Love and Liberty

The Avengers is fifty years old this year, and at last it’s all available on DVD. But where to start? Strangely (but for both practical and quality reasons), not at the beginning. Last night, I celebrated one of the most important anniversaries in Twentieth Century British history in saying Why The Avengers Matters, how it changed television and society too. Today, I have a simple guide to those extraordinary agents’ DVDs for you to watch one of the greatest TV series ever. And if you buy The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection box set today, you can get a bargain!

Choosing Between The Avengers DVD Boxed Sets

You’ve got a choice of half a dozen The Avengers DVD boxed sets, and if you don’t want to get everything at once, well, I don’t blame you, and I’ll pick which are best to dip into first in a minute. But bear with me. If you don’t have any of The Avengers – and you have a bit of spare cash – obviously I’ll recommend you buy the 39-disc limited edition DVD box set The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection, which is complete. Completely complete. The lot… Well, except for The New Avengers, which has a different rights owner and which you have to buy separately (but quite cheaply), and for most of the first season of The Avengers from 1961, which unfortunately doesn’t exist any more. So it’s as complete as you’re likely to get, and it’s worth buying if you can afford it. And if you can afford it today, it’ll be slightly cheaper.

The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection has several advantages over buying all five of the one-season sets. It’s expensive – but it’s cheaper than buying the lot. And while there’s not a lot of range between different sellers, according to this price comparison site, if you order it by the end of today from one site there’s a 10% off code, which for this one stacks up to more than a tenner. It’s quite a nice case, though the packaging’s even more difficult to get into without leaving your prints all over the disc than it is to shake out the jammed-in slim cases from the season boxes. It has a whole extra disc of still more bonus features that they couldn’t fit on the earlier releases (though, and kudos to Optimum for this, they’re having the decency to bring that out separately later in the year so people who’ve already bought the individual seasons can buy it too). And – and this is embarrassing – if you buy them like this, all the discs work properly. For all these sets, for all 139 episodes, the picture’s been restored as well as it can be; there are commentaries, rare little clips, scripts and other pdfs, huge stills galleries (but not much in the way of subtitles). And then some prat at the DVD authoring house managed to let production faults slip through on most of the boxes. Now don’t panic: they’ve fixed them all, and each of the ones they buggered up can be replaced. But it’s a palaver, isn’t it? So get them at once, and because this big set came out last, you don’t have to exchange any of it.

But, OK, buying the individual season box sets has its advantages too. You get a few more extras to hold in your hands – exciting little reproduction press handouts, and not just on pdf. And you don’t have to shell out so much at once, just in case (in some Bizarro-world) you turn out not to like it. And picking and choosing encourages you to start in the middle, which if you’ve never seen The Avengers, might be wise. There were six seasons broadcast through the Sixties, 1961 to 1969; two more of The New Avengers in the mid-’70s. In six boxes. That’s because they some of the early ones went out live, and some of those they recorded, they threw away, so the few bits left of the first season are in with the complete second, and The New Avengers only ran half as long, so both seasons are boxed together. That’s six. So which to choose? Start in the middle. The Complete Series 2 is historically fascinating, has flashes of brilliance (not least Mr Teddy Bear), and changed TV – but compared to the rest, it’s much cruder, and it suddenly hits its stride a year later. The New Avengers starts well and has a handful of terrific episodes, but hits a steep decline. So be counterintuitive, and leave the first and last until a little later.

Which Avengers Episodes To Watch?

So if you were to buy just one The Avengers season box set, which should it be? And which episodes from it are especially tempting?

Most people would pick The Complete Series 5. It’s “The Avengers – In Color” for the first time, with Diana Rigg and American money, a massive international hit. And it’s brilliant. Or you might go for The Complete Series 3, the height of Honor Blackman, the original breakthrough, the strongest of all the Avengers women, much cheaper but inventive and with the scripts starting to leave the ground. And that’s nearly as brilliant. But I’m a bit strange, so I’ll draw your attention to the two others. The Complete Series 4 was the first with Diana Rigg, the first shot on film, and stylish as anything in black and white. The Complete Series 6 stars Linda Thorson, and is satisfyingly weird in blazing colour. Both hit just the right note for me between camp and sinister. But whichever you pick, some episodes are better than others, so to help you pick your year, or to give you somewhere to start once you’ve got it, here are a few to set you on your way…

The Avengers – The Complete Series 4

Introducing Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, witty, gorgeously shot in black and white, and the perfect balance of suspense and silliness. If you choose this DVD boxed set, I think you’ll find it’s the most consistently brilliant of all the seasons, though some episodes are more wobbly towards the end. And the very first episode in the set is the perfect introduction to The Avengers. As I’ve often said, The Town of No Return is a strong episode, though certainly not the best, but its first seven minutes are flawless: the first blast of that famous fanfare theme tune; a bizarre mystery played utterly deadpan; meeting our heroes as they trade barbs and make their way to the scene. Together, those seven minutes make up the most perfect encapsulation of what The Avengers is about, not least in letting you know that unlike every other crime-fighting / spy-busting duo, they just do it for fun.

“Are you sure you won’t have a marzipan delight?”

And once that’s – holding my breath – grabbed your attention, here’s my variety assortment (in no particular order, but with a one-line sketch so you can see which might be most to your taste) of the other episodes you might want to dive in with:

• Dial a Deadly Number – sex, big business and Peter Bowles; high finance, high camp and the best duel in TV history. It’s not with what you think… Or, rather, it is.

• The Cybernauts – straightforward, quite a bit of action, outstanding music and the most sci-fi the series ever gets: watch out for the killer robots!

• Quick-Quick Slow Death – silly froth. Simply fun. With murder, obviously.

• The House That Jack Built – Op-art craziness for Emma! It looks terrific, and so is she (stuck in an evil TARDIS).

• Too Many Christmas Trees – haunting and brilliant, though Steed’s character is off-key for important reasons; not completely the season of goodwill.

The Avengers – The Complete Series 6

Tara King is younger, more earnest – sometimes – and very easy to root for, growing as she goes along. So do the stories; like the black and white Mrs Peels, these superbly blend suspense and silliness, but here the earlier episodes tend to be the rockier ones. It’s more of a mixed bag, but its heights are fabulous. My personal favourite’s Pandora, but even for The Avengers, that’s out of the ordinary, so if you pick up this particular box, here’s my pick of a variety of episodes you might consider starting with:

• Game – iconic Avengers: outrageously surreal sets and plotting, giant killer games, Peter Jeffrey… And I’ve written about it in detail, too, with a whole list of reasons why you should watch this postmodern extravaganza.

• Look – (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers… – a comedy of murders, with surreal style, John Cleese, Bernard Cribbins and killer clowns.

• My Wildest Dream – threatening psychodrama, with superb action sequences and score, plus one of the most barking sets.

• Who Was That Man I Saw You With? – the first I ever saw, and it got me hooked. Slippery double-crossing spies, murder and setting our heroes up.

The Avengers – The Complete Series 5

The most famous, the most repeated, the height of the series’ wackiness and depiction of Britain as a fantasy ‘Avengerland’, this is Emma Peel “In Color”. Simply iconic, though the last third of this season were made after a bit of a break and (comparatively) run out of steam a little. And if you choose this particular boxed, here are my suggestions for a variety of different episodes you might want to start with:

• Escape in Time – inventive, entertaining, colourful, a great use of other times and cuddly toys, and a magnificent villain in Peter Bowles.

• The Hidden Tiger – archetypal ‘first half setting up the threat, second half going to the villains’ Avengers plotting, and the height of comic fantasy (with Ronnie Barker).

• Dead Man’s Treasure – like a week off, driving around the countryside to breezy music. Fun.

• The Superlative Seven – one of the most sinister colour Mrs Peels, rather brilliant, loads of guest stars… Not a lot of Mrs Peel, though (perhaps The Joker if you want an unsettling one with more Emma).

The Avengers – The Complete Series 3

A little more ‘realistic’ than the others, becoming a big hit in the UK but still with a limited budget, this gives the first, most physical of The Avengers women her finest hours. Steed’s often at his best, too, and Honor Blackman terrific; the downside is a much less polished production and the original theme tune, which isn’t bad, but disjointed and nowhere near as classy as that famous fanfare introduced with Mrs Peel. And finally, if this is the boxed set you pick up, here’s my pick (as with all of these, in no particular order, spanning various tastes) of the episodes you might want to try first:

• Esprit de Corps – great fun, with a twisty-turny plot, a striking central idea and some superb guest stars (Roy Kinnear, John Thaw).

• The Charmers – very witty, a brilliant spy spoof, and even better than the later colour remake (though that’s fun, too).

• Man With Two Shadows – a really rather dark thriller, and arguably the best of the series’ ‘doubles’ episodes.

• November Five – assassination at the by-election, political manipulation and dastardly plots inside the House of Commons. Who’d have thought? Vote Gale to sort it all out!

Of my previously-written Avengers articles I’ve linked to above, incidentally, my picks for the best would be The Town of No Return, Game and The House That Jack Built, as I think I did rather well for each of them. But what are you sitting down reading them for? Go out and find the episodes themselves! And whichever you pick, enjoy, and watch out for diabolical masterminds.

Labels: DVD, DVD Tasters, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 1, The Avengers Season 2, The Avengers Season 3, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 5, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers, Top Tips

Fifty years old this year, The Avengers is remembered not just because it’s the most Sixties show of the Sixties, or outrageous fun, but because, unexpectedly, it mattered. And there’s no better date to show you why than September 29th. Because exactly forty-nine years ago tonight, The Avengers – Mr Teddy Bear introduced viewers to Honor Blackman as an intelligent, independent woman who flung men over her shoulders. I’d like to say that TV was never the same again, but staid, submissive roles for women still can be; but this changed Britain by showing that they didn’t have to be.

