Get Me Out Of Here!

DVD, The Champions (Get Me Out Of Here!)

In all honesty not one of the memorable episodes of the series although it was produced squarely in the middle of the run so perhaps fatigue was creeping in? There aren't glaring problems, and in fact it's one of those episodes where the trio of agents are working closely together throughout and no one ever has to get captured and then rescued by their colleagues, unless you count the scene near the end when Sharron and her charge are caught by the police in a resistance member's house. But then the whole story is about rescuing a captured political prisoner, Professor Anna Maria Martes, leading figure in medical research, lured back to her home country of San Dios, an island west of Cuba, because she's about to make a scientific breakthrough of some kind and the leader, el jefe, wants to take advantage of her in his 'Year of Scientific Progress.' So it's like a subplot in an episode expanded to be the whole story. It sounds like it could be pretty exciting to break into a country, locate their target and expertly wrest her out of the control of her people, but in practice the majority of the episode is a waiting game. They wait and observe. They wait and formulate plans. They wait for the right time to put the next stage into operation. They wait… and the waiting grows tiresome.

At least the guest cast livens things up a bit with the great and ubiquitous figure of TV and film, Philip Madoc as Anna Maria's lazy, useless ex-husband, Angel, and the Commandante. The latter is good value for his complete change of face depending on who he's dealing with: around Anna Maria he relishes the power he has over her and enjoys being the man to break the news to her she's not going anywhere, almost like he's energised to act out a role, whereas when dealing with the lowly Angel, who has no part in his plans, he is bored and to the point, showing complete disinterest to the extent that the contrast is entertaining in itself. Sadly, for a man of Madoc's talents he's largely wasted (according to the DVD booklet he was unable to do a good Latin American accent and so was dubbed by one of the 'Thunderbirds' voice artists, which seems strange as he was known for his accents!), though he does get something of an arc to his character who doesn't appreciate the ex-wife he's lost, except where it concerns her money and the prestige he gets by association, showing him up as a shallow man. He goes from this to switching sides, though he's no noble hero, it's all self-interest on his part as he can see his position is finished in his own country so he may as well use the opportunity to take the exit to America, even if Anna Maria doesn't want him around. He's killed by one of the Commandante's men in a firefight after he's turned traitor to the regime, allowing time for Craig and Richard to come dashing in and beat up the enemy, with a deathbed moment for Anna Maria to see some good in her ex-husband.

In contrast to the selfish and blinkered Angel, her friend Henriques Cuevos is a man of honour and bravery, refusing to spill the beans about the secret room in his house where Anna Maria and Sharron are in hiding even when the Commandante threatens to burn down his house and all his possessions in order to get to them. A member of the resistance, he's cultivated a good cover as a doctor, but Angel reveals the existence of the hideout while still appearing to work for the enemy. I'm not sure when he actually decided to switch sides, perhaps it was all planned, or maybe it occurred to him once Anna Maria had been unearthed, but he makes up for any evil he's responsible for with his life. I have to say that Sharron wasn't up to much this time - she's supposed to be protecting Anna Maria, and while there's not a lot she could have done against a posse of armed men there's a general sense of helplessness on her part throughout the episode: she's the one driving the getaway car when she manages to crash into some rubble (proving that even with twenty-twenty vision you're not infallible), on the road to the coast, cracking the sump and lessening their chance of escape, and she spends most of the episode sitting around talking with either Craig or Richard while they do all the work and have all the 'fun,' about her only worthwhile moment being to lure Angel to a meeting with her, 'Karen Holmes for International.'

That may be one reason Sharron's awarded the sole limelight in the post-opening credits sequence where we're reminded who the champions are and what kind of abilities they have - she's in a train carriage when a thief reaches over to steal a woman's unattended purse when the lights in the carriage go out, Sharron shown to have natural night vision complete with green glow, able to see his groping hand approaching and switching the purse out for a cup of hot tea. I don't think we'd had this power used before, but then they don't tend to operate in pitch blackness, and it is a cool little sequence that showcases the ability well and also has amusement value. Usually, unless the scene plays directly into the main part of the episode, there's a distinct lack of connection with these showcase reminders, so much so that you wonder if they were written and filmed separately and inserted into whatever episode was warranted at the time, especially when you consider that some post-credits scenes were reused in other episodes, but in this case it was either very good symmetry or they wrote it specifically for this episode because the night vision is integral to the plot - Craig and Richard break into the police station, the Commandante's HQ, to rescue Anna Maria who is officially in 'protective custody' there, and break her out by smashing the generator and turning the lights off. It can't be a coincidence then that the night vision had been introduced, and we even return to the theme of sight when Sharron crashes the car, and at the end when Tremayne voices his usual scepticism and suspicion on how they pulled off this latest mission, but he's got to the point where he doesn't really want to know, he's just happy they're so successful and tells them to run away as if he accepts that's how it'll always be after being fobbed off with excessive eating of carrots as an explanation for their keen eyesight!

