Adam Adamant Lives!
Adam Adamant Lives! was a television series that ran from 1966 to 1967 on the BBC. The show was the BBC's attempt to repeat the success of ITV's The Avengers, with a comedy adventure theme. The plots of the Austin Powers movies are similar to the plots in Adam Adamant Lives!
The main character, Adam Llewellyn De Vere Adamant, was a Victorian Gentleman Adventurer, frozen in a block of ice in 1902 by his arch-nemesis 'The Face' and revived in 1966. Adam was rescued by a typical swinging sixties chick called Georgina Jones and he soon became embroiled in the criminal world of the 1960s.
Adam Adamant Lives! starred Gerald Harper as Adam Adamant, Juliet Harmer as Miss Georgina Jones, Jack May as William E. Simms, and Peter Ducrow as The Face. The show was created by Sydney Newman and produced by Verity Lambert (also the creator and first producer respectively of Doctor Who).
There were originally 29 black and white episodes comprising two series. Twelve of these were wiped by the BBC. The rest, including the first and last episodes, survive in the form of 16mm film telerecordings of varying quality. To date only 2 of the surviving episodes have been released on video and DVD in the UK.
The episode "D For Destruction" thought lost, but recovered in 2003 has since been screened every year at the Missing Believed Wiped event.