The Saint is still my favourite ITC series out of all of them. The series concerns a man who is described as being a modern day Robin Hood of crime. Roger Moore truly is Simon Templar - no one else comes close. R.I.P. Broadcast from 1962 until 1969, 118 episodes is quite an achievement and they are mostly great. "The Saint" was able to evolve with the times, just like "The Avengers." The black and white episodes have a bit more in the way of intrigue and mystery. Simon Templar would sometimes gather all the suspects in one room and present his findings - shades of Hercule Poirot. The colour ones aimed for being more trendy and rather larger-than- life. Templar usually acted as a one man army in his crime-fighting activities and feared no one. His cool demeanour spoke volumes. The writers admitted that they usually had to insert a middle section in an episode because there wasn't one included in the original story. Leslie Charteris never seemed very happy or satisfied with the series on the whole. What he perhaps failed to realise, was that the series had to keep Simon Templar in a more contemporary setting. Otherwise, the whole thing would have looked old fashioned. There are far too many great episodes to list but on the whole, about 90% or more are of a high standard. The music for the shows theme is very effective. There were 3 different tunes and the first one is the best in my opinion. I know the scale of the series was quite small, with not much location filming. I can easily overlook this. It was "The Saint" and "Danger Man" that really sealed it for "ITC," regarding their future successes. Every subsequent series from Lew Grade was compared the above ones in some fashion or other.
Review of The Saint
