Love and Liberty

Tonight’s Avengers on BBC4 (7.10, or 11.30 tomorrow night) is one of the strongest, and arguably the most famous. While there are plenty of guest actors who’ll have you going, ‘Ooh, it’s him!’ – most notably villainous Michael Gough, with his marvellous voice and wolfish cast to the mouth – it’s not the humans it’s remembered for. This is one of the few distinctly sci-fi episodes, and despite several red herrings along the way it’s not much of a spoiler to say that it does what it says in the title. Tune in to see implacable armoured robots smashing things.

Steed receives a deadly gift – Emma pockets it

There’s something about scary monsters that seizes the imagination, even if the Cybernauts didn’t wrest control of The Avengers in quite the way that the Daleks did Doctor Who. I don’t know how I knew about them from long before I ever saw them, but know them I did; having been captivated by some of the mid-’80s Avengers repeats when I was at school that were my introduction to the programme, I know that this is the one I really wanted to see when more repeats and video releases finally came round in the mid-’90s. When, in the colour Mrs Peel season, Emma sits at home watching an old Avengers episode on TV, naturally it’s this one; while Doctor Who has made use of many ideas from The Avengers, inveterate borrower that it’s always been (not least the very, very bad attempt to do The Avengers that I’m trying to review for something else right now), the Cybernauts are the most obvious influence and helped inspire such famous monsters as, particularly, the Autons and the Cybermen. So do they stand up today? Actually, yes, they do.

The Cybernauts return twice to menace the Avengers, their only recurring foes, but I reckon this is still the best use of them. The plot revolves around them, from making sense of the fashionable concern with Japanese electronics to the villain’s disturbingly ‘rational’ plan, and the screen presence of great lumbering men with solid silver faces is much enhanced by claustrophobic black and white, outstanding direction and a music score so good that I once made a friend through it. I can’t hold a tune in a bucket, but I remember meeting a chap down the pub and talking Avengers; before long, we got onto this episode’s great music, and one of us just started humming the urgent, strident theme that accompanies the metal men. The other joined in, and we knew we were on the same wavelength (as well as scaring everyone around us). It repeatedly holds back on the full fanfare, tantalising us with just a build-up until near the climax of the episode when the music really gets going, much as the director hold backs on the ‘reveal’ of the Cybernauts themselves. They’re not a wildly imaginative design, but what they do have is presence, right from the first moments as one smashes through a door. We get an impression of massive bulk, a powerful fist (a guard, hit, tumbles splendidly), invulnerability to pistol shots and point-blank shotgun fire from the business tycoon it’s pursuing, and then just the huge dark shape moving from the camera as the victim falls, neck bent. And as for that whipcrack sound each time it hits out…

This is a brilliantly directed piece of TV, full of tension that builds towards a stunning set of climaxes, though it knows how to let in lighter moments along the way. Look out for Steed moving past dividing walls, shown by a bobbing bowler, or what comes of Hammond’s prissy precision in tidying Steed’s flat, and of course Steed managing to have an improbable amount of fun just spinning around a lift. All this is aided by an impeccable cast, with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg in good form, despite her wearing rather a frumpy outfit for much of it (and, trivia fans, I have a feeling this may be the only time this year they don’t drive off together). That ‘Ooh, it’s him!’ factor includes actors like Frederick Jaeger, John Hollis (the bald guy from The Empire Strikes Back and, oh, everything), Bernard Horsfall (one of those character actors who always gets it right, including four roles in Doctor Who, three superb), Burt Kwouk (you know him, don’t you?) and, of course, the compelling Michael Gough as diabolical mastermind Dr Clement Armstrong. A wheelchair-bound megalomaniac who wants to spin the clock forward to a world of mechanisation, he inspired Dalek- and Cyber-creators Davros and Mr Lumic, and though he only appears half-way through, immediately dominates and remains centre-stage until the end. As with many utopians who know exactly how to ‘perfect’ the world, what’s terrifying about him is his utter certainty.

This is the first Avengers script from writer Philip Levene, as well as featuring some much-used plot devices, one of which will be a SPOILER. Mr Levene goes on to create most of the series’ more outrageous fantasy episodes, often very amusingly; this is slightly less witty than most, though still surprisingly playful for so many brutal murders (even in visual jokes like Jephcott’s toys and the ‘worker’ Cybernaut). It introduces the Avengers plot device of ‘carrying something around that will destroy you’, which is going to turn up in a startling number of guises from now on and even in a Doctor Who story of around the same time, featuring a Cybernaut-on-Cybernaut-style monster fight, then a few years later in one of the most Avengers-influenced Who stories, by a sometime Avengers writer (your challenge for this week, Will, is to spot which stories these are). The SPOILER, coming now, is perhaps predictable in another version of the Frankenstein myth; it’s a very overused Avengers cliché for the villain to be killed with his own weapon, though the way Armstrong goes out at the hands of his own creation is considerably more stylish and appropriate than the sometimes wearying ‘Oh, look, he happens to have fallen on his own gun / sword / giant block of butter, and it went off’.

I tend to particularly enjoy Philip Levene’s Avengers scripts, though it’s more for their playfulness than their occasional science fiction overtones. The Avengers is surprisingly hard to pin down as to ‘what sort of series it is’, but sci-fi wouldn’t really spring to mind. Though it’s happy to borrow and play with some of the trappings from time to time, for every killer robot, there’s a fake time machine to say it’s all pretend. While it concerns espionage, secret files and murder far more often than sci-fi, calling it a ‘spy series’ misses the point too. They’re having too much fun to be James Bond, let alone George Smiley. A comedy thriller, then? Well, that’s not too far off, but though it’s often not to be taken any too seriously, it adds drama to humour in unexpected ways. A series to tune in to be amused by, certainly, but I can’t imagine it with a laughter track. Breaking other people’s formulas and inventing its own, I’ve called the series a fantasy of Britain, but the best way of summing it up remains to tune in and watch this unique and wonderful show itself.

Next week, they’re showing no less than four Avengers episodes. Eek!

Labels: Doctor Who, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 4