MAKE THEM CRY ‘UNCLE’ : McCALLUM HOPES FOR NEW SERIES

NEW YORK â€”  David McCallum is up to his old tricks--espionage.

The actor who played Illya Kuryakin in the spy spoof “The Man From UNCLE� from 1964-’68 is returning to television as a World War II spy master in “Behind Enemy Lines,� to air on NBC Sunday, 9-11 p.m.

“He is a spy,� McCallum said of his new character, “but he’s a different kind of spy--he’s a professional spy instead of an NBC spy.�

“Behind Enemy Lines� deals with the operations of the OSS--the Office of Strategic Services that was the forerunner of the CIA. Time: 1943. Place: London.

“‘Behind Enemy Lines’ is about the loves and intrigues and all the relationships among the people in the London headquarters,� McCallum said in an interview. “It’s about where they lived--their digs, their landladies--and the women they fell in love with and the people they met.

“That’s what it will be like if it goes to series--in the old ‘Hill Street Blues’ tradition of multiple stories woven together.�

Was this a backdoor pilot?

“It’s a front-door pilot, as far as the way my contract reads,� he said.

Hal Holbrook plays the head of the London office, a Harvard history professor turned spy master, and McCallum is his top aide, a career Army intelligence officer who resents having to work for a newly recruited civilian.

“One of the reasons I want it to go to series is that they revive the ‘40s music--the big band music of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Ray Noble, all the great bands,� he said.

“They have recorded them, with modern recording techniques and today’s musicians but with the exact same arrangements.�

McCallum said the show also has a look of the ‘40s--�the hairdos and skirt styles and the scarfs the factory girls wore.�

“I was dressed up in the uniform of a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, walking through the East End of London,� he said, “when this very elderly lady in a window looked out and said, ‘Have you got any nylons, darling?’ and there it was--World War II all over again.�

Because of his accent in “UNCLE,� many TV fans think he is Russian. (“I always say yes when they ask.�) Actually McCallum, 52, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, where his father was concertmaster for the Glasgow Symphony, and grew up in London when his father become concertmaster of the London Philharmonic. He came to the United States in 1961, but retains a British accent.

McCallum makes no bones about wanting the show to become a series. One reason is that it is set in yesterday and so free of what he called “the inherent censorship on television in this country.�

“It’s a form of self-censorship,� he said. “Ratings are the name of the game in this country and I am told that--New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles apart--if people are offended by something on television they turn it off. So you have to make sure you don’t offend people on certain levels.

“Now life in its true form is wonderful, awful, appealing, offensive, gaudy, pornographic, flimsy and any other adjective there is. People get offended if something is too religious, too ethnic, too loving, whatever, so you tend to eliminate a large part of the spectrum of life.

“It boils down to the world’s troubles being eliminated in a one-hour format with a car chase.

“So I tend to end up doing shows where you don’t have to worry about censorship because they’re either metaphysical, science fiction, fantasy or history. You’re safe there--they can rewrite history but they can’t censor it.