In British cultural history there’s nothing like the Sixties, and in the Sixties there’s nothing like The Avengers. The decade’s TV is bursting with spies, thrillers, comedies, sci-fi, subversion of the establishment and celebrations of tradition – but only The Avengers did all of that at one, and more. You can’t place it in just one genre: it’s an extraordinary series, with extraordinary “agents”, and I’d call it “A fantasy of Britain” in the much more detailed article I’ll publish here at some point. But not tonight. Because tonight I’m thinking of the most important thing that made The Avengers extraordinary: that it rode old-fashioned Britishness and Swinging modernity with equal excitement – you might call it a hugely successful Conservative-Liberal coalition – and that equality was sexual in a way that no other TV show had ever managed. Or even tried.

Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale; Diana Rigg as Emma Peel; Linda Thorson as Tara King; Joanna Lumley as Purdey; all strong, independent women in their different ways, in a series that for the most part just ignored sexism and simply made women equal. All symbols of modern Britain, all partnered with the best of old Britishness, Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, a mysterious dandy in a bowler hat. It was sheer genius to make all the women ahead of their time and the man from a bygone age. And as well as lifting a glass of champagne to those brilliant women tonight, lift one to Mr Macnee, who was there first and did what few male stars would have done – let alone male action stars – by being both generous and secure enough in himself to let someone else step into the spotlight, and not just another man, but a woman who’d do most of the action (of all the many serendipitous accidents of history that created The Avengers, perhaps a special hurrah for Mr Macnee being raised by lesbians).


And now you’re enthusiastic to see this amazing series, where to start? Well, I can help you with that…

Labels: British Politics, History, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 2, The Avengers Season 3, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 5, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers

The deaths have been announced of two men with enormous track records in entertainment: Peter Rogers, who fabulously produced every single Carry On film; then celebrity cook, glacially slow Just A Minute speaker and contributor to the gaiety of the nation through Parliamentary Liberalism Clement Freud. Both of them and their work have been presences through my whole life, and I’m sorry that I never met either of them. I did, however, meet John Cater, an actor whose death was also announced recently, and I’d like to celebrate that genuinely nice chap as well as the two more famous men.

Intellectually, I’ve known for many years that Clement Freud was a Liberal MP, but as he lost his seat and largely disappeared from politics at around the time I started getting interested, it’s always been difficult to feel that political presence in the man who I’ve always known as a lugubrious regular alongside Nicholas Parsons (the only time I can remember hearing a Lib Dem conversation about him was scurrilous rumours that he and Roy Jenkins used to compete to see who could go for longest without visiting their seats). So as well as lauding Stephen Glenn’s very appropriate tribute, I’d like to direct you to Paul Walter, whose Clement Freud’s Vital 12.5% puts in perspective just how important Clement was to the Liberal Party during his time in Parliament – first elected on a day when, astonishingly, we won two by-elections on one day (26th July 1973) and, in those days long before being able to get 63 MPs elected, at a stroke increased our Commons representation by a third on top of what we’d had a few hours before. And, of course, I was always a great fan of Band On the Run, too (Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five is still one of the most stirring rock anthems). But, for all those people who talk about how off-message he was, you can read via Jonathan Calder how sharp his instinct was for getting a political point in at the most unlikely moment.

John Cater – Intense, Reliable, and A Disturbing Sort of Spear-Carrier

You probably knew of Clement Freud, and you’ve almost certainly watched some of Peter Rogers’ films, but you may not be able to place the name of John Cater. He was an actor with a hugely impressive list of screen credits across fifty years – from Saturday Night Theatre in 1958, via the Dr Phibes movies, Dad’s Army and a regular role in The Duchess of Duke Street to, oh, never mind, Bonekickers last year – but taking in along the way an enormous number of roles. I particularly remember him for his appearances in arguably my three favourite series of all, Doctor Who, I, Claudius, and the one I’ll always associate him with, The Avengers.

He was quite slight, and often bearded, with an inquisitive look to him; though usually found in moderately-sized rather than leading roles, he was a very reliable character actor, and managed to combine a light touch for comedy with an extraordinary intensity. He was always terribly watchable. In Doctor Who – The War Machines, the 1966 story that warns that the Internet is coming and it will TAKE OVER THE WORLD! he’s Professor Krimpton, one of the developers of the deadly computer system who, on seeing his boss become a starry-eyed zombie, first laughs and just thinks he’s flipped, as you would, then fights against the Machine’s hypnotic control in a very disturbing scene, then eventually succumbs. A decade later, he was one of the Emperor Claudius’ two trusted Greek administrators towards the end of the serial, the one who saw what was coming and didn’t betray him.

Back in the mid-’80s, however, it was John Cater’s death in an episode of The Avengers that made him unforgettable for me. During a Channel 4 repeat run, I got hooked on the series first through some of the Tara King episodes and then on catching some of the black and white Mrs Peel outings. It was in one of the latter, Death At Bargain Prices, that he plays a store detective who befriends Mrs Peel – sent there to investigate strange goings-on – and comes to a particularly nasty end. Though he’s also an entertainingly diffident foreign spy in the later episode The Living Dead and “Disco” (not who you imagine) in the Cathy Gale story The Nutshell, for me he’ll always be Jarvis, creeping around Pinter’s Department Store. But what harm could come to you in a big store? Well, when there’s a large jungle set up in the middle of it – to show off camping equipment, of course – where better to find yourself winding up with a spear through your chest, for one of the most haunting images of my teens?

In the last couple of years, I met John twice at different Doctor Who events, and had the chance to chat to him (and to get him to autograph my Avengers DVDs). Spry, animated and a great conversationalist, he came across as a genuinely lovely guy, with a wicked twinkle. Discussing I, Claudius, he talked about how Derek Jacobi would always learn his lines at least one episode in advance, so he could sit doing the Times crossword as other actors got it right, and how another actor he worked with, Ronald Culver (father of Michael), would do the same. From the inside, he too was very impressed by I, Claudius, but unimpressed by the industry not giving any work to its director, “the great Herbie Wise,” because “directors over forty are past it” – recalling Herbie’s being asked “What have you done?” when going for a job on The Bill, “whereas actors can get away with it, because there’ll always be old fart parts for old farts like me.” He remembered, in The Avengers’ The Living Dead, “being a rather silly second lieutenant to Julian Glover,” but enjoying playing the piano badly and being asked by a gruff shop steward, “Are you in the Musicians’ Union?” And as he’d always been a bit of a muso, he joined on the spot and still kept it up to that day, which gave him the odd free entry to concerts and things. He found that episode’s director John Krish a real gentleman – he got him a car home despite the unions making a fuss, and did him a copy of The Living Dead when he couldn’t find one (he recalled that John also did a film, Decline and Fall, which John regrets was ruined by the editors forced on him).

I mentioned, of course, my memory of that gloriously surreal Avengers image of him lying dead with a spear in his chest, in a jungle, in a department store, one of the moments that so captivated me about the series when I was new to it. He told me about the filming, and the “mechanism” he was fitted with:

“Yes, I remember that shot. The props man passed by as I was being set up for it and shouted, ‘Stick it up his Jacksie’. And I thought, how rude! ‘You wouldn’t say that if I was Laurence Olivier,’ I said. ‘But you’re not, are you?’ he said. ‘Stick it up his Jacksie!’”

Peter Rogers, Carry On Up the Khyber, and The Worst DVD Commentary in the World, Ever!

Peter Rogers was a brilliant producer. To have made so many Carry On films, and for so many of them to be brilliant – as well as some that were all right, some mediocre and one or two downright dreadful – means he deserves to be remembered for giving people an awful lot of pleasure and, for someone who clearly had a sharp focus on the bottom line, for being responsible for the one of the most successful British film series ever made. I think only James Bond can touch it.

The best way to celebrate him, then, is to bung on one of his films and simply enjoy it. If you need a tip, try going for Carry On Cleo, or Carry On Screaming, or Carry On, Don’t Lose Your Head – yesterday, Film Four showed Leslie Howard’s version of The Scarlet Pimpernel, and though that’s much-lauded, Don’t Lose Your Head is not only (naturally) a much funnier film, but a far more exciting one. The 1934 adaptation may have a strong plot and some good lines (if none to match “The Duc de Pommes Frittes has had his chips!”), but the action in the comedy version beats it hands down, and you can’t beat Sid James’ joyous foppery. For years, every time Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel came round, The Guardian’s film review would praise its swordplay as “exhilarating”. And every time, I’d raise an eyebrow, because that film contains no swordplay at all, still less any to compete with the genuinely exhilarating swordplay at the climax of Peter Rogers’ Don’t Lose Your Head. Or, of course, you could simply watch the finest of all his films, set in part in the aforementioned town of Jacksie, Carry On Up the Khyber.

Ah, yes, Carry On Up the Khyber. It may be an inappropriate way to remember him, but I didn’t hear all that many interviews with Peter Rogers, and the one that sticks in my head with fascinated horror was his DVD commentary for that movie, an experience so dreadful that – years before I started blogging – I was moved to send an e-mail round relating it. So here, from the 24th of May 2003, is my reaction to his reaction. I hope you’ll find it entertaining, if a cautionary tale in why being brilliant behind the camera doesn’t necessarily mean entertainment in front of it…

The Worst DVD Commentary in the World, Ever!

OK, I admit that (paraphrasing Donald Cotton on Helen of Troy) it’s impossible to know this without the most extensive surveys, but yesterday evening I listened to such a mind-boggling train-wreck of a commentary that I had to share it with you. Or give you a warning.

