Charters and Caldicott

Charters and Caldicott started out as two supporting characters in the 1938 Alfred Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes. The two humorous and cricket-obsessed characters were played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. The characters were created by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. The duo became very popular and were used as recurring characters in subsequent films, in BBC Radio productions, and eventually in their own BBC television series.

Films

In The Lady Vanishes, Charters and Caldicott are singleminded cricket enthusiasts, rushing back to England to see the last days of a Test match. They proved popular with audiences and returned in the Gilliat-and-Launder films Night Train to Munich (1940, also starring Margaret Lockwood) and Millions Like Us (1943), and in the BBC radio serials Crook's Tour (1941, made into a film later that year) and Secret Mission 609 (1942).

Wayne and Radford played similar double acts in several more movies, such as Dead of Night (1945, sequence directed by Charles Crichton), A Girl in a Million (1946, Francis Searle) and Quartet (1948, sequence directed by Ralph Smart). Another recurring cricket-mad pairing played by them were Bright and Early in It's Not Cricket (1949, Alfred Roome), Helter Skelter (1949, Ralph Thomas) and Stop Press Girl (1949, Michael Barry).

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Charters_and_Caldicott

Charters and Caldicott (TV series)

Charters and Caldicott is a 1985 BBC mystery series featuring the characters Charters and Caldicott from the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes but updated to the 1980s. It comprised six 50 minute episodes broadcast on BBC1 at 9.25pm on Thursdays from 10 January to 14 February 1985.

Plot

The story shows the pair in their retirement. Caldicott lives in the splendid Viceroy Court in Marylebone, whilst Charters is a widower living in a country cottage near Reigate, travelling up to his Pall Mall club on a Green Line bus (hailing it on the street as if it were a taxi). When a young girl is found murdered in Caldicott's flat, Charters and Caldicott forsake their regular Friday lunch and cinema visit to involve themselves in solving the crime.