Most of the time in this episode their powers aren't played up, strangely, it's like they have them and we know it, so they don't feel the need to emphasise it like they usually do. There isn't much of the twinkly music that usually denotes supernatural senses and suchlike, often we're left to assume they were in a tougher situation than a normal person could deal with: for example, when Craig has to hide in the water cistern on the roof of the hotel where Anna Maria's initially being held, he must have had to hold his breath for a significant period as the guards, complete with Alsatian, search for him, but we don't see him burst up for air as if he could barely survive much longer, he climbs out calmly. The same can be said when Richard leads the guards on a wild goose chase so Craig can get in and speak to Anna Maria - it's not like he performs any astonishing acrobatics to escape the pursuing police, he just runs around a bit, eventually speeding off on a motorbike into the countryside until they give up the chase, but confiscate the abandoned 'cycle, leaving him with a ten kilometre walk back to town which he mentions, but we never see. The night vision means they don't have to do any fighting during the break-in at the station - while they do have to climb down the side of the building, any good climber could have done that so it doesn't qualify for exceptional in the champions' world.

They do kick the Professor's cell door in (though it wasn't possible to see if they were doing it together in the method they've come to use often, as we see it from the inner side), and when trying to escape the pursuit after Sharron's ruined the car, Craig ends up carrying Anna Maria because otherwise she's slowing them down. Again, unspoken evidence of their superior physical abilities, and in one sense the subtlety is good, but we're used to powers being pronounced and impressed upon us. Early on, when Craig first meets the Professor he uses his senses to, apparently, 'hear' the bug in her room. I wonder why they chose to do it that way when in the past if they're looking for something they usually show it as being a sense that guides them to what they need to find, but here they very definitely focus on his ear as if he's listening for it. His sixth sense doesn't warn him about the CCTV watching him, however (possibly because it wasn't switched on at first), and though the bug can be nullified by playing the radio next to it and speaking softly, it doesn't take long for the monitoring guard to get suspicious and turn on the TV where Craig is perfectly framed in conversation with Anna Maria. Once again it shows their powers to be fallible. At the end, Craig and Richard receive a warning from the fear Sharron's experiencing when she and the Professor are discovered in the hiding place, precipitating their abandonment of the dinghy they were preparing and making a beeline back to the fishing village to enter the fray and fight the authorities.

If their powers aren't used to the full in the episode there are much more pertinent blunders that don't help to sell the reality of the situation: Anna Maria picks up the note posted under her door by Craig, warning her to remain silent, yet she reads it aloud! And when Richard makes himself a target for the police outside they never once draw guns, and the police car in the road fails to block the fairly tight exit or even try to knock Richard off the bike as he roars towards them - they had plenty of time to see where he was going! I can only assume there was more than one route out of there, but even so it makes them look inept and incompetent. In the scene where Craig and Richard enter the police station, quite apart from the fact they do it by crashing through a large window that would surely have alerted everyone on that floor, it's quite light outside, yet inside, once the generator's sabotage has been accomplished the whole building is in complete darkness - what about the large windows we see on the outside? Finally, and this is just a fun little observation you really have to pay attention to spot: when Craig's climbing into the water tank the lid almost falls off the back and you can just about see hands grabbing it to stop it from falling!

There are very few of the usual questions over who was and wasn't credited at the end since most of the characters are included and the other speaking roles were filled by generic soldiers or police. Aside from the main roles of Anna Maria and Angel, the Commandante and Cuevos, we have the small role of 'Minister' credited, a large man that goes by the name of Carlos, the most interesting thing about him being that I believe they brought the actor back to play a villain in the final episode of the series. Josef was obviously the red-topped informer in Cuevos' village, but the roles of Police Captain and Detective aren't easy to pin down as there are several options for who's who. Norman Florence, who played the Police Captain, had previously been Cabello in 'The Iron Man,' but that doesn't help as I never worked out whose role that was in that episode. One of these roles must have been the man in the white suit, the Commandante's deputy, as he was more prominent than most of the soldiers, but whether he was the Captain or the Detective I can't decide. One prominent character was the guy who searches Anna Maria's room for Craig and questions her, so he's also a contender. The room itself was the usual set they'd used before with its long, shuttered windows. The roof of the hotel where Craig hides must be the same set as that from 'A Case of Lemmings' where Craig almost jumped to his death, though extended (although technically, this episode was made immediately before, so it originated here), and of course the regular appearance of the steep, cobbled hill with houses either side, returns as the fishing village where they escape to Cuevos.

It's a shame the episode doesn't really work that well because it's a pleasure when the three of them carry out missions so closely together and the idea is ripe for exciting pursuits and split second action to infiltrate and extract their target in a 'Mission: Impossible' vein. The way it was filmed, the locations used, with a lot of external shooting, also marks a point in its favour, and sells it as this foreign country rather than London or its environs where it was most likely filmed. It's just the execution that's at fault, with Sharron underused or made to look a little useless, and full advantage of the situation never taken. The muted use of powers didn't help, nor the underuse of Philip Madoc (most famous for being the German submarine Captain in 'Dad's Army' episode 'The Deadly Attachment,' often cited as the best of that series), who might have been better utilised as the Commandante, though I enjoyed that performance a lot. I wondered if Craig's comment where he doubts the regime will put their 'wonder woman' up against a wall was a reference to the superhero, but such references weren't common in those days so it's probably just a common turn of phrase. I suppose it's surprising that I haven't had much to say about Anna Maria herself, but she was more a plot device to put the heroes into action, and though she shows some fire we don't really learn about her research or motivations - a bit like Sharron, really, who is along because of her medical knowledge, something that has been important in other episodes but falls by the wayside here.

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