The Secret Service is one of the most obscure teleseries ever produced by a major company. The show was barely seen in it's native England (only regionally broadcast there) and never aired in the States. It has only lately been discovered in large part by the DVD release. The Secret Service was Gerry Anderson's final Supermationation series, and combined live action sequences with it's puppetry -which itself was about as advanced as you could get without just doing it with actors anyway. Charming, quirky, and relatively small scale compared to the earlier shows, The Secret Service was built around comic actor Stanley Unwin. Unwin voiced (and in long shots doubled) Father Stanley Unwin, an unassuming Catholic priest with a beloved 1917 Model T Ford. What most weren't aware of was the fact that Father Unwin had been recruited by the spy organization B.I.S.H.O.P. as a field agent. Unwin had in his possession the last work of a great scientist who was a member of his flock, a miniaturizer ray camouflaged as a book. Assigned to Unwin was special agent Matthew Harding (pictured), who would routinely be miniaturized to a foot high to engage in espionage activities -carried about in a special case by Father Unwin. A priest makes for an unusual spy, chiefly in that he can't lie. To aid in misdirection, Unwin uses a peculiar sort of gibberish which was actually a bit of the real Stanley Unwin's act. Unwinese, it was called, and it defies written description. The distributor didn't think the show would make it in the all-important American market, and cancelled the show half-way through the broadcast of the pilot! The show lasted but 13 episodes, which is a shame, because it was really quite lovely.
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