DICK BARTON

Shortly after the series went off the air, two books came out with Dick Barton adventures. One had no author associated with it and the other was said to have been penned by the character.

In 1977, an experienced BBC writer and producer created [probable] novelizations of the first three adventures and collected them in one volume.

Two years later when the character was revived for television, four more adventures were released. The covers show the actors in the television show who played Dick Barton and Snowy White, which is appropriate since the books were novelizations of the four televised adventures.

At the height of its popularity on radio, the character of Dick Barton was transposed to celluloid by Hammer Films. These movies have been criticized for being of poor quality with too much humor and not enough action (I have not seen them so cannot say).

A fourth movie, Dick Baron In Africa had been planned but the actor for the series, Don Stannard, died in a car accident and the company decided to cancel the series rather than find a replacement.

Resurrecting the popular radio program fron three decades before, a small British production company, Southern Television, crafted a series of serialized episodes to be on the ITV Network.

Just as in those earlier radio broadcasts, the adventures of Barton, of which there were four made, were broken into 15-minute segments, each shown on a different night.

32 of these quarter-hour pieces were produced in total, 10 in the first adventure, 8 in the second, 6 for the third, and 8 for the fourth and last.

No names were given for these stories so the consensus has been to just label them Adventures. However, each adventure had a novelization published so I have chosen to label the adventures with those titles.

The entire collection as been made available in a DVD set in 2009.

According to Wikipedia:

"Dick Barton – Special Agent is a radio thriller serial that was broadcast in the BBC Light Programme between 7 October 1946 and 30 March 1951. Produced and directed by Raymond Raikes, Neil Tuson, and Charles Lefaux, it was aired in 15-minute episodes at 6.45 (later 6.15) each weekday evening. From 11 January 1947 an additional "omnibus" edition repeated all of the week's programmes each Saturday morning between 11.00 and 12.00. In all, 711 episodes were produced and the serial achieved a peak audience of 15 million. Its end was marked by a leading article in The Times."

Regretably a good number of these broadcasts are lost. Luckily some have been found and subsequently made available for purchase. Listed below are the collections of story arcs that still exist. [A story arc is the concept of a single adventure told in serial format over many aired episodes.]

Shortly after the highly popular radio program ended its run, the character was revised and presented in serial format in the British comic The Comet, a weekly publication created by J.B.Allen in 1946 which was bought by Amalgamated Press in 1949.

The publication was definitely geared towards the younger audience so someone decided that to appeal to kids, many of whom might not have ever heard the original broadcasts, it was necessary to retcon the character.

Dick Barton remained but he was a younger version of himself. His trusted sidekick companion, Snowy White, though, was tremendously morphed into a teenager. There was no mention of the War and the adventures they encountered were futuristic in nature. Travel to the moon was involved and a civilization, well two of them actually, inside the satellite was discovered. While the first two adventures melded together, they were two separate problems Barton and White faced.

Then the third adventure came and with barely a nod to the first two (saying only that the two had returned from the moon) the new case dealt with crooks and smugglers and car racing, all 20th Century fare. And then they were gone.

When the television show came on in 1979, an annual was produced to accompany the show and that publication held two comicbook adventures. Here Dick Barton and friends were as they were in the TV show.