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In the early 1960s, ITV's drama output was dominated by a string of
imaginative, slick and escapist filmed series aimed at an international
audience. Danger Man (1960-67), The Avengers (1961-69) and The Saint (1962-69)
served up their action with glimpses of an intoxicatingly glamorous, jetsetting
lifestyle. In this context, The Human Jungle was a curiosity: a popular drama
based around nothing more extraordinary than a psychiatrist's casebook; talky
and studio-bound, with a protagonist who rarely ventured further than the Home
Counties.
Though best-known for his suavely villainous roles in the likes of Night and
the City (d. Jules Dassin, 1950) and North West Frontier (d. J. Lee Thompson,
1959), Herbert Lom made his breakthrough as a psychiatrist in the
post-Gainsborough melodrama The Seventh Veil (d. Compton Bennett, 1945), and his
unmistakeable Eastern European accent suited the public image of the profession
at a time when many felt that there was something distinctly 'un-British' about
consulting a shrink.
The Human Jungle's opening titles evoked the darkness and mental anguish of
film noir: the moody photography enveloped Lom's Dr Corder in shadow and the
smoke of his own cigarette, while the brooding jazz theme, performed by John
Barry, further emphasised the hero's detachment. But though its subject was the
mind's more extreme states, this was more than a mere psychological freak show.
Corder's clients were of the kind that could be satisfyingly cured in a one-hour
slot, but they were convincingly rounded and often bold case studies, including
a suicidal stripper, a young couple suffocated by their families' love, and a
schoolteacher punishing herself for a long-repressed crush on a pupil.
Dividing his time between his Harley Street practice and St Damian's
hospital, Dr Corder was neither an orthodox prescription-pad psychiatrist nor a
strict 'talking cure' therapist, favouring a maverick ad-hoc approach that was
as influenced by the fashionable 'anti-psychiatry' of R.D. Laing as by Freud.
Indeed, his quest for a rapid breakthrough often looked alarmingly reckless. As
Corder himself admits of one idiosyncratic therapy, "this, of course, could be
dangerous psychology, or it could be a stroke of genius."
Dr Corder lost his practice after two series, when the producers elected to
devote their energies to his more profitable stable-mate, The Avengers. While it
never had the same cult appeal, however, The Human Jungle remains, in its own
way, as revealing of 1960s attitudes as any of its more famous
contemporaries.
Mark Duguid
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1. Titles and opening sequence (3:47)
