Vraag Gewoon Nog een Keer om Diamant

Last time on my epic quest for the never-repeated, never-released-on-home-video Diamond Brothers TV series from 1991, blog reader Giles Leigh had tracked down a whole bunch of newspaper and magazine clippings pertaining to the series' broadcast in the Netherlands. Bearing in mind I knew the show had been a co-production with a Dutch filming company, allowing for filming on location in Amsterdam, this is possibly something I should have thought to look into before. Ahem.

Anyway, another blog reader, Netherlands-based David, has now been in touch with another selection of clippings from various Dutch newspapers covering the series' broadcast there; I am tremendously grateful to him for sharing this veritable treasure trove, and for helping out with the translations. Pictured above is the first of these, taken from the 8th April 1991 edition of the Leidsche Courant and featuring, unless I'm mistaken, a never-before-seen publicity still of Colin Dale and Dursley McLinden.

Before we dive into the rest of the clippings, though, David provided some information about Horowitz's success in the Netherlands: basically, during the 80s and 90s Horowitz's work sold much better in Belgium and the Netherlands than it did in the UK (his Dutch translator did an excellent job of translating the jokes, and Horowitz was also able to check and correct the translations), and he wrote several stories and prefaces to his and other works which have been published only in Dutch. Horowitz also had some work translating Dutch works into English -- David highlights his work translating the poems of Annie M.G. Schmidt, the Dutch equivalent to Roald Dahl. Many of Horowitz's earliest titles, such as The Sinister Secret of Frederick K. Bower and the Pentagram Chronicles, despite having been out of print in the UK for decades, are still available in the Netherlands today. There is even a full-length novel of his which has only been published in Dutch and never in English, William S., which David describes as an outrageously funny story about a modern-day version of William Shakespeare in Hollywood. All of this was presumably at least a factor in Horowitz writing a book and TV series set there with the cooperation of a Dutch production company.

Talking about Horowitz's use of the country in his novels, David also explained why the setting of a high-action chase scene in the Flevoland in South by South East is so funny: in the early 90s, the Flevoland was almost totally uninhabited and widely considered to be the most boring and unheroic place one can think of, since only a few years previously the land had been reclaimed by draining the Zuiderzee. Indeed, the setting of the rural Flevoland contrasts with rural Indiana in North by North West!

Next, another new image featuring Dale, McLinden and the Hitchcock impersonator who appeared in every episode, taken from the 25th March 1991 edition of the NRC Handelsblad:

(Note that these two clippings refer to the series being broadcast on the channel NED 2, whereas the ones Giles sent me last time round referred to airings on AVRO; I don't understand the way Dutch television works well enough to explain this for certain, but one seems to be a local broadcaster and the other a regional one.) This picture was accompanied by a review entitled South by Southeast zouteloze parodie op Hitchcocks North by Northwest; this translates as a "saltless parody", meaning insipid or tasteless. The review is not hugely positive -- the reviewer in particular seems to take issue with Horowitz's sense of humour -- so there's little reason to clutter this post up with the whole thing, but it does note "Rarely have so many untranslatable puns been debuted in a foreign series on the Dutch screen."

Next is an image from the 25th March edition of Het Virje Volk, which Wikipedia informs me was a daily newspaper with a socialist slant that merged with another publication five days after this picture appeared in it:

Again from the 25th March, next up is an edition of the De Telegraaf, the largest Dutch daily morning newspaper. SBSE headlines the TV listings page, described as a "wink at Hitchcock":

The introduction and preview translate as follows:
Tim Diamond is not one of the brightest. He does have a detective agency, but it is mainly run by his 13-year-old brother Nick. When the two gentlemen are faced with a serious crime, they put their shoulders to the wheel. With varying degrees of success. In the new detective series 'South by Southeast', the absurd situations follow each other at breakneck speed.

The Diamonds accidentally become involved in a criminal conspiracy when a secret agent stumbles into their office and, before giving up the ghost, mumbles the words "South by Southeast." Tim and Nick then find out that a certain Charon's gang wants to kill a Russian dissident who is visiting England. The brothers try to prevent that in every possible way. But before they know it, they themselves are wanted for a bank robbery.

Later on, there is also a review:

The story is written by master storyteller Anthony Horowitz, who also directs. If the title reminds you of anything, that's exactly what it means, because South by Southeast is full of comic references to Hitchcock's work in general, and to the movie "North by Northwest" in particular. Almost in every scene there is a doppelganger of 'the master of suspense', as happened in his own films. But some scenes also seem to come straight from one of his films, although a humorous touch has been added. Horowitz, however, hates the word satire. I love Hitchcock's films and prefer the title 'homage'.

The AVRO has produced the series in collaboration with the BBC [sic]. “We not only wanted to make a financial contribution, but also a substantive contribution,” said the broadcaster. "That's why part of the film takes place in our country." The series features some of our most famous actors and actresses. How about Monique van de Ven, who plays a Dutch detective writer and falls passionately in love with the silly Tim, and Thom Hoffman as a secret agent?

For those who prefer an exciting series, South by Southeast may be a disappointment, but lovers of the real British humor will get their money's worth. It is to be hoped that the subtitles do justice to the many linguistic, English jokes that have been incorporated. The AVRO has appealed to Annemarie van Ewijck for this, who has also translated Horowitz's books into Dutch in a sublime way. South by Southeast consists of six episodes that are broadcast weekly. Tim Diamond is played by Dursley McLinden and his brother Nick is portrayed by Colin Dale.

That last bit confirms something I'd suspected when I read the NRC Handelsblad review: in the Netherlands, the series was broadcast in English with Dutch subtitles. This makes the possibility of a Dutch copy of the series turning up all the more enticing.

Next up is a short clipping from Algemeen Dagblad, a daily newspaper based in Rotterdam, which actually relates to a June 1992 airing of Just Ask for Diamond:

Just ask for Diamond (0.15 am, Duitsland 1) is a cheerful English parody of American crime films from the 1940s in which the two Diamond brothers open a detective agency. The eldest (Dursley McLinden) is rather bumbling and has a lot of trouble with the trade, his younger brother (Colin Dale) is handy and smart. The mystery they face revolves around a box of candy.

Going back to the newspapers of 25 March 1991, this next one comes from Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, a regional paper based in Groningen:

Note that the headline says the series is "based on Horowitz's book". Even though I haven't nailed down the exact story about the relationship between the book and the series for sure, Horowitz is on record as saying that the series came first. But that was 30 years after the fact; this is a contemporary piece of publishing with quotes from him. And it says this:

The screenplay for its television adaptation came about at the same time: in the morning he wrote the adventures of the main character Tim Diamond, in the evening he put the six-part series on paper.

(A lot of the other Horowitz quotes in the piece are very similar -- or, in some cases, identical -- to the Leeuwarder Corant one Giles sent me, which appeared last time round; I suspect this was one interview distributed to a lot of different news sources for use in promoting the series, who used different bits of it.)

But anyway. It seems from that quote things aren't quite as simple as the book being a novelisation of the series; Horowitz was working on both simultaneously. So which was commissioned first? Was the book already being developed when the TV series came about? (I can't think of any other case of a book being commissioned for an adaptation before it's even been written...) Or was the TV series commissioned as a follow-up to Just Ask for Diamond, and Horowitz decided he could also get a book out of it? I really can't be sure; it's a real chicken-and-egg situation.

If you look back at the last article I wrote on the relationship between the two, I came up with the following theory:

1. At some point in 1990, Horowitz writes the screenplay for the TV series.
2. Shortly, if not immediately, after that, he writes a novelisation based on that version of the screenplay, so it can be released at the same time as the series.
3. At some point between that and filming on the TV series starting, the script is rewritten, mostly to remove a few set-pieces that are unfilmable or not adding enough to the plot (Ernest Lemon, the original escape from the guest-house, the original climax at the funfair), but for whatever reason the novelisation is left alone (maybe Horowitz didn't have time, maybe he felt there was no need if a lot of the changes were because they couldn't be realised onscreen, maybe he just preferred the original).
4. Finally, in 1997, the book is rewritten for republication by Walker Books. The TV series was already well into obscurity by this point, so I doubt the changes were to bring it in line with that; more likely it was a mixture of dissatisfaction with the original and trying to bring it in line with the other two books in the series (the '97 revision does seem to remove or change some bits that feel like they were faithfully adapted from the script in '91 but don't really work in print -- although, that being said, it is a shame that the scene on the train gets simplified so much in the '97 version, because whilst I can understand Horowitz feeling it didn't work in print, the rewrite does feel like Charlotte is missing some fairly important character development). Maybe Horowitz decided Ernest Lemon was redundant in retrospect but couldn't remember what he'd done on the TV series by that point and just deleted him entirely.

Now, in fairness, "immediately afterwards" and "simultaneously" aren't dissimilar. And I suspect the rest of the timeline I posited there still isn't too far off the truth: Horowitz wrote a screenplay and a book that were pretty much the same, then he had to rewrite the former based on what was possible on the budget available and other factors, but the book had no such constraints. Another theory I have, with the knowledge that Horowitz was working on both simultaneously, is that he deliberately introduced differences so he wasn't just writing the same thing twice -- but I suspect that wouldn't account for all of the differences between the two versions. Unless I see both first-draft and shooting scripts for the TV series, the whole truth is going to remain unknowable.

I will say this, however: given Horowitz's popularity in the Netherlands, and that he was already well established as a film and TV writer in 1990 (the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden article also says that his 1987 William Tell series Crossbow, which had a quite remarkable production history -- it was an American-French co-production and featured one of the first non-Burger-King-related TV appearances of Sarah Michelle Gellar -- was broadcast in the Netherlands, as was Robin of Sherwood, which Horowitz contributed several scripts to in its third and final series)... does it not seem more likely that a Dutch production company approached him about the possibility of writing a TV series set there, and that's how South by South East got started? So the series did, however fractionally, come first?

When you've quite recovered from that revelation, up next is a big one -- the Algemeen Dagblad, again on the 25th March, carried an interview with Horowitz, with another rare picture of the author in his youthful phase:

The headline translates to "Quite a challenge", and the subheading to "series full of parodies of Hitchcock movies". Here is most, but not all, of the translated interview (I have trimmed a few bits):

“We have come to South by Southeast in the realization that you shouldn't really distinguish between films for children and films for adults. If you wanted a movie or series of movies for the whole family for children not to be too mature and not too childish for parents, age groups should have fun together. But you only achieve that when the timing is right; not in the afternoon at half past three when many parents don't have time to watch it, nor at night when the children have already gone to bed."

"I have always been very interested in the kind of humour that appeals to children and that at the same time is appreciated on a completely different level by adults. And because I am a big fan of film classics, the idea arose to make parodies or parody of them. A crazy and exciting story with an extra dimension, which is why I think South by Southeast will be fun for anyone who likes Hitchcock's movies. There is something to be found in almost every film."

The Hitchcock content in the series is high. The premiere episode of South by Southeast — literally a 180-degree inversion of the title North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason — features numerous scenes borrowed directly from Psycho, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes.

The scenes played in a train and on a skating rink, in which they meet their Dutch counterparts Monique van de Ven and Thom Hoffman, will also be recognized by many as 'van Hitchcock' .

(Note that it's around here that the article completely ruins the ending, by noting both that Tim misheard McGuffin's last words, and also what he actually said!)

“When you parody a movie, it has to be a masterpiece,” Horowitz says. “Otherwise you're just wasting time. Making a parody also assumes that you have reverence, love and admiration for the original work. And it helps if the parodied film is widely known. That gives it the extra dimension. Still, South by Southeast can exist on its own. Those who are not familiar with Hitchcock's work will not easily find something lost in it. Whoever knows that Hitchcock was always featured in his own movies, will recognize that joke here. Others may just notice that they've seen that weird man in the big hat before. It happens about sixteen times in this series. Incidentally, I do not pretend to equate myself to Hitchcock. I don't even bother with his technique. He was a brilliant director, I'm just a beginner. Second, there is, of course, a financial constraint. Effects like in The Birds are not affordable for us. And even if we could have, we could never have achieved what Hitchcock himself could. He was an absolute master.”

While South by Southeast is his debut as a television director, Anthony Horowitz already has a respectable record as a writer. Of the fifteen books he has published in his own country so far, five of which have already been published in Dutch translation through the Antwerp publishing house Facet, a number of them are set against the background of other classics in film history. Keywords are The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney and Raoul Walsh. In addition, he also wrote some 'occult thrillers'.

Born and raised in London in 1955, Anthony Horowitz, whose name explains his "very distant" Polish-Jewish descent, has been writing since he was eight. "I've been writing since I knew what a pen is for. When I discovered that I became a writer. A life without writing does not exist for me. The only subjects in school that I mastered well were English language and literature. I was always busy with that. Later at the University of York I wrote my first plays which I directed myself. It was there that I first came into contact with a professional theatre company."

"With a very strong cast, Susannah York played one of the lead roles, Stephen Bailey turned my first book into a movie. I wrote some scripts for Red Rooster, which also co-produces this series. When we were going to make South by Southeast a series, they asked if I wouldn't even try directing myself. My scripts are quite visual, I often indicate very well how something should look like. But I was stunned and actually a bit scared because I didn't know much about technology, about light, sound and lenses. I've spent enough time on movie sets to know what's going on, but it was quite a challenge nonetheless."

"Last summer we started and until October we made recordings in England and the Netherlands. The Netherlands plays a major role in the story. The famous airplane scenes from North by Northwest have been recorded in Flevoland. By the way, Hitchcock himself has also filmed in the Netherlands; Foreign Correspondence. So I also got the chance to use a few things from that film at the same time."

That bit I've highlighted also indicates the book came first, although even then the idea to do a TV series must have come along at exactly the same time. So I think my confusion was pretty justified, and indeed is still ongoing. (The "scripts for Red Rooster" he mentions likely refer to his 1990 CITV series The Gift.)

Will there be no protests against this course of action? It probably won't be long till someone accuses you of plagiarism?
Anthony Horowitz shrugs. “The Dashiell Hammett Estate has tried to stop the making of my first film. They didn't want us to touch anything related to Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon. There was also a chocolate manufacturer who did not want the film because his product would appear in it, something like that. And beyond that, Hitchcock's heirs keep a close eye on what we're doing. We have to be careful not to get too much Hitchcock in, that would probably break a law. And there are plenty of lawyers who want to earn money from that. Apart from a few librarians and teachers who find my work irresponsible or too violent, no one has officially objected so far."

The penultimate thing we're looking at comes from another nationwide Dutch daily, de Volkskrant:

This is another broadly negative review (the headline dubs it "really no good", and the reviewer seems to mostly take issue with the series not being clear if it's for adults or children), but it does contain some interesting titbits, including the continuity introducing the first episode:

According to the AVRO presenter, she had stated: “I immediately fell in love with Monique when we first met. But given the nature of both of our relationships, I decided not to act." [David says this is a euphemism for "deciding not to tempt her".] What kind of nonsense is that to introduce the new AVRO series South by South East in this way?

And a description of a scene involving Snape and Boyle that appears to only be in the TV series:

Private investigators Nick Diamond (14) and his older but dim-witted brother Tim stumble upon a dead man in a pay phone. At the police station, the inspector asks his subordinate for the file. He pulls out a large file from under his hash. "No idiot, the file, the file!" At the end of the first episode, the two comedic detectives are kidnapped in a taxi. The youngest takes stock by voice: “Locked doors, a taxi driver with a gun in hand. But one thing is certain: he will not get a tip from us.”

And the very last thing comes from Trouw, another daily national paper -- unlike the other pieces, which covered the broadcast of the first episode, this one is dated 16 April 1991 and reviews the fourth episode, broadcast the previous evening:

This is yet another negative review, which appears to arise mostly from the reviewer taking issue with a children's show being scheduled at 8:30pm, and also from there being no canned laughter so he can't tell what's meant to be funny; he appears to have mistaken it for a sitcom, as he refers to the cast as "comedians" at one point, and criticises a line which isn't actually meant to be a joke for not being funny. There is also reference to a scene in a café where the characters talk about snakes, which appears to be something else exclusive to the TV series.

* * *

So, apart from learning that the Dutch newspapers -- at least the more elitist ones, as David puts it -- generally weren't very keen on South by South East (although on the evidence available I might suggest some of them didn't quite get what it was meant to be, not that it was their fault; it looks like a lot of the humour didn't translate, especially given it was being done with subtitles rather than dubbing, and scheduling a children's drama series at 8.30pm, even one intended to have crossover appeal with an older audience, probably isn't a very good idea, although David notes that popular and regional newspapers were generally more positive), we've learnt more about the show's relationship with the book. And that is that it's even more complicated than we previously thought...

Once again, I am enormously grateful to David for getting in touch and providing so much information (and help with translations!)