If you asked any prepubescent British school kid about Paul Gallico in the 1960s, you'd probably be told that Gallico was the author of The Snow Goose: A Story of Dunkirk. Oddly, Gallico, the author of what we considered the most British of heroic wartime tales, was an American.
We weren't asked to read Gallico's other works for exams, among them The Adventures of Hiram Holliday. But we were able to follow those in a half-hour U.S. series shown at teatime, featuring Wally Cox as the bespectacled Hiram, a man who's "never done a wrong thing in his life" according to his much put-upon agent Joel Smith (Ainslie Pryor).
Gibralter Road has Hiram visiting the Rock in pursuit of a rare species of toad and being arrested under suspicion of attempting to blow the place up. In the course of the show he gets engaged to a beautiful girl (alas she is emotionally unstable, so the engagement falls through), dances a flamenco (every episode seemed to have a dance scene---the most fondly-remembered was a sizzling Parisian Apache dance which somehow got under the censors radar), and fights a duel with dagger and rapier (Hiram is a master of arms) as well as disarming a warhead and finding a Gibralter Fire Toad (so rare, apparently, that even Google can't find it!) I have tried to identify the lovely actress sharing a scene with Wally Cox in the still I've uploaded, but regretfully the cast list is missing from the film upload found at Jimbo Berkey's public domain film site.
We weren't asked to read Gallico's other works for exams, among them The Adventures of Hiram Holliday. But we were able to follow those in a half-hour U.S. series shown at teatime, featuring Wally Cox as the bespectacled Hiram, a man who's "never done a wrong thing in his life" according to his much put-upon agent Joel Smith (Ainslie Pryor).
Gibralter Road has Hiram visiting the Rock in pursuit of a rare species of toad and being arrested under suspicion of attempting to blow the place up. In the course of the show he gets engaged to a beautiful girl (alas she is emotionally unstable, so the engagement falls through), dances a flamenco (every episode seemed to have a dance scene---the most fondly-remembered was a sizzling Parisian Apache dance which somehow got under the censors radar), and fights a duel with dagger and rapier (Hiram is a master of arms) as well as disarming a warhead and finding a Gibralter Fire Toad (so rare, apparently, that even Google can't find it!) I have tried to identify the lovely actress sharing a scene with Wally Cox in the still I've uploaded, but regretfully the cast list is missing from the film upload found at Jimbo Berkey's public domain film site.