This six-part series premiered on Monday 10 July 1972, at 5.20 pm.
All the blood and thunder of Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling classic – murderous buccaneers, coral islands, roaring surf, hidden treasure – was captured in the Anglia Television production.
The characters – Long John Silver, Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, Ben Gunn and the pirates – came alive under the brush of John Worsley with the stories narrated by Paul Honeyman, who also produced the series. Ron Downing directed.
John Worsley and Paul Honeyman first met in a Newcastle pub when Honeyman – who’d just got out of the Gurkhas – was working on his first television job as a continuity announcer and newscaster. Lamenting the dearth of good storytelling on TV, the pair got together to produce Wind In The Willows and A Christmas Carol for Anglia TV. Both were strikingly successful.
Worsley had served as a war artist. Captured by the Germans, he was detained in the infamous prisoner-of-war camp Marlag O where he documented POW life with supplies provided by the Red Cross and his expertise was employed in the forging of identity papers for escapees and an ingenious escape attempt requiring the construction of a mannequin named Albert RN – later immortalised in a 1953 movie of the same name.
He was also a noted portrait painter, counting Field Marshall Montgomery, Walter de La Mare, and Edward Heath amongst his subjects.
