Adam Adamant Lives!

"It appears that 1966 has a great deal of capacity for a man of my talents."

A black-and-white British series running on the BBC in 1966 and 1967, which featured a Victorian adventurer frozen and returned to life in the present day. The show was originally planned to use the actual Victorian character Sexton Blake, but the BBC could not get the rights to use the character this way (although they did a Blake radio show with a normal setting) and a new name, Adam Adamant was chosen.

Betrayed by the woman Louise in 1902 to his archenemy The Face, the Edwardian adventurer Adamant is frozen and not resuscitated until 1966. He escapes the hospital and is overwhelmed by the sights of the city. He meets and helps Georgina Jones, a swinging chick and dedicated Adamant fan, who constantly becomes embroiled in adventures, which Adam considers unladylike. Saving her from a murderous protection racket was his first step in resuming his adventuring career. Adamant's home base is his old home rebuilt--on top of the upper floor of a car park (parking lot to Americans).

Subsequent episodes established more of a formula. Either Adam or Georgina would stumble upon a plot, usually involving some technofantasy element (clothes that kill their wearers, washing powder with an addictive scent, etc.). Adam would forbid Georgina to investigate, but she would anyway. Then he would have to rescue her as well as solving the case. In the better stories they would solve it together. In episode 2 Adam employed a former seaside entertainer Willaim Simms (Jack May) as a valet. One of the show's highlights was the constant bickering between Simms and Georgina.

There was never much romance between the two leads. Georgina hero-worshipped Adam to the point of stalking him (in one episode she followed him all the way to Japan and disguised herself as a geisha to get near him) but his attitude to her was always more paternal. He would, however, frequently be attracted to female villains. His blind spot was that he could never believe a woman to be capable of evil, no matter how many evil women he met.

The series was produced by Verity Lambert when Sidney Newman was BBC Head of Drama; the two were more famous for Doctor Who. It starred Gerard Harper as Adamant and Juliet Harmer as Georgina Jones. It lasted two seasons, but almost half the episodes are missing nowadays. The existing episodes were released on DVD in the UK and Australia in 2006, with script PDFs for the missing ones.

Tropes used in Adam Adamant Lives! include:

• A God Am I
• Alliterative Name
• Arch Enemy: The Face.
• As the Good Book Says...
• Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Adamant.
• Big Bad: The Face, who wasn't a presence until season two, and even then only as The Man Behind The Man.
• Combat Pragmatist: For a gentleman with a high moral code in most things, Adam can be quite the dirty fighter, from trashcan lids to chairs, from kicking a man when he's down to hitting a woman (only if she is directly about to kill someone else), he'll usually take a villain and his or her mooks down by whatever means possible.
• Cool Car: Semi-averted. Adam drives a Mini Cooper S, a fairly humdrum compact car, but with an expensively remodelled interior.
• Crucified Hero Shot
• Cultured Badass
• Deadly Dodging
• Deadpan Snarker: Adam's valet Simms, usually toward Georgina.
• Decoy Damsel: Often used successfully against Adam, and is perhaps his only Achilles' Heel
• Deliberate Values Dissonance between Adamant's Victorian mores and the modern day. On the other hand, Adamant recognized that the modern world has some social advantages and didn't approve when a villain thought the Victorian era was perfect.
• Dissonant Laughter: Adam often does this in the midst of a fight.
• Dude in Distress: Pretty much the whole first season had one scene an episode where Adamant is knocked out and sees a flashback of his treacherous love interest in the Victorian era saying "So clever... but oh so vulnerable."
• Dueling Shows: The Avengers also featured an overdressed male adventurer helped by a modern-day woman.
• Duel to the Death: With foils in "The Terribly Happy Embalmers", with a fellow Sword Cane carrier in "Sing a Song of Murder", and with fists in "Beauty is an Ugly Word".
• Faked Rip Van Winkle: Done in reverse in the episode "A Slight Case Of Reincarnation"
• Fangirl: Georgina Jones grew up on stories of Adam and constantly stalks him.
• Femme Fatale: Initially, Louise with The Face. Also applies to almost all of the women Adam meets in the sixties, with the exception of Georgina. His belief in the purity of womanhood, despite Louise's betrayal, always allows them to get the better of him.
• Fictional Counterpart: One episode had a club with girls with Playboy Bunny-like outfits (but trimmed with feathers instead of ears and a tail).
• Fish Out of Temporal Water
• Forgot About His Powers: Adam's intelligence quotient, perception, and many of his skills seem to frequently increase or decrease as the plot demands; something he didn't fall for in a previous episode, he falls for in another, especially when it comes to suspecting women.
• Geisha: An embarrassingly bad episode More Deadly than the Sword which included inaccurate stereotypes of Japan, bad accents, and actors in Yellowface.
• Gentleman Adventurer: Adamant. Although on the documentary, the writers admit that Adamant wasn't really like a Victorian adventurer, even a fictional one.
• Gentleman Snarker
• Good Old Ways: Adamant.
• Human Popsicle: Adamant and The Face.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Simms, as far as Georgina is concerned.
• May Contain Evil: "The Sweet Smell of Disaster".
• Missing Episode: Most of the second season and some of the first season no longer exist in any form.
• More Deadly Than the Male: The women tend to be far more ruthless than the men in the series.
• Old School Chivalry: Part of Adamant's Victorian attitude.
• Once an Episode: See "Distressed Dude". Also, many episodes also include a scene where Simms composes a limerick by way of comment on the situation (all of which were written by Dick Vosburgh).
• Reckless Sidekick: Georgina.
• Religion of Evil: "The Village of Evil".
• Rich Idiot With No Day Job: It is never explained how Adamant gets his money.
• The Sixties and The Swinging Sixties
• The Slow Path: Adamant eventually meets Louise in the modern day, aged as one would expect.
• Sword Cane: Adam's trademark weapon.
• Tear Jerker: In "Black Echo", when Adam finally learns the truth about Louise's fate. (Unfortunately, although this episode survives it has the worst sound and picture quality.)
• The Sixties
• Town with a Dark Secret: "The Village of Evil".
• Undead Tax Exemption: Averted, because Adam Adamant is a famous person in-story and his revival is not a secret, so his own identity is still good.
• Utopia Justifies the Means
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Charity, Faith, and Hope in "The League of Uncharitable Ladies"