Anthony Valentine cuts a lean, dark figure as A. J. Raffles, the celebrated England batsman who burgles London drawing rooms between matches, while Christopher Strauli's flaxen-haired Bunny Manders tags along as the worshipping accomplice who keeps botching the getaway. Yorkshire Television shot thirteen episodes during the sweltering summer of 1976, the cast sweating under starched collars while the crew built a replica Albany facade after the real club refused access. Philip Mackie's scripts stitch together Hornung's stories, merging "A Jubilee Present" and "The Criminologists' Club" into the Royal Gold Cup heist that lands Raffles before a table of admiring amateur detectives.
Guest stars arrive like a roll-call of late-seventies British talent: Robert Hardy as the slippery Lord Ernest Belville, Charles Dance playing a debt-ridden young gent, Marina Sirtis an Italian maid trapped by the Camorra, Peter Sallis a tweedy criminologist. Victor Carin's dour Scottish Inspector Mackenzie shadows every episode, forever near but never quite clutching his man. The series keeps Raffles permanently at the Albany and always a cricketer, simplifying the canon yet restoring the clean-shaven, saturnine charm that David Niven and Ronald Colman had obscured with pencil moustaches. There had been a one-off play broadcast in 1975 called Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman featuring the same cast and crew.
Production Details
UK / ITV - Yorkshire / 1 Season / 13 x 50 minute episode / 1977
Created by: Philip Mackie
Showrunner(s): David Cunliffe
Writer(s): Philip Mackie
Producer(s): Jacky Stoller
Music: Anthony Isaac
Main Cast
Anthony Valentine as A. J. Raffles
Christopher Strauli as Bunny Manders
Victor Brooks as Albany Porter
Guest Stars