The DVD in question is one just bought for me by my beloved, the Special Edition of Carry On Up the Khyber (or “Carry On the Regiment” as a team of censors unfunnily tried to persuade them was a better title). Now, for the most part this is a terrific DVD, with added subtitles, a nice little booklet with Doctor Who references, rather good extras – even the bonus Carry On Laughing show (usually unimpressive), The Sobbing Cavalier, is quite a fun Civil War piece – and the film itself is fantastic, which is why we went for the Special Edition even after getting the original DVD release. But the commentary is astoundingly painful.

The Carry On Special Edition commentaries I’ve heard so far have mostly been Jim Dale on his own, which are only so-so, or a team of the more minor actors, which are rather more entertaining, each moderated by Carry On reference book author Robert Ross (Barbara Windsor doesn’t seem to be doing any). For Khyber, sadly, almost all the actors are now dead, and presumably they didn’t think Angela Douglas, say, was a big enough draw on her own. You can imagine Mr Ross thinking, ‘Hey, this is the best Carry On, so for something really special, let’s bring in Peter Rogers, the producer of all the films. That’ll work.’

It doesn't.

By half-way through, I was actually wondering if they’d get to the end of the recording; if this was a marriage, it’d be at the stage of acrimonious divorce due to irreconcilable differences. Ross has gone into it with a trayful of fascinating facts and a set of questions to prompt heart-warming anecdotes; Rogers is under the impression that he’s being paid to sit and watch a film – with gritted teeth – and regards any attempt to engage him in conversation as the utmost impertinence.

Before this, my most grumpy commentary was with Nigel Kneale on the laserdisc of the Quatermass II film, being prodded every few minutes by his moderator and either staying silent or snapping viciously at the stick that’s prodding him. At least, though, Kneale is a brilliantly evil old curmudgeon who hates directors, actors, and above all every single young person in the world, and can be relied on to say something waspish and indiscreet (notably taking a fiendish delight in Brian Donlevy’s flying hairpiece) that makes the long periods of silence bearable. Rogers’ lofty hostility beats this hands down as a grim listening experience.

Peter Rogers appears to have entered a bet with someone that he can take profound personal offense at any remark, even if it’s actually praising him, rather like the “I Couldn't Disagree With You More” round on the much-missed ’90s panel game If I Ruled the World. “So, this film is often thought of as one of the best British films ever made – do you feel proud of it?” asks Ross hopefully, for example. “Proud? No, certainly not. What a thing to say,” is just one of the affronted retorts I remember from last night.

Rogers’ other tactic is silence. Getting any reply at all out of him is like pulling teeth. You get the feeling that Ross was considering shooting himself after the 433rd complicated question which had been greeted with “… (pause) … (more pause) …No.” Admittedly, he asks for trouble a couple of times, trying persistently to correct Rogers on facts which the other man clearly isn’t going to give way on (tip: never mention Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in his presence), but you can’t blame him. I’d probably have strangled the rude old git.

He’s hypersensitive about money; he puts down Ross’ attempts to infodump to give the listener something for their money (“You sound like a football commentator”); he says, in the tone of a headmaster cleaning urine out of the drinking fountain with his hands, “As long as I make people laugh, I’m happy.” At one point, he has the cheek to remark, “You’ve not asked me any questions for a while,” immediately qualifying it with “Not that I want to answer them.” Most of all, he just doesn’t want to speak. I suspect he’s never heard a DVD commentary. Except as a lesson in how not to do one, you shouldn’t try to hear this one, either.

Oh, and it closes with Ross somehow forcing himself to say, “Thank you, Peter Rogers. It’s been a pleasure.” “I wish I could say the same,” he stiffly replies. Straight up!

Finally, though you won’t see John Cater in either of them, tonight BBC4 spoil us with two episodes of The Avengers. At 7.40 you can see Obsession, a reasonable story notable for Purdey’s ballet career and sad love affair, asides about Middle East politics and being the first time Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw (later to be a memorable Citizen Camembert himself) worked together, and that’s on again tomorrow night at 12.25. Steed’s pretty damned terrific at the end, too. If you’re seriously sleepless, they’re also showing a signed repeat tonight of the very much better House of Cards, the last of Peter Jeffrey’s strange trilogy of villains spread across a decade, each time a different old foe bent on revenge against an Avenger, where each uses a playing card motif, each has a dubious continental connection, and each one is dead… But that episode’s not on until 2.30am, so I hope not to be watching it this time.

Labels: Carry On, Fandom, Film, Liberal Democrats, Obituary, Peter Jeffrey, Reviews, The Avengers Season 3, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 5, The New Avengers, William Hartnell

Tonight at midnight, BBC4 brings us The New Avengers’ puntastic The Tale of the Big Why, which I’d not seen for ages but which, in one of the joys of writing these reviews, I watched again today and thoroughly enjoyed. Although it has a surprising amount in common with last week’s disappointing episode, it’s both much more exciting and much more laid back; in short, much more Avengers. It looks great, it keeps you guessing with plenty of dodgy characters (a young Roy Marsden, a crooked Tory councillor…), and Steed, Purdey and even Gambit all come out of it superbly. Oh, and the opening titles have finally replaced that uninspiring assemblage of clips with a remarkable bit of 1976 CGI, a union flag lion that so delighted the producers that, in tonight’s adventure, Purdey wears it emblazoned on the back of her rather fetching biker jacket. Along with her name, in big letters. What a fabulous secret agent she is – at last, someone’s even more noticeable than Steed.

Before the analysis and the spoilers, for the second week running, the most entertaining scenes include those of Gambit and Purdey zooming about the countryside. Again, he’s at the wheel, but this time rather than his talking about sex, it’s Purdey’s carnal lusts that drive their destination. She’s gagging for a meal, and dreams of Italian. Gambit, bless him, pulls up outside The Chef’s Hat, a roadside hot dog caravan. Purdey, not finding this what she had in mind, emerges from the car in a gold lamé cocktail dress and, in between bites of huge sausage sarnie (actually, I rather fancy one as I watch her), engages first Mike and then the cuisinier in conversation:

“Is this one of your favourite restaurants? I suppose you bring all your girlfriends here… Did he book?”
“Nah, he’s just lucky!”

The script’s fast-paced and, though simple in its story, quite complex in its plotting, so it’s to The Tale of the Big Why’s great advantage that Robert Fuest’s in charge, probably my favourite and almost certainly the most strikingly pop-art Avengers director. The story’s shot almost entirely on location, and illustrated with many striking images – justly the most famous is the recurring close-up of a beer glass used as chronometer, but it’s also perhaps the New Avengers episode most packed with chases. My favourite moments are probably of Purdey on her motorbike, zooming towards a great stunt in the pre-credits freeze-frame or popping suddenly into startling close-up, but there’s a lot more variation than that. Through tonight’s story, the vehicles move from a motorbike to an exciting chase with smashing cars (well, very ugly cars, actually, but they get smashed up), then lots of action with a crop-duster plane. Even Gambit gets a strikingly heroic moment facing off against it.

The Regular Characters (and some familiar plots)

Though it’s not quite as light-hearted – there’s an unexpected death, which I’ll mention shortly so look away now if you want to avoid spoilers, which comes quite early on and has a particularly grim aftermath – this has a lot in common with the marvellous Avengers episode Dead Man’s Treasure. That’s more of a summery week off than this is, but both feature extended treasure hunts with remarkable numbers of participants on remarkable numbers of sides. Admittedly, Dead Man’s Treasure has many cryptic clues while The Tale of the Big Why features only one, but the near-eponymous racy Western The Tale of the Big Y is a doozy (despite our heroes’ cracking it rather depending on all aviators’ maps being identical).

The other story from the same stable that this week’s bears an uncanny resemblance to when looked at from the right angle is, as I mentioned above, the previous New Avengers episode, To Catch a Rat. On paper, you’d think this was shallower – there’s none of the genuine emotion of a wounded old spy recovering himself to take on his old enemy, but rather more of the jolly runaround. On screen, it comes across as having a lot more to it. While the actors injected considerable pathos into the last story, it moved very slowly and had very little to it to live up to its serious intent – you could have halved it to a 25-minute episode without losing anything very important, while this week’s all-action frivolity not only deserves its length but passes the time much faster. The chasing around the countryside has had far more thought put into it; there’s far more variety, of scenes, of characters, of vehicles; again, there’s someone emerging after years away to expose a traitor in the Department (one of the perennial New Avengers clichés), but this time the exposer’s corrupt, too, and swiftly dead, which is a real shock after last week’s weary dragging-out. The feel’s improved, too, by a Jazz-flavoured score with which Laurie Johnson is clearly more comfortable than the usual more noticeably ’70s style; though Cornelltoppingday dismiss it with “Porno Funk Music Factor: 10,” I’d say it’s far less dated than that, and I rather enjoy the jazzy ‘chasing around’ theme that accompanies Purdey’s bike and the odd other vehicle.

Though there’s a less powerful emotional core to the acting than Ian Hendry provided and the script is one of the last gasps at fetishising macho Mike Gambit, this story makes far better and more interesting use of the three leads, too. I’ve mentioned Purdey’s fabulous biker’s outfit and gold frock; Joanna looks great in a fairly practical red jacket and black skirt, too, so it looks like the days of the diaphanous dress (so handy for running in) are behind her. Nothing can save Gambit and most of the others, though. Anyway, not only is she better-outfitted, but her part continues to break out of the sexist trap the series’ initial set-up had consigned her to. She’s heavily favoured early in the story, with some fantastic bike work as she takes the lead, Gambit only following at a distance and mainly to report back to Steed at ‘home base’. Towards the end of the story, Purdey’s kidnapped so the two men will break and have to save the poor little girlie – sigh – but, again, that template’s swiftly broken, as Purdey gets hopping mad and, in a terrific scene, shows that she can beat the villains with both arms tied behind her back.

