.

Matthew’s safely back in the case and Unwin begs him to wish them luck with the landing. At least he’s not arrogant enough to assume this is all going to go swimmingly.

There’s not an awful lot to say about this next bit. You’ve seen this type of thing in a gazillion different airplane-based disaster movies and TV shows. The air traffic controller gives some instructions. The pilot sometimes does the orders just fine, but then will inexplicably do something thoroughly dangerous which makes us all think they’re doomed to die and turn into people-jam as soon as they hit the runway. 

The snowy airfield is rather pretty. The vehicle in the foreground is the one which started out life as a Superon tanker in the Thunderbirds episode Path of Destruction and was most recently seen parked outside the base in Recall To Service. Yes, I am repeating very similar trivia from previous reviews again. Don’t have a cow man.

The assistant to the air traffic controller gets an opportunity to speak. Apparently there’s a higher than average number of red-haired people in Iceland which might be a poor way of explaining why these two look like brothers when they’re probably not supposed to be brothers. They try to keep their cool as Father Unwin makes his final approach towards the runway. 

Uh oh, the controller loses it and Unwin needs to pull up fast. Of course he’s knackered it. But what did he do wrong? Have a guess. It’s the thing that they always, always get wrong during these movies…

They forgot to tell Father Unwin to lower the undercarriage. It’s such a common trope of emergency landings I’m surprised air traffic controllers don’t start keeping a post-it note on their desks just to remind them to mention it during these situations.

The air traffic controller looks like a right wally now but never mind. There’s some rather lovely shots of the RM1 as it steers back around to approach the runway for another go at landing. Hmmm… a second attempt at landing… I wonder where I’ve seen that before in an Anderson production…

Unwin is instructed to release his undercarriage… Fortunately, he keeps his underwear exactly where they should be.

Wheels now lowered, there’s a lot of cutting back and forth between various faces to ramp up the tension nicely.

I want to hear the Fireflash landing music at this point, but I can also appreciate that Barry Gray would never stoop so low as to be THAT unoriginal.

Unwin lands the plane successfully. In the script, the air traffic control twins celebrate by shaking hands and yelling “Magnificent job, sir!” in a very British way that wouldn’t be right. Instead the finished episode seems to have the Assistant’s hand hovering just out of shot above the Controller’s ummm… thingy.

But because it’s an Anderson show, the plane has to crash into something… but in this case we get a really lame version of it. RM1 veers off the runway, and approaches a radar truck thing, then we cut away briefly before the collision, and the next shot is the plane sitting in front of the camera looking totally fine. Apparently it does actually clip the radar truck according to the script, but you wouldn’t know because special effects inexplicably decided not to blow anything up. Not even a little bit. We don’t even see evidence of the collision on camera at all. How disappointing.

The Controller is thoroughly impressed though. So that’s nice.

To end the episode on a warm and fuzzy note, the King confirms that he was right to trust Father Unwin with his life. It’s a nice moment to reinforce what the character of Father Unwin is all about. He’s an unlikely hero, but his determination and a passion for doing the right thing still manages to make him a hero in every situation… despite an overwhelming lack of ability which ends up clashing with the high stakes of those situations…

We end with a sermon, but not the one that’s scripted. Here’s the version originally written by Bob Kesten:

252. INT. CHURCH. DAY

SHOOT over CONGREGATION to FATHER UNWIN in the pulpit.

UNWIN: For my text today, my dear brethren, I chose a quotation from the New England Primer..

CUT TO:

253. MS – FATHER UNWIN

UNWIN: Our days begin with troubles here,
Our life is but a span,
And cruel death is always near,
So frail a thing is man..

In the finished episode, Unwin starts by quoting from the book of Job: “The hypocrites in heart heap up wrath.” and continues, “The people who hurt us most are those who profess to love us and yet deliberately deceive us for their own ends.”

It certainly makes sense that the script editor would want Unwin quoting from the King James Bible, rather than the New England Primer because the former is much more Anglican. In terms of the actual messaging, the original quotation is basically saying, “gosh, life’s short isn’t it?” while the finished episode says, “your close family are going to kill you.” Both sum up the episode, I guess… to be honest, I can’t think of anything more intellectually significant to grasp from May-Day, May-Day!

I feel that I was unceremoniously harsh throughout this entire review. I wasn’t planning to be. When I first re-watched May-Day, May-Day! for this review I thought it was basically fine if a little vanilla. It’s one of those episodes that functions well enough at a surface level. Probe any deeper and you discover that Bob Kesten’s script is full of tropes and generic swathes of stuff you’d get from other Anderson shows but not done nearly as well. I stand by the fact that this episode could have been written for any of the Supermarionation series and that’s really unfortunate because at this late stage in The Secret Service, we’ve established that this particular show has some really specific scripting requirements which make it unique. 

The big picture stuff is all okay – Unwin turning out to be the unlikely action hero, and Matthew risking his life as the capable assistant is all as it should be. But the miniaturisation aspect is barely a factor that impacts the story. Gabriel is kept out of the picture almost entirely. The Unwinese is used in the most basic way possible. The comedy and whimsy is mostly absent. Even the sermon at the end is delivered straight on the nose without a hint of irony. Overall, it’s pretty clear that May-Day, May-Day! originated from what Kesten knew about the Andersons’ earlier series, and from their original vision of The Secret Service as outlined in their script for A Case For The Bishop. For some reason, the essential balance of whacky sci-fi mixed with playful English whimsy that Tony Barwick injected into his own scripts and encouraged from other writers as the series progressed is absent from Bob Kesten’s contribution to the show. 

Rather than repeating the greatest hits from the past on a lower budget as May-Day, May-Day! attempts to do, we’ll see next week that the most memorable instalments of The Secret Service dared to take Supermarionation in a wild new direction…