Not so much a "spot" as a "listen", but I came across another Tintin reference in
The Avengers, in a slightly odd place... So first, a little background...
In South Africa in the early Seventies radio was still a primary source of home entertainment, and there was a thriving industry in producing comedy and drama in that medium.
To fill a gap in the schedule, someone who had seen the series on TV in the U.K. hit on the idea of adapting
The Avengers as a daily radio serial, with the original one hour stories being turned into six- or seven-segment tales, each episode running to 12 or 13 minutes, plus adverts, to fit a 15 minute slot.
Scripts and music were obtained from the TV company in Britain, the adaptor got to work, and a series remarkably faithful to the spirit of the original was produced with a local cast: Donald Monat as John Steed, Diane Appleby as Mrs. Peel (the character Mrs. Peel was used throughout, replacing Tara King in the later epsiodes).
One interesting insight found in the radio version is that the scripts sent over to South Africa were not necessarily the final version used for the filming, providing a glimpse of some what-might-have-been moments.
This is most obvious in the serial
Too Many Olés, which is set in Spain, and involves such locations as a bull-ring, all of which feature in the radio serial, adapted from the script they were given.
If you are a fan of the TV series, however, you may realise that there is no such episode to be found; this is because the filming in Spain was cancelled, and the script was revised to use British locations, and became the story
They Keep Killing Steed. This version didn't get sent to South Africa.
Thus it's possible to have at least an idea of what the story might have been like before it was changed, and see what came and went in the process.
A slight fly in the ointment was only discovered some time later, in that although the TV company had approved the series, they didn't actually have the right to do so, and the original authors never were compensated for the use of their stories. Similarly, Laurie Johnson the composer discovered that not only had his theme been used, but that music from albums he'd written outside of the series had been supplied for the back-ground score!
That, and the fact that once broadcast the episodes were not kept by the producers (if you wanted to repeat something, you simply had to record it again), meant that the radio
Avengers slipped into obscurity, and was thought all but lost.
However, fate stepped in when it was discovered that some tapes were in circulation, and had even been broadcast by a local station in the U.S.
Diligent research by fans traced these few surviving episodes to a gentleman who, being blind, was in the habit of recording radio programmes which he could swap with other blind people around the world who were always on the look out for good audio entertainment.
19 complete stories and some other odd episodes are now known to have survived (out of at least 88 serials produced - some more than once), and have been digitally preserved and restored for posterity by Alan and Alys Hayes. You can read about the story of
The Avengers on the Radio at this
wonderful website.
So that out of the way, back to Tintin! None of the stories in which we see Steed reading the albums is to be found in the surviving radio episodes, so there's no telling if there was any on air mention of them.
However, one story, entitled
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Station on TV, but broadcast as
Train of Events on radio, features an old Admiral character who helps Emma Peel.
At the moment of a crucial revelation, the TV Admiral lets out a rather weak, "Oh!"
On the radio, at the same point, the character lets forth with a far more robust, "Blistering barnacles!"
It would be very interesting to find out if this was an original scripted line dropped from the TV version, yet preserved in the script and carried on into the radio version; was inserted by the adaptor later; or was even an ad-lib by the actor involved.
