Half a century after Freewheelers’ heyday, Roger Crow reflects on one of ITV’s most ambitious teenage spy dramas, and chats to series veteran Chris Chittell about some of his fondest memories on set.

Christopher Chittell and Carole Mowlam in Freewheelers (1968)

For viewers growing up in the sixties and seventies, Freewheelers was TV nirvana. Teen crime busters, colourful villains, and exotic locations: perfect escapism in those days of three telly channels.

However, almost 50 years since it was cancelled, that series seems to have done a vanishing act. So who were the Freewheelers, and what happened to them? To answer the first part of that question, let’s step into the Infinity time machine, and set the co-ordinates for April 4,1968.

Cue the flashback music and cut to your average British household at teatime. While kids snack on Wagon Wheels, and The Beatles’ Lady Madonna dominates the charts, telly sets transfix millions with Menace -Part One: The Sleepers. It’s the inaugural episode of producer Chris McMaster’s action packed drama, and the result is like a meeting of nitro and glycerine. (Okay, menthol mints and fizzy pop).

Freewheelers would become a small-screen staple for the next five years.

Phase one of said crime-fighting outfit saw Bill Cowan (Tom Owen), Chris Kelly (Gregory Phillips) and Terry Driver (Mary Maude) tackle obligatory Nazi nutcase Colonel Karl Von Gelb (Geoffrey Toone). His plan was to poison Blighty’s water supply, the fiend.

By series two, Kelly was out, and a fresh-faced Nick Carter (aka future Emmerdale star Chris Chittell) joined the cast, along with Jeanne Moody’s Olga Yevchenko. When the series was sold to West Germany, Von Gelb was given the boot to avoid any red-faced meetings between ITV’s international sales team and Teutonic telly bosses.

Sue Craig (Wendy Padbury), Mike Hobbs (Adrian Wright) and Steve Walker (Leonard Gregory) were the final wave of wholesome heroes. They were overseen by obligatory posh military type Colonel Buchan (Ronald Leigh-Hunt), who was ably assisted by Fiona (Carole Mowlam).