Love and Liberty

If you’re up at midnight, there’s an especially good episode of The Avengers featuring Dad’s Army’s top eccentric John Laurie and a diabolical plot on a train. Tonight on BBC4, it’s the tasteful attack of the funny terrorists! It was on last night, too; with fabulous timing, if you took a break from wall-to-wall TV coverage of a slimy liar re-announcing that he’s really, really, really going to go this time, eventually, you may have caught someone called Blair’s involvement with a plan to sharply abbreviate a Labour Prime Minister’s reign in mid-term (then Hustle, with another load of con-artists).

Steed goes off the rails – Emma finds her station in life

“Durbridge. Population – two thousand, four hundred and thirteen. Principal industry – manufacture of glass eyes for teddy bears. Fame – non-existent. But – after tonight, there won’t be anyone in the civilised world who hasn’t heard of it.”

Perhaps you might not think ‘comedy terrorism’ the ideal subject material for television today. I can’t imagine it was a natural choice in 1967 either, but then that was the year kids were entertained by Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a couple of dozen episodes of puppet fun in which a heroic living corpse battled an unending stream of zombie terrorists. Whose terror attacks sometimes succeeded. Anyway, this story opens with a big, brassy chase theme as a thoroughly respectable civil service type is chased between trains by two gun-wielding roughs… But turns out to be slightly less innocent and defenceless when he uses his neatly striped tie as a garrotte on one of them and escapes. Don’t worry, though, readers – he’s one of Steed’s sort of chaps, and has discovered a plan to assassinate the Prime Minister by a “splinter group of fanatics”. The funny thing that then happened to this script on the way to it being as dark as an episode of Cracker is, of course, that it became terribly funny. If it hadn’t been made forty years ago and was being put out on a channel where more than a handful of us were watching it, there would be letters of complaint. Hurrah!

Labels: British Politics, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5