Adam Adamant Lives!
British television series
Adam Adamant Lives! is a British adventure television series that ran from 1966 to 1967 on BBC1, starring Gerald Harper in the title role. The series was created and produced by several alumni from Doctor Who. The titular character was an adventurer born in 1867, who had been revived from hibernation in 1966, thus offering a satirical look at life in the 1960s through the eyes of a Victorian. In 2020, Big Finish Productions reimagined the series as a Radio drama.
Premise
The main character originally went through a number of possible names: "Cornelius Chance", "Rupert De'Ath", "Dick Daring", "Dexter Noble", "Aurelian Winton", "Magnus Hawke" and even "Darius Crud" before Sydney Newman settled on Adam Adamant, named after the generic mineral term adamantine which, since the Middle Ages, has commonly referred to diamond. In the opening episode, "A Vintage Year for Scoundrels", Adam Llewellyn De Vere Adamant is a swashbuckling Edwardian gentleman adventurer who, in 1902 (when Edward VII had been on the throne just one year), goes to rescue his kidnapped girlfriend Louise. In fact, he is lured into a trap, whereupon he is captured and condemned to be frozen forever in a block of ice by his nemesis, the Face, whose identity is concealed behind a leather mask and who speaks in a sinister whispering voice. The Face grants him one last request, and Adamant asks to see Louise; in his last moments of life before being frozen, he learns to his horror that Louise had faked her kidnapping and had been working for the Face all along.
Adamant is found in 1966, when a building is being knocked down, and he is revived.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Adam Adamant Lives!” as british television series. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as british television series. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4678620. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1967, 1867 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adam Adamant Lives!” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.