Steed, too, has a much better part this week – rather than kept back until virtually the last scene, he not only has much more to do back at ‘base’ but gets out towards the end, where he’s caught up in some splendid action sequences and has a great time exploring the wonders of nature (while tiring out poor Gambit). Given a far more dynamic role, he seems far more like the old Steed than in most of the previous New Avengers episodes. It’s not that he takes the lead as the action man – though, when two heavies come calling, there’s a great moment where he slaps a gun out of one villain’s hand, instantly punches him out, then repels another with his hat – but that he gets the space in the narrative to relax and enjoy himself. It’s how Steed should be: carefree in doing his job, serious in what he does but not how he does it. He’s perfect when sent to charm a lady and catch a package in his bowler hat, when performing a Holmesian piece of deduction in tracing a location through orchard crop-spray on a pair of boots, or when giving Purdey her moment at the climax with a typically off-the-wall distraction, and Gambit rewards him with absolute trust (when it matters). Amid a profusion of villains, it’s Steed’s attention to detail that captures the most important one, because he’s got almost as much of an eye for photos and guns as for antique doorknobs. We also spend time, for once, not in Purdey’s bedroom but in Steed’s palatial apartment and Gambit’s groovy pad, and to complete the set Gambit gets two action set-pieces towards the end (against a plane and a gun) which really work.

The Irregular Characters (and a deadly sin)

Although I’ve made it sound like it’s all rather fun, and it is, there are some serious undercurrents, particularly in the guest parts. Rarely, almost every new character in the script is working for someone different – themselves, for almost all of them, and so many of them chasing that it resembles Wacky Races – yet almost every one of them has the same motive: greed. It opens with everyone focused on Burt Brandon, a spy just about to get out of prison after nine years and all set to make a fortune, he claims, by exposing a secret at the heart of government. Played by George A Cooper in his third Avengers role, he’s an instantly recognisable actor (Mr Griffiths from Grange Hill) and so blatantly the centre of attention that it’s a real shock when he’s killed barely a dozen minutes in. This takes the viewer by surprise, not least because now it means that no-one knows what they’re looking for, nor where to find it: the chase becomes that much more unpredictable. And, of course, when Steed and Gambit finally unearth the ‘buried treasure’, it isn’t there, so even solving the clue of the pulp paperback doesn’t tell you who has the goods, let alone what the goods actually are.

The story’s main ‘villains’ are apparently Eastern Bloc heavies gone native – they’re communists who’ve turned capitalist, the power of all that money having turned their heads. And one of them’s a Conservative councillor into the bargain! Well, all right, that’s not strictly true, but a corrupt, communist, capitalist traitor Tory is believable, isn’t it? It’s not like we can’t all think of the odd crooked Tory with an extremist political past… No, no not that one – I’m actually thinking of the actor’s later role in The Vicar of Dibley. Yes, it’s him, isn’t it? That surprised you. Anyway, where was I? He and his nervous henchman ambush Brandon and kill him without actually intending to, as this means they can’t get the truth out of him; instead, in the episode’s grimmest sequence, they strip and search his body, splayed out in the middle of a field. Fortunately, the nastiness of that moment is swiftly followed by a surreal echo as, having failed to find anything on him, they search his car then take it to pieces and lay them out around the frame, creating an image in the field like an exploded diagram of all a car’s components. Gambit drives up later, seeing Purdey sitting on the completely disassembled wreck of a car:

“I say! Need any help? Could be a blocked carburettor.”

Brian Clemens creates an interesting flourish with the names, too. The two heavies are Roach and Poole, and there’s something distinctly fishy about them; Roy Marsden plays Turner, an apparently ordinary guy who’s tempted to the dark side by the lure of lucre (his first name, ironically, is Frank); and the top civil servant who’s sold out his country for whacking great pay-offs (again, entrepreneurship from the communists) is called Harmer. Incidentally, for Doctor Who fans of old, the two main suspects for the turncoat at the top are Hepesh and Shardovan, but the traitor’s the other way round in this series. With so much money said to be washing around, one of the most memorable things about this story is that it creates new villains among everyone who hears of it, as they’re all tempted just that little too far – an ordinary woman turned gleeful gas-bombing femme fatale, crop-sprayer Turner who takes the vital parcel (and who never had any hair) and is prepared to sell to the highest bidder… Though, with each, there are hints that the lure is only bringing out incipient corruption: the woman is jailbird spy Brandon’s estranged daughter; bluff, friendly Mrs Turner is first seen at her farmhouse, dipping bits of machinery in acid to sell them on to “Genuine Antiques”. But the multiplicity of villains, like the multiplicity of chases, help to keep the episode constantly lively, unpredictable and much better than the ordinary. It all leads up to a splendid series of climaxes with different villains – big and small – and they’ve all been set up so well that each grabs your attention, whether it’s an edge of the seat fight with Soviets turned independent, an impressive stunt with a plane to stop an ordinary bloke, or the fun of revealing and dealing with the traitor that, it turns out, the whole thing’s been about.

Next week, it’s about-face for a story of spies right up close rather than ones you have to chase, and there’s another villain who’ll grow up to be a famous detective on TV, in one of The New Avengers’ best.

Labels: Joanna Lumley, Reviews, The Avengers Season 5, The New Avengers

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

This evening’s edition of The Avengers (BBC4 at 7.10, and again tomorrow night at 11.50) is one of the most amusing and – with its impeccably polite killers, an army of deadly agents inspired by Steed’s fashions, and Emma meeting her Eastern Bloc match – one of the most ‘iconic’, though hardly the most original. The US-financed colour episodes from 1967 were really getting into their swing, so writer Brian Clemens decided he’d like to show American audiences some of what they’d missed in the early ’60s with this direct remake of black and white Honor Blackman episode The Charmers, the first of three and a half such rewrites. With the beautifully filmed Mrs Peel shows “in color” by far the best-remembered, most-repeated and most often commercially available of The Avengers these days, it’s a fair bet that this version is better-known than the original version. But is it better?

Steed changes partner – Emma joins the enemy

This story certainly has a scintillating script, though writer / producer Brian Clemens deserves most of his credit for it for the 1964 rather than the 1967 version, but there’s also impressive work from (appropriately) Ealing Comedy director Charles Crichton and a startling array of guest stars – Philip Madoc, Peter Barkworth, Anna Quayle, Terence Alexander, Timothy Bateson, Michael Gough – with even Steed and Emma’s outfits almost uniformly delightful this time out (thanks to Pierre Cardin and Alun Hughes). Added to all that talent, it certainly had a lot more money put into it than the visibly much cheaper version made more crudely on videotape. Now, by this stage you’re going to imagine my punchline to be that the cheapie prototype has a raw power to it, but that the stylish and expensive remake loses the chemistry and is a terrible flop. Actually, no. Both of them are splendidly crafted and highly entertaining pieces of television – but the earlier one, while less polished, remains the more stylish…

More (sigh) to follow…

Meanwhile, for anyone trying to get in touch, again please use the e-mail link in the sidebar. My main e-mail address remains inaccessible, despite my being told by my ISP that it was a temporary problem and everyone’s service would be restored by “tomorrow evening”. That was a week of tomorrows ago now… Anyone with the misfortune to share Breathe as their ISP has my sympathy.

…And after a slight interregnum, I’ve caught up [readers may be reassured to learn that we did eventually find a better ISP. And for this particular piece of television, it seems apposite that it’s Waitrose].

Iconic Avenging

It’s not hard to understand why this is an iconic episode: The Avengers defies a simple description, but is often called a comedy spy series, while I’d describe it as a fantasy of Britain. This is one of the most comedy scripts (even more noticeable in the more down-to-earth 1963-4 series as a clear signpost of what was to come), one which unusually revolves around spies from ‘the other side’ rather than mad scientists and mad conservatives, and as for a fantasy of Britain… The villain wants to take over the world with an army of Steeds. It even starts on a foggy cobbled street at night by gas lamp, as a rather nastily-outfitted Russian member of the other side with an accent – which all of them share (to verifying degrees of plausibility) but no-one mentions – waits for two impeccably attired chaps in suits and bowlers just like our hero’s to come round the corner, accompanied by an inappropriately (or is it?) martial fanfare. They have important information to sell – but, being British, can’t do so until they’ve been properly introduced. So, is this a topical tale of traitors? It seems so for a moment… But then it looks more complicated, as their raise their hats to their contact – and shoot him dead with silenced pistols, leaving him in the gutter as they walk briskly away and the episode’s title is revealed as the punchline: “The Correct Way to Kill”. The music’s far better with Laurie Johnson than the 1964 version, of course, as is the title, and this teaser scene’s much more to the point – establishing the Cold War and the perfidious stiff upper lip. Yet while upper-class killers Percy and Algy are one up on the less memorable lone well-mannered warrior of the earlier production, I can’t help thinking it was more subtle and stylish when fencing practice turned suddenly deadly was presented as a complete mystery. As the episode goes on, too, you notice that the army for whom Percy and Algy are prototypes are all trained in foils; that the episode ends with an exciting pair of fights with foils; and that this opening scene rewritten with guns… Lacks its earlier symmetry.

