The Secret Service - Production

Production

I thought it would be a great idea if I cast in the role of a secret agent; he played the part of a priest and he had his own church, hence the title – the double meaning – The Secret Service. If he ever got into a difficult spot, say the police had stopped him, he would talk to them in his Unwinese and that would fox the police totally. They'd have to be polite – "I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that," because they're writing it down. He says, "I'll repeat that," then he repeats the whole lot and, of course, the guy is saying, "I didn't understand that." Eventually, the police would say, "Yes, yes, I quite understand, sir. Sorry to trouble you, off you go." So that was the gimmick.

With the completion of Joe 90, which commenced transmission on ATV in September 1968, Gerry Anderson decided to produce another espionage television series. This would incorporate the plot device of a rural English village as the base of operations for the star secret agent, the local parish priest. Anderson selected Stanley Unwin to voice the lead character, which would be named after him, after encountering the comedian at Pinewood Studios as he completed dubbing work for the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

In the 1940s and 50s, Unwin had developed "Unwinese", a nonsense language that distorted words and phrases into a form of gibberish that sounded unintelligible but which in fact retained some fragments of meaning. Recalling Unwin's radio and television performances, Anderson thought that the self-made language would suit the character of an eccentric undercover operative, and could produce humour if demonstrated to have a confusing effect on enemies. He elaborated, "As far as I was concerned, Stanley came first and then the idea had to accommodate him. It wasn't that the story called for someone who could speak gobbledegook, it was a question of how we could fit him into the storyline."

Due to the strange nature of the language, the Century 21 writers would brief Unwin on episode plots and then leave space in their scripts for the actor to draft all the Unwinese dialogue himself. Shane Rimmer, who scripted the episode "Hole in One", remarked that "A lot of you had to leave to . You gave him a line of patter that's going to work with what he does. Because he was such a bizarre character, you felt you could really go all the way with him: you could practically do anything."

The premise of The Secret Service drew part of its inspiration from the Joe 90 episode "The Unorthodox Shepherd", which features the character of an aged, deaf vicar who covers up a money counterfeiting operation on his church grounds. Archer and Hearn comment on the wider influence of Joe 90 on its successor series, stating that The Secret Service "continues the espionage theme of Joe 90 in a range of adventures that depict a Britain under siege from despicable foreign agents intent on stealing its secrets."