Many Happy Returns

    The original script for ‘Many Happy Returns’ called for filming around Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, specifying a sequence outside Lillywhites a sports retailer based in Piccadilly Circus. A passer-by gives Number 6 a two-shilling coin thinking him to be a beggar. This two-shilling coin he uses to deposit the roll of film, containing pictures of The Village, in a left luggage locker at Piccadilly Circus tube station for safe keeping.

    Safe keeping! I wonder what state that roll of film and the copy of The Tally Ho would have been in, should have been in, when the gun runners tipped Number 6 into the water. It was most advantageous for Number 6 to have put both the roll and film into a polythene bag and put it in his pocket. Had he left them in one of the wooden crates aboard the raft, the moment he was parted from his raft, the photographic evidence of The Village, along with his log written on the back of The Tally Ho, would have drifted away aboard the raft. Having said that, the polythene bag wasn’t exactly waterproof, simply wrapped round the two items, but not sealed. So it was thought water would have seeped into that bag, and thereby ruining both items. However experiment has proved, that although some water would have seeped into the polythene bag, both the copy of The Tally Ho and the roll of film would have in the main survived, which of course in the episode they did.

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