So, we have a mystery. Who is killing off the Soviet other side’s agents? And why? Steed and Mrs Peel meet on that cobbled street in the clear daylight, and two of them look rather good on it. I don’t usually go for pinstripe, but Steed’s is in a rather plush grey that always suits him, while Emma’s in a striking blue top and very vibrant orange blouse and skirt (very Pet Shop Boys). It’s not what you’d expect her to be wearing, but she looks terrific in it. That street, though, looks even more like a studio in ‘daylight’; unusually for this period of The Avengers, the whole thing’s filmed on studio sets*, and perhaps it’s a little let down by their ranging only from ‘quite intriguing’ to ‘functional’ rather than up to ‘outré’, meaning that while this episode is visibly much less cheap than the 1964 production it’s still one of the cheaper ones by 1967 standards (perhaps they spent the budget on the star-studded guest cast?). Anyway, Steed is rather peeved to recognise Groski in the gutter:

“You mean he’s not one of ours?”
“No. He’s one of theirs. One of their top agents.”
“That makes a change.”
“Yes, but it’s embarrassing. If he had been naughty, they might have had the good manners to have popped him off in his own country.”
“Leaves us with all the paperwork.”

It’s just not cricket. He hopes they don’t do it again… But, of course, they do, dispatching agents in a lift and then a revolving door, with Emma pulling Steed up on repeating his same testy observations about purges and unethical behaviour…

“We need a drink.”
“That you haven’t said.”

Which, knowing those two, I frankly find unlikely. Still, that gets us back to Steed’s flat for the scene that sets up the dynamic of most of the plot: Emma notices a lurking presence and, tethering Steed to declaim a mish-mash of poetry and prose, lures in and clobbers Philip Madoc’s agent Ivan, who wants to shoot our hero (while Steed saves, then offers, the red wine). And it’s not just that he’s fed up with schoolboys reciting Casabianca – in a twist on who’s usually ‘the Avengers’, he’s been sent to kill Steed in revenge for the others. But Steed hasn’t killed anyone all week! With Ivan convinced, they realise that someone is setting the two sides against each other and decide to work together – Emma being assigned to work with Ivan, and Steed given a new partner who’s the most Russian Russian ever shown on TV without anyone ever saying the word “Russian”. And so the hi-jinks ensue. With an increasing level of spoilers from this point on.

Stars From the Other Side

I’ve said this has a set of great guest actors and a script full of witty lines, though the two don’t always come together to make great parts. The late Peter Barkworth gets little to do but sneer and shoot as assassin Percy (and Graham Armitage still less as Algy, though the only other TV I really know him from is Doctor Who’s The Macra Terror, coincidentally broadcast the same day), while Timothy Bateson has virtually nothing but being testy, then jumpy, then murdered in a blackly comic way. Philip Madoc’s Ivan is on paper a more shallow part than the 1964 equivalent “Martin” and probably the slightest of his five Avengers roles, but he mines something memorable from not very much, not only making the most of his meagre lines but with a flickering wolfish grin, many significant looks, lots of business with his coat and an ability to insinuate himself into the foreground so that, when he does get something to say, you listen. Not long after they kill off Ivan, the traditional mid-episode shift of scene takes us to SNOB and Terence Alexander’s Tarquin Ponsonby-Fry, a larger role but almost his polar opposite – where Ivan was mostly gloomy with a predatory smile, stating his opposition to Steed but eventually helpful, Ponsonby-Fry lights up with admiration at Steed’s style but, for all his smiling worship, wants to give him a short, sharp, stab in the back.

The two biggest guest roles are both from the other side: Anna Quayle’s formidable Olga (wearing a complete Russian bear) and Michael Gough’s spymaster Nutski (“My friends call me Nutty”). Olga is a more heavily armed, more ideologically pure and far less knowing Mrs Peel, introduced to much admiration from Nutski (“And they say that today there is no moral fibre among the younger generation”) and with much hostility to Steed (though she thaws slightly by the end, the tag scene suggesting a degree of cultural exchange and offering a good shaggy dog of a party manifesto). She’s the biggest change from The Charmers – not as subtle, funny or lush as Fenella Fielding’s Kim Lawrence, but with a completely different character and different set of lines she’s able to make the part her own. And I suspect it may have been written that way, as Anna Quayle had had a hit on stage with a very similar Soviet part in Stop the World – I Want To Get Off. She has the disadvantage that where Kim’s unpredictability would throw Steed, Olga’s blunderbuss fanaticism doesn’t worry him at all, though her utterly straight absurdity and reactions direct to camera for his more outrageous moments are still priceless. While there’s a running joke about his asking for her to be more “subtle”, that’s something someone might have said to Michael Gough, as his characterisation of Nutski starts with the name and goes upward. Where Warren Mitchell’s 1964 equivalent Keller is grubby, Nutski is hammy, and only in part because his plan is significantly inflated here (like his little tribute to The Great Dictator). Perhaps Michael Gough, a superb actor with an amazingly long résumé, just wanted to differentiate his performance from last season’s Dr Armstrong in The Cybernauts (Emma gives a twirl to that role here as one of her several homages to that particular episode)? He still gets many of the best lines, and Merlin’s hanging crocodile, but somehow he’s less funny by being just that bit too over the top, right from his first greeting to Steed – and aside to Ivan:

“What a delightful surprise! What a pleasure to see you again! I told you to kill him.”

Imitation and Flattery

Steed and Emma are still at the centre of all this, despite so many scene-stealers – not least because even the villains recognise that they are the best in the world. Everyone mysteriously seems to have the same Enemy Identification Boards boasting rather lovely publicity shots of each of them, with her tickled at their labels; and while Steed is the more obvious model for the evil of the Third Way, that might just be because Mrs Peel is too high a standard to meet. The killers trained at Sociability, Nobility, Omnipotence, Breeding, Inc. (like FOG, SMOG and ABORCASHATA, I can’t resist an acronym) are all men, and all doing Steed the compliment of becoming dangerous agents with bowlers and swordstick brollies but with added fascistic taxi-hailing… But they’re all taught by a woman, who’s clearly deadlier. SNOB, as it should, has the best of the sets, rich-looking golden panelling outside, fashionable paint sketches within.

Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg live up to their roles as ever, both seemingly enjoying an episode in which even the baddies hero-worship them. Steed has enormous opportunities for fun paired with Olga and then admired by Ponsonby-Fry as so much better than his protégés even in defeat, with Patrick Macnee happily every bit as suave as the script demands, and while Emma has less time to form double-acts with Ivan or Nutski, Diana Rigg gets some sparkling moments on her own (as well as a fabulous reaction to what Hubert Merryweather does, in a gag that literally up-ends a role from the earlier version). Emma wins the outfits, too in an episode where neither of them have a bad one – though Emma’s lilac trouser suit isn’t too striking and Steed’s slightly-too-dark-for-him navy suit is, shockingly, accessorised by a non-matching black bowler, even Steed’s cravats are stylish, and while Emma’s vibrant dark blue and orange from earlier in the episode is her best outfit here, to prepare for the inevitable fights she swaps round the dominant colours for an even more vivid orange Emmapeeler with dark blue trim. If I have a complaint, it’s that neither are at their most dangerous – perhaps they simply assume beating imitations will be a breeze. So, for example, Emma’s delivery of “I can assure you, my cheek will be nowhere near his jowl” can’t help but sound secretly indulgent, lacking Cathy’s fiery whiplash the first time, and though their individual swordfights at the climax are neatly choreographed – particularly Emma and Olga at last perfectly in sync – something in me says they’re the wrong way round; Emma gets to be stylish but looks too easy, while Steed’s fight with Ponsonby-Fry sees the two smashing and slashing as if their foils are broadswords or cutlasses, making it more about strength than style. It’s a rare moment where they slip into sexual stereotypes, and also for me Steed seems more dangerous when he looks like he’s not trying, and Emma when beating men at their own game.

Perhaps that’s part of the sense that, in polishing The Charmers, they’ve filed off some of its edge. Other than Ponsonby-Fry’s creeping, it’s mostly so light and frothy that there’s not much sinister, despite a rare outing for Mrs Peel’s first season’s old ‘mysterious’ music in a colour episode and two effective ominous moments, one a ‘hanged man’ in the foreground as Steed and Olga enter Winters’ shop (though the proprietor is much jollier than the creepy old curmudgeon once in his place), and another a brief use of writer Brian Clemens’ favourite ‘undertaker’ motif. It’s certainly not threatening when the diabolical mastermind’s plan suddenly grows to preposterous proportions. He’s revealed as none other than triple-crossing Nutski himself – not merely frustrated, as Keller was in 1964, with being an underfunded station chief and looking to exploit both sides, but suddenly a Bond villain who wants to take over the entire world! I like the idea ‘How would a Russian take over the world? By being just like the British’, and that we’re secretly very unsporting, too, but it’s a bit of a leap, and Michael Gough is both too much and not enough. If you want a bonkers villain who throws around a globe, plots world domination and declaims “this is merely the beginning” like he means it while still being funny, I have the terrible confession that Sean Connery slices much better ham in The Avengers movie (though in general that’s far less successful than The Correct Way To Kill). For what’s been – for 1967 – a relatively small, relatively (relatively) rooted in reality spy spoof, it seems to climax in a failure of nerve and try to puff itself up to something it isn’t. The villains want to be the Avengers, but bigger, and badder, and fail; the producers want to do The Charmers, but bigger, and better, and… Nearly succeed. But not quite. It’s still funny, stylish and a solid piece of Avenging, but it tries just that little bit too hard.


*There’s just one brief scene filmed in a real dingy, wet street as Ivan’s nasty car drives up; establishing it shows us that the other side are a bit cheap, but it hardly adds to the style of the thing.

