Walter Gotell in a pre-Gogol 'Gogol' role

Shady Tree

For any fans of Euston Films and/or 70s British TV crime drama, the last couple of seasons of 'Special Branch' are well worth acquiring/ viewing. A cracking episode from April 1974, 'Intercept', features Walter Gotell playing Morales, a head of state in a corrupt South American regime who visits London for secret talks with the government and to make a few underhand moves. With his sly, commanding cool, his all-purpose 'foreign accent', his covert operations and his implicit understanding with the representative (Paul Eddington's Strand) of a British government which has reasons of its own for keeping him on side, Morales is all but an early version of Gotell's recurring Bond character, Gogol. The way Gotell rolls his r in his lines about "the British police", with a disdainfully hinted sense of superiority, prefigures exactly the way his Gogol speaks of "the British Secret Service" in TSWLM; and, at the end of the episode, the sense of mutual respect between Morales and George Sewell's DCI Craven, as Craven returns Morales's diamonds to him, makes me think of the end of the FYEO, especially given a deliberate ambiguity: Craven may be handing Morales the glass fakes from earlier in the episode. ("You don't have it, comrade!") A great piece of 70s crime drama in its own right, 'Intercept' feels pretty much like Gotell's audition tape for Gogol!