Adam Animate

The man who loves danger is back, as a lost episode is recreated

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ADAM LLEWELLYN DE VERE ADAMANT IS no stranger to unexpected resurrections. The hero of cult ’60s show Adam Adamant Lives!, this dashing, dandy adventurer found himself deep-frozen in 1902, only to awake in the age of miniskirts and Mini Coopers. Played by the suave Gerald Harper, Adam swash buckled his way through two seasons of adventures, waggling a sword-stick at the forces of evil and injustice.

Twelve of those episodes are missing from the archives. But now, at least, 1967’s “The Basardi Affair” is set to be recreated in animated form, matching new visuals to the original soundtrack.

“The BBC reused so much videotape back in the ’60s,” says Chris Perry of Kaleidoscope, a company dedicated to preserving and celebrating vintage TV. “A videotape would cost anything between £200-300, depending on its length. These things got reused pretty quickly, so once they’d been recorded on and shown, they were wiped and reused. The second season of Adam Adamant Lives! is virtually decimated.”

The audio of “The Basardi Affair” was only found in 2018. “It’s absolutely remarkable, really,” Perry tells Red Alert. “It’s more common to find soundtracks recorded off the TV by collectors at home, but this was quite different. It was a transfer project being run at BBC Bristol. It was all supposed to be natural history stuff. Suddenly this reel popped up, this off-air soundtrack. Tim Emblem-English, who was transferring the material, realised it was