Labels: Philip Madoc, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 3, The Avengers Season 5

Having been all too distracted by the exciting new world of Doctor Who, I’m not ready in advance for this evening’s episode of The Avengers, which you can find at 7.10 on BBC4 (and 11pm tomorrow). It’s a ghostly episode that may seem like a shade of the first black and white Mrs Peel story, though replacing wistful Second World War iconography with picture-book Britain and spooky dukes suggests a tilt towards American consumption. But with the marvellous Julian Glover among the guest stars, who could complain? Come back after 7 as I unwisely aim to liveblog The Living Dead…

Steed finds a mine of information – Emma goes underground

Sinister music, film of a real mine and obviously unreal pub, chapel and graveyard. It’s that unconvincing grassy knoll again. Still, points straight away for getting right to the dead man who isn’t dead, as a white figure rises from one of the graves to ring the chapel bell! The poor old hermit’s terrified. He’s called Kermit, you know – hmm, there’s a name that’ll never be fashionable again. It was the dead Duke’s ghost, we’re told.

The best bit in it’s in the first couple of minutes, again, but it’s not that bit above, fun as it is. It’s Mrs Peel being told she’s needed by the traffic lights. Gorgeous moment.

Steed in grey suit, white shirt and maroon tie’s all right, but I don’t like Mrs Peel’s murky jacket and trousers. Grey? Tan? Green? Like an old bit of dry mud, anyway. Is the ghostly Duke of Benedict the one from the mine disaster five years ago, or the Elizabethan one on the pub sign? Well, obviously everyone claims it’s the 1690s one, but as he’s also the spit of the one they all knew five years ago, something’s up.

Steed chases Kermit, Emma attends chapel. All she finds is a glamorous woman on the floor. I’ve known chapels like that. Anyway, she’s Mandy McKay, the fabulous Pamela Ann Davy, and she’s quite the best thing in it despite her pigtails. Nice leathers, though – comes over like a kooky Mrs Peel. She’s entranced by ghosts; can sense but hasn’t seen them, and wants to be their friend. Vernon Dobtcheff’s not impressed by her “cant and superstition” – a great clashing pair, representing FOG (Friends of Ghosts) and SMOG (Scientific Measurement of Ghosts). At least one of these is going to be a smokescreen, you mark my words.

Steed gets shot at for poaching by estate manager Masgard, who thinks he’s in season. Charm’s wasted on him, so Steed grabs the bumbling duke instead. And it’s Howard Marion Crawford! Almost everyone’s famous. Masgard is ‘Villainous Julian Glover’ again, tall, icily commanding, always one of my favourite actors. As well as villainy in three other Avengers, he’s in The Empire Strikes Back as one of those rare Imperial admirals who’s up to the job, ohh, For Your Eyes Only, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Doctor Who’s The Crusade and City of Death (a particularly fabulous villain), Faction Paradox… Shame he’s not given enough to do here, save get a fake tan and shout a bit. Lots of fake tan lotion, jumpy about ‘the cellar’… Can you see what it is yet?

Oh, Steed, Steed, why do you think it’s your turn for an even nastier murky grey jacket, and yellow shirt? While Emma’s put on a garish pink top and orange jacket. Maybe for a bet. Fun as Emma and Mandy move in on Steed in unison, though. And oh dear, Mr SMOG’s been stuck straight through with the sword from a crusader’s effigy! What was he detecting, one wonders?

Kermit splashes money about in the pub, Steed gets him to confess he lied about the lack of ghost. Great follow-up with Masgard, though – coolly tells our hero he’s quite right, and he paid off the hermit to stop tourists coming in and ruining the game. Things are perking up, with Diana Rigg in that blue and yellow Emmapeeler catsuit that suits her again to go off investigating with Mandy.

The Landlord says the mine was closed to honour the Duke and experts all lost down there in the disaster. If indeed there was such a thing. And Mrs Peel’s seeing another gravestone slide open. Could there be something underground? Gosh, wonder what? Well, running overground is Mandy, scared by a ghost. “It took Mrs Peel!” She stammers and dithers and drinks a lot of brandy. Shame she’s taken off her leather top, though; tan cardigan underneath. What is it with the colours in this story? Everything looks so drab. I’m sorry, but this is the level of critical analysis I can manage when I’m just watching it and typing straight off rather than sitting back and thinking carefully: ‘Colours pretty. Or not.’ But I’m missing Mandy’s story. “I ran.” “And Mrs Peel?” “Didn’t run.” Then she starts dancing around with excitement at realising she’s seen her first ghost. Bless her, you might think.

It’s half-way, Richard’s in with some lovely things to eat from M&S the food porn shop, and Mrs Peel’s woken up in somewhere that looks distinctly solid for ectoplasm. You’re shocked, aren’t you? It matches the secret passage Steed’s found in the cellar – mechanically operated, and with a bloke in gas mask and make-up coming through. Steed’s nicking his outfit – and just as he was back in a nicer grey suit and gold tie, too. Ah, it’s Masgard, in a cheap and nasty suit, ordering the Duke about. A suspicious vaguely-foreigner ordering a peer of the realm! There must be something frightfully villainous going on. They spot the guy Steed stripped, which is alarming. Oh, let’s see, Kermit’s been shot, forgot to mention it, and Steed’s still not in the overalls, which is a blessing. Maybe it was just an extra who went past pretending to be him. He persuades the ex-miner landlord to take him down, but Mandy blinks her big blue eyes at him to come too. No, Steed! You’re meant to be the caddishly seductive one, not the other way round. Let someone charm you instead and who knows where it will lead? Well, obviously, it’s leading underground, where we’ve just seen Mrs Peel for a moment again as she watches an execution in a huge, tall, empty city. She’s not got a lot on this week, it appears.

Hmm, Mandy’s impatient and suddenly doesn’t believe in subterranean ghosts, while Steed’s stuck a miner’s lamp on his bowler (doesn’t suit it) and Masgard has the lines to the old mine lift cut up top, holding the poor landlord at gunpoint with his minions. But despite Mandy’s dubiousness, Steed finds the underground city, great white walls of windows stretching up and along. Oops, did I say “dubiousness” instead of ‘doubtfulness’? Easy mistake to make, as she’s just about to pull a gun on Steed for investigating. Gasp! No, really, she’s one of their best late-reveal villains, and fab to boot.

Meanwhile, Villainous Julian Glover is explaining all to Mrs Peel. ‘Dead’ Duke Rupert escaped and started the ‘ghost’ scare before he was dragged back below, but it’s a surprise the Avengers don’t recognise what’s going on. Just as in The Town of No Return, some dubious Cold War foreigners are stocking up an underground HQ in preparation to seize the country. This time we get to see the whole underground city, which is pretty impressive, but noticeably deserted (and the whole thing has less verve).

“It’s far too elaborate for a private fantasy.”

Ooh, I recognise that line! It’s one of several innuendos sampled into an Avengers remix done sometime in the early ’90s. Haven’t heard that for ages; wonder if they did a video for it? Steed’s beautifully delivered but linguistically improbable line about “Exit” was in that too, I think.

That line of Steed’s won’t be along for a minute – I just remember it. He’s down far below Mrs Peel’s high cell, about to be shot. Well, I say “about to be”; you could work out which dastardly country supplies the villains by spotting which one has the most astoundingly protracted execution preparation, and with a very nervous sergeant-major in charge, too. Plus they all have very nasty little helmets, like a riding helmet gone wrong. Steed’s last request: “cancel my milk.” Ooh, he’s cool. Good job, as it takes Emma simply ages to save him. She knocks out Masgard, then has an exciting fight with Mandy, and only just makes it on “Fire!” to machine-gun the entire firing squad. That’s a bit graphic (with provocation, I suppose). And now the “Exit! …To depart from, to leave, to escape!” Terrible last “That’s the spirit!” pun that makes them all laugh (fortunately, the Duke and friends were there as burial party, so they can pop up top and entomb Masgard now he’s sealed the back way in himself). I love a terrible pun normally, but that was too bad even for me. And uninspired by Mrs Peel under Steed’s engine for ‘ghosts’ at the tag scene, though Steed actually looks rather nice in a chocolatey brown overcoat. Mmmmm. Chocolate.

Well, that was much as I remembered it – competent but a little flat, borrowing a lot from better episodes and never terribly original or sparkling. Still, Pamela Ann Davy is great, Julian Glover’s always worth the money, and the city looks huge – a mix of false perspective and glass painting, Richard suggests, but either way it’s a spectacular size. Just not wildly exciting.

Now time for my patient beloved to see that fantastic Who trailer thingy…

Phew! Finished typing it all by three minutes past eight – hurrah for long credits! Wonder if it makes any sense?

Labels: Julian Glover, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5

Tonight’s Avengers episode on BBC4 at 11.40 is one of the most memorable; perhaps not quite one of the best, but if you see it, you’ll remember it. Dark and threatening, knowing and colourful, and all enormous fun, this borrows both sides of Batman – the grim avenger of the comics, the caped campery of the TV series – and turns them into something that could only be The Avengers. It looks great, though to say that it doesn’t look entirely realistic… Well, even for this series, here is an incredibly stylised story that repeatedly bursts through the fourth wall.

Steed goes bird watching – Emma does a comic strip..

A couple of weeks ago, I was a little grudging towards the previous Avengers episode, the curiously lacklustre The Bird Who Knew Too Much. If you want an Avengers take on sinister birds, try this one instead; it’s far more creative and distinctive, and though also far more violent, the violence is of such a stylised nature that it’s far less unpleasant than an ordinary-looking man with a gun. I rather enjoy comic art, but even if you’ve never touched a graphic novel, you’ll recognise Batman here; you might also recognise such guest actors as Nigel Green, an impeccably British authority figure in many films of the time, or a young Colin Jeavons, later the oily whip Stamper in House of Cards. What really stands out about it, though, is the way it keeps reminding you that it’s a television programme – did you see the latest Life On Mars on Tuesday (if not, it’s the fifth episode of the second series, repeated next Tuesday on BBC4 just after the sixth one)? It was a brilliant piece of television, and more like The Winged Avenger than pretty much anything else in the forty years in between, from the stupendous opening Camberwick Green scene to the climax as Sam, in a coma within a coma (probably), watches the other officers in danger against the villain on a TV set inside his head. When the grainy shot that’s on Sam’s TV melts into exactly the same shot in ‘reality’, it echoes the most extraordinary sequence in tonight’s Avengers as, about forty minutes in, the episode switches from the relatively normal ‘mysterious killer’ plot to showing exquisitely drawn pieces of comic artwork fading into exactly the same frame of film of what’s happening for ‘real’…

The rest of this is hurriedly being written before 11.40, but really, if the above doesn’t make you want to watch it, what will?

…OK, finished off now (a couple of hours and a tasty dinner later), so back to the start as the episode opens with a sinister, cloaked figure in rather outré silver boots approaching the office block headquarters of a major publishing firm, within which the ruthless owner is giving his son lessons in how to be a cold-hearted grasper. Before long, a faithful employee has been sacked, and the ruthless businessman torn to pieces by the grotesque claws of a bird-masked thing that has climbed up the side of his offices, to music that’s first ominous and then, in the Winged Avenger’s special four-note theme, positively strident. It’s an arresting opening, though perhaps seeing the man in the bird mask at the first murder isn’t the best strategic decision; much of the first half of the story makes valiant efforts to establish red herrings, or rather herons, but though regular viewers know that the early leads are frequently false ones, having already seen what’s doing the killing is a bit of a giveaway. ‘Mysterious’ news of other murdered businessmen in high places! Books of killer birds studied! Sir Lexius Cray and his falconer’s glove! All wasted, I’m afraid, but watch out for the moment about twenty minutes in when Mrs Peel finds out how this enigmatic killer has managed to scale the outer walls (spoiler coming up in a couple of paragraphs) and breaks the news to Steed, who’s been trying to puzzle it out with the aid of lovingly made models covered in flags and trajectory lines:

“Does it ruin your theories?”
“I have two possible alternatives. The murderer inflates a small balloon – he rises up the nearest building, he fires a rocket line across to the penthouse, he drops a trampoline, he bounces on it, in through the window. Possibility number one.”
“And possibility number two?”
“He bribes the doorman.”

I don’t want you to think the first half of the story isn’t enjoyable; it just has a few structural problems that undermine the tension. Still, along the way the scratches left by the huge claws are rather more graphic than you usually find in the series, and (though bloodless) the various deaths are pretty raw. With the Avengers a little ambiguous but definitely in some way working for law and order, such message as there is in the fairly basic what-or-who-dunnit plot is that they have little sympathy with either the killer or his victims. You’ll have spotted the story’s very broad critique of superheroes as scary vigilantes, but our heroes aren’t fans of the people they’re rushing to save either – at one point they work out who the next victim is going to be by looking in the paper for the day’s rapacious hate-figure and pretty much say, ‘He looks like the sort of complete bastard likely to be knocked off’. Meanwhile, the audience is even more in on the joke than usual, beginning with the ‘Avenger’ title and the first victims; they’re publishers who rip writers off and are mauled to death. Just a little bit of a wink, there. One of the first and best ‘fourth wall’ gags goes to Nigel Green, despite not having much to do as Sir Lexius. A mountaineer first seen with Mrs Peel on a rock face in howling wind and snow, looking as convincing as any ’60s studio set, the camera pulls back to show it’s built in his library and he just likes to keep in practice at home. All his acting ‘suspicious’ goes rather to waste, though at least he’s not as suspicious as his distracting manservant Tay-Ling. This is the least convincing ‘Oriental’ character outside of Benny Hill, with no make-up or any other facial resemblance to an actual Chinese actor; his presumed ethnic background is communicated entirely by the music, a set of false teeth and a feeble cod accent, of which the music isn’t too bad. I suppose a genuine Chinese actor wouldn’t have looked all that Tibetan or Nepalese either – it’s implied he’s from somewhere around the Himalayas – but at least they might have looked less like Nosferatu.

Steed and Emma’s look is rather better than Tay-ling’s – even the butler’s jacket-and-t-shirt ensemble is unflattering – and this week Mrs Peel definitely has the best time of it. She gets a couple of catsuits, a mustard-yellow and maroon one that doesn’t quite work but a vivid blue one with pink highlights that’s very striking, as well as a rich green jacket over a black top. Even the pink frock looks good. Steed has a more variable time; quite a nice navy pinstripe, and of course that grey suit with gold tie, but he spends altogether too much of the episode in a pond-slime-brown checked jacket that he really shouldn’t. But back to an outfit that’s important to the plot… In the absence of a giant killer bird, the murders turn out – gasp! – to be being committed by a man in a stylised bird costume, climbing walls with the aid of special magnetic boots, as invented by the eccentric (boy, does he try to be eccentric) Professor Poole. The Professor lives in a huge gothic pile at the top of a rather fabulously vertiginous set of stairs, and has a serious case of bird envy: he tries to do the calls; he tries to fly; he hangs upside-down from the ceiling. Yes, I know, they’ve forgotten that this is Batman ‘Birdman’ for a moment, haven’t they? He’s made the mistake of flogging his boots to someone ever-so-slightly unstable from the offices of Winged Avenger Enterprises, Britain’s premier judge, jury and executioner superhero until Judge Dredd came along ten years later (and he’s got an eagle on his shoulder, you know, so think on). Our heroes have also found copies of Winged Avenger comics at the scenes of the crimes, and noticed some of the splash frames of bodies ‘executed’ by the Avenger bear an uncanny similarity to the real dead businessmen. Could it be a coincidence? Of course not. Check your watch: ‘red herring time’ expired five minutes ago, along with the bloke on the duck shoot.

Ee-urp! The Secret Identity Revealed

The remainder of the story appears to be shaping up as ‘which of the Winged Avenger staff has gone bonkers in the nut’, and that’s not too tricky to spot. There’s Julian, who dresses in the costume and poses for the drawings (note: this is not, in fact, how comic artists work outside of The Avengers), but he’s too dull and has too few lines to be the villain; there’s Stanton the writer, who’s prissy, highly strung and on the edge of losing it – yes, the one with the ‘I’m so obvious it can’t be me’ sign from the Agatha Christie job lot hung round his neck; or there’s Arnie the artist, who seems completely in control but wants to abandon the successful partnership and take over in his own right. Almost as if he needs to decide everything in the world himself, from the story to life and death! Well, all right, the plot’s not a complex one even by Avengers standards, but here’s where the style really starts delivering. Not just the enormously entertaining variations on the word “Ee-urp!” (which like “KKLAK!” must be experienced rather than explained), but the gorgeous panels of artwork that suddenly become the stars of the show. They’re beautifully inked and coloured panels by the extraordinary Frank Bellamy, but it’s the way that among pictures of all the victims we suddenly see Professor Poole on the ’phone to Emma, then see him ‘really’ do just that, then his double-take at the claw coming into shot, which reverts back to artwork again… That’s what has a touch of genius about it. Forty minutes in and it’s suddenly hit creative overdrive with the way that, abandoning even the most meagre pretence of realism, Steed and Stanton start following the story by using impossible artwork as if it was CCTV. It looks absolutely fantastic, even if the drawn Emma going up the enormous stairs has a much bigger bum than Diana Rigg, or even her ‘double’ on location (though to be fair, the Winged Avenger outfit looks a lot more stylish in comic strip form than in fluffy costume).

“I am the eradicator of all evils. I deal out justice and vengeance to those whom the law cannot touch. And to those who stand between me and my purpose!”

Of course, much of this sounds like the job description of the Avengers themselves, and the title is a subtle clue to that line of commentary, but you can spot the difference: Arnie really only gets one scene to speak ‘in character’, and he’s rather less ‘diabolical mastermind’ than just maaaad. He does, however, threaten Mrs Peel in an upside-down fight after he’s finally revealed, and who can save her now? Well, usually she would herself, but those claws are jolly mean, so after a story of implying ‘that grim vigilante chap who hangs about dressed as a Bat; he may not be entirely stable’, and as it’s the mid-1960s, where else could it go for the grand finale than Adam Ward’s camp TV Batman? In dashes Steed, still holding those artwork panels, and uses them to batter Arnie before he can strike out. You’ll never guess what the boards have on them here, either. Oh! It turns out you have. Being hit by “POW!” “SPLAT!” and “BAM!” distract him sufficiently for Mrs Peel to be able to kick his legs away, and he plummets through the window to a music you might also be able to recognise (and it’s amazing the lawyers didn’t object to). All that remains is for Steed to draw a meal at Emma’s flat and convert it into reality, serving it with a “PING!” as she pops the champagne with a giggle. It’s a very satisfying end to a very stylish story, one that started well, fumbled several times as it went along, but teetered on the edge of genius as it veered unsteadily to its climax. Very funny, very silly and very good fun, this is a fitfully brilliant fusion of comic strip art and ’60s pop art. Just watch out for the day when Gordon Brown starts dressing up as a giant buzzard.

Labels: Batman, Comics, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5

The colour Emma Peel episodes of The Avengers are among the most distinctive television ever made; sometimes a bit too silly or too stylised, if anything, but you can’t mistake them for any other series. This one, then, on BBC4 at 7.10 this evening and 11.30 tomorrow night, is unusual for being… Ordinary. Despite the presence of Ron Moody, Kenneth Cope and Anthony Valentine, there’s something a little drab and prosaic about this tale of espionage and birds, made up of an uneven string of set-pieces rather than a strong story. And what do triangles have to do with it?

Steed fancies pigeons – Emma gets the bird

It’s not all bad, of course, but it is curiously disjointed. It’s disappointing in a quite different way to another recently shown episode, The Fear Merchants, which was structurally fine for an Avengers episode but just seemed to have had the fun and colour drained out of it… By contrast, this has several fun moments but simply doesn’t feel like The Avengers at all. Some of the set-piece scenes are very entertaining; some are rather clumsy; but few of them flow together. It’s as if the script was written for some other series and polished up in a hurry, then left with a director with more enthusiasm than ability to make a sequence go with verve. For once, it feels like The Avengers is swamped by the Sixties rather than coasting on top of the period: Steed and Emma are both great fun modelling, for example, but the groovy fashion photographer who takes their pictures feels much more in tune with this episode than they do – stripy shirt, narrow tie and trousers, down-to-earth manner, very Sixties but not very Avengers at all. Still, Steed looks rather fab striking poses (while firing off questions) in his stylish grey suit, as of course does Emma in nothing but a Union Flag. You get the feeling this was more so they could use photos of her like that for publicity than because it was really part of the story, though.

Part of the problem is that The Avengers at this point is extraordinary: extraordinary agents, extraordinary crimes, extraordinary style. Too much here is rather mundane. Someone’s taken photos of a fairly anonymous missile installation; yawn. There are a pair of drably dressed killers who could be dialled out of any rather nasty sadist-you-like directory instead of the book of urbane Avengers masterminds; ugh. They drive a forgettable car, and visit a shabbily ordinary house; sorry, what show am I watching again? Perhaps aware of this, the director tries a bit too hard to create some ‘quirky’ deaths of agents early on, but they just come across as a bit daft. You’ll never see someone drop his gun in so contrived a way as Danvers does while on the run from the pair of killers, and while the director thinks high structures look cool to dash into, you can’t help thinking that they’re not outstandingly practical if you’re trying to take cover from men with guns – why not paint a big target on yourself while you’re at it? I mean, it’s quite well-shot, but so, inevitably, is he. The next agent makes exactly the same mistake, but rather than an observation tower (which is at least partially covered), he dashes into scaffolding. Then plunges into a handy tank of quick-setting concrete. Now, I’m the last person to say that everything in The Avengers needs to follow common sense (it’s hardly common at all), but it does have its own sort of logic, and these events just lack any cohesion at all. Things happen purely because they’re trying to look cool, and, guess what? They don’t, very much.

How do the killers know who Steed and Emma are? How does Steed know who the killers are, and how does he smuggle a homing pigeon among their birds without them noticing? Why doesn’t he take them in while he’s doing it? How do they creep up behind the highly-trained Steed, or take Mrs Peel unawares when she’s deliberately creeping in on them? Why don’t they kill Steed instead of just knocking him out, and why do they decide on a complicated booby trap to kill Mrs Peel when they’re not worried about an ‘alibi’ for killing anyone else – including Mrs Peel, at other points in the episode? Why is one of the killers so astoundingly slow to shoot her at the climax that she can disarm him by coming all the way across a room? Why does Steed, having strung along a dead agent’s girlfriend for most of the episode, coldly spring on her that he’s dead, unprompted, and why does she still trust him afterwards (though she’s called ‘Sam Spade’, she’s distressingly insipid, only there to move along what passes for the plot, and despite the birds this is no match for The Maltese Falcon)?

Fortunately, it seems to find its feet a bit around half-way through. John Wood’s twitchy bird-exhibitor, Twitter, is worth the money, and his smart young assistant (a youthful Anthony Valentine, of Raffles and Robin of Sherwood) has rather a good mixture of casual charm and cold efficiency. The show is stolen, though, by bird-instructor Ron Moody. He’s not as well-used as in Honey For the Prince, but it’s a relief when he comes on to flutter about with his schoolroom of birds, disguised as one of them by the stuffed bird on his mortar board (soon blown into feathers – oh, and his system trains them using individually keyed notes from a set of triangles): at a late stage, it’s suddenly feeling like an Avengers episode. There’s still not a huge amount of wit, despite a flock of ‘bird’ puns, and though there’s something rather unpleasantly gloating about this week’s example of ‘Emma tied to a chair’ – yes, that’s three for three I’ve reviewed from this season so far where that happens – it does build up quite a lot of tension as, with Mrs Peel tied in place and a gun fixed to the door handle, a peril beckons of ‘Will Steed slay Emma?’ He doesn’t, of course, not that there’s any reason for him to come in by the window… There’s another exciting action moment in the same location when Steed leaps away from the mini-grenade in his umbrella, though I wasn’t sorry to see that particular ‘street’ set blown up; The Avengers has a fine line in utterly fake-looking but very stylish streets (check out Escape in Time’s fab ‘Mackidockie Court’), but this one is just grey with a lilac door. If you’re going to design a street scene, why build it in pale pastels? And Emma gets her own back on one of the killers in a rather impressive way, as towards the end of the episode the director’s high-rise obsession finally pays off. Trying to snipe at Ron Moody from a diving board, there’s a great shot of the giggling villain high above the swimming pool with Mrs Peel racing towards him below, and it’s well worth watching for when she kicks him off the edge, adjusts her hair, then dives in after him. Still not quite as stylish as the New Avengers episode featuring birds and an attack at an open-air pool, though…

Though few of the supporting cast are memorably attired (that bird-topped mortar board excepted), at least by this stage they’ve worked out what looks good on the leads – even when it’s nothing but a flag. Emma even gets a yellow dress that suits her, in contrast to the earlier mustard smock. Steed looks frightfully dashing when taking Sam to dinner on a lake, too, or relaxing as he waits for a homing pigeon in lush grey suit (I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it does look rich) and gold tie, with champagne at hand. Oh, yes, champagne… They’re starting to consume rather a lot of it, here. Steed presses several glasses on Emma as a “pick-me-up” at one stage, though rather than being concerned that she rest, he’s just trying to get her ready to go back into action, the swine. Still, when dressed for action she’s now in rather a nice catsuit, a vivid blue number known as an ‘Emmapeeler’ (and which blatantly gives away one scene where they’re driving along against back-projection and the film mix can’t seem to pick up the colour blue, making our heroes rather pink and Emma’s outfit suddenly black). I’m glad some of the pictures are pretty, as the late and entirely unsurprising revelation that a talking parrot is to squawk all the missile details and thereby eliminate the need for smuggled microfilm – a twist on the ‘memory man’, I suppose – is deeply unexciting. Even the closing ‘tag’ scene is curiously lacklustre, as they leave backwards in an antique car in a throwback to the ‘vehicle of the week’ endings of the previous season. It’s a curiously lacklustre episode all told, so it’s a relief that the series hits its stride after this: next time features a far, far more Avengers idea of how to do a story about a bird…

Labels: Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5

It’s almost automatic that I recommend The Avengers each week, but while tonight’s on BBC4 at 11.30 remains head and shoulders above most TV, some Avengers are higher up than others. An ‘automatic’ feel is indeed the downside to this story of hi-tech business efficiency. The first colour episode shown was remarkably silly; this one by contrast is severe and colourless (except for Emma’s hideous mustard smock), but for a story all about fear, curiously un-thrilling. It’s not a patch on next Thursday and Friday’s showing of Escape in Time, where they suddenly turn on the colour and the fun.

Steed puts out a light – Emma takes fright

So what does The Fear Merchants have going for it? Well, there’s an intriguing mystery to start with, as leading businessmen (no women; it’s the 1960s, and only Mrs Peel or murderesses are yet allowed to be tycoons) are literally scared out of their wits by such phobias as speed, naff model spiders and, er, mice, illustrated by an impressive array of big-name and soon-to-be-big-name guest stars including Patrick Cargill, Brian Wilde, Garfield Morgan, Bernard Horsfall and Andrew Keir. The mysterious rash of nervous breakdowns opens up into something strikingly modern, as the villains – look away now if you’re particularly concerned for 40-year-old spoilers, though there are no red herrings to make it a twist – turn out to be the Business Efficiency Bureau, a team of coldly competent management consultants willing to do anything to boost the bottom line.

“Efficiency isn’t a crime.” “That depends how it’s applied.”

Even someone phoning Steed hears “Your call is being answered by a recording device…” in what must have felt a wild sci-fi idea in 1967 (today it feels strange that it’s our hero that puts you on hold rather than the soullessly efficient hi-tech villains). Think yourself into the time, though, and there’s also a whiff of something from a couple of decades earlier: the BEB’s stark, horrible ‘efficiency’ has a hint of Nazism about it – or is Doctor Voss’ German accent an accident? And that, I think, is at the root of the problem I have with this episode. It feels clinical and rather unpleasant, and as a result no-one seems to be having much fun.

Patrick Macnee does his best virtually single-handed to make this entertaining, but he’s struggling against a script and plot devoid of the usual humour, and against design and direction with little of the usual diverting style. It’s rarely witty, playful or surreal, and though there are several eccentrics, they’re mainly among the ruthless business fraternity, making them rather difficult to warm to. It’s still not without the odd spark, with Steed enjoying himself in the role of a jumped-up bureaucrat from the very 1960s-central-planning-corporatist-sounding ‘Central Productivity Council’ (more points for his cover from the ‘Monopolies Commission’, putting Mr Raven on the spot for claiming that eliminating all his competitors would be good for the customer) while investigating the way the heads of our leading ceramics firms are suddenly breaking out into the screaming heebie-jeