There was, but I wasn't in Rome, that was one I didn't go to on the first leg. I can remember being put in some smart hotel on the Champs Elysees in Paris and there was a funny little slot machine by the side of the bed which said 'One Franc', so I put one Franc in and the whole bed vibrated - it was a massage machine. I loved that, very sensual, but you couldn't switch the damn thing off so you either had to get off the bed, or wait for it to stop! IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT ROBERT VAUGHN BECAME A LITTLE DIFF- ICULT TOWARDS THE END OF THE SECOND SEASON ? I know Robert and Gerry didn't get on and the reason, again this is not based on complete, but some, knowledge, was the disappointment Robert, and Sherwood Price, had in the scripts. It's not a question of apportioning blame, or knowing who was in the right, but the Americans, when they prepare a series like "The Man from UNCLE", prepare it very, very thoroughly indeed - down to the last detail before the first day's shooting. They've got all the scr- ipts, worked out exactly who the characters are. Now it's not Gerry's fault that the format of "The Protectors" was not fully devised because he was given something like a month, I believe, by Lew Grade, who simply said, "There's half an hour slot to fill on the American network or syn- dicates, you've got 'x' amount for your budget, GO !" That's pretty slim a brief and he didn't have time to fill it so he did what he could. There were constant thi- ngs going on about improving the scripts and giving Robert something more substantial to do. I think the final rift came between them with an article that was printed in "Time" magazine between the first and second legs. This was not strictly speaking a problem be- tween Robert and Gerry, it was a problem between Robert & ITC. What had happened, I gather, was that Robert Vaughn had been interviewed as Robert Vaughn by "Time" magazine. It was a lengthy interview and one or one and a half para- graphs of the interview was given over to Robert answer- ing a question about how did he like working in Britain, as opposed to America and I think he made a remark some- thing like, I'm not quoting accurately, he preferred wor- king with American crews - he found them more efficient or something like that. That, apparently, caused a fracas back in the ITC office. The next thing I knew was we were in Saltzburh and there was some legal guy, some represen- tative of ITC, with Gerry Anderson in Robert Vaughn's hotel suite. Robert claimed he was an American Citizen, the right of freedom of speech and, anyway, what had he said to damage the thing and the very fact that he, the star of the show, had been in "Time" magazine was fantas- tic publicity for the show. Anyway, everybody held their own viewpoints. . . .I think that put the nail in whatever had been going on before and I don't think much was ever said after that. . . . WHAT WAS THE SCHEDULE LIKE IN TERMS OF THE STUDIO SHOOTING WHAT WAS THE TURNAROUND ? We shot from Monday to Friday on one episode and then the next Monday to Friday was the next episode, bearing in mind we had already shot in the cities I mentioned, so that part of each script had already been done by the time we arrived at Elstree. However, there are always snags and hold-ups and for one reason or another, technical, script changes or something, towards the end of the shooting schedule we did find ourselves shooting excerpts from may- be up to three episodes in one day; it was a question of changing your tie and jacket. . .push me onto a set, what do I say and who do I look at, because you really haven't got time to figure out who the hell you were, or what you were about.

WERE THERE VARIOUS TRIPS OUT TO THE CONTINENT ? The second leg is inevitably better organised than the first because they've ironed out many of the problems they encountered the first time round. I think we had all 26 scripts before we started and we shot all the foreign locations of all the scripts in one block before we came back to Elstree. I'm therefore fairly certain that was how the first leg was shot, the only difference being we only had 10 scripts out of the 26 written by the time we went abroad, so those ten were the only ones that contained foreign locations so they had to be interspersed in transmission times. SO THE OTHER 16 EPISODES DIDN'T HAVE FOREIGN LOCATIONS ? That's right, or they would have had what were supposed to be foreign locations that had been actually shot in London or in the country somewhere. WOULD YOU HAVE DONE A THIRD SERIES ? NO FEAR OF BEING TYPECAST ? I think so. There's always that fear but I suspect that if it had gone to a third series it would have suggested that the series was getting rather popular and success- ful and any kind of success must open horizons and I was interested in breaking into the American market, so I would probably have said yes from a career point of view; unless I was being offered something else of more interest to me, in which case I would have rejected "The Protectors". A GAP BETWEEN "THE PROTECTORS" AND "SPACE: 1999". WHAT WERE YOU UP TO THEN ? It's interesting you were talking about typecasting - would I have done a Phase Three, because that's when the bottom began to drop out for me for a bit. I did a thing for Thames Television called "Napoleon In Love", which was a series with Ian Holm and Billie Whitelaw as Napoleon and Josephine and I played Josephine's lover, in good con- trast to something like "The Protectors". In fact it was a disastrous series; it had a lot of talent in it, but they were not channelled properly, the script was by Philip Mackle, who is a very clever writer, but basically it was just about the boudoire exploits of Napoleon with differ- ent ladies each week. It became a bit boring, it wasn't popular either critically or with the viewers, and after that I really found work very difficult and the reason seemed to be that "The Protectors", far from having helped me, had made people thinkof me in a certain slot. I was sort of American, I was sort of foreign, I was sort of glamorous and, therefore, wasn't a sort of actor ! I was a screen face, also theatre people seemed to have forgo- tten. I decided to change my Agent, as actors tend to do when the going gets rough, 'cause they don't know what else to do. I spent three years in which I worked 15 months and suffered the indignity of being on the dole until I got anot- her job. I decided to finish. Then I met somebody and I was thinking of going into an organization which organised international conferences because I thought if I can't be an actor at least I'll travel the world and meet some people and get into some game that doesn't require any specific paper qualifications. I'd met this guy in Octo- ber or November '75 and I was due to meet him the follow- ing February but, within a week or two weeks, I got a 'phone call at home out of the blue from Gerry Anderson who said, "Have you seen Space: 1999 ?" and I think I had seen one episdoe of it and, to be perfectly honest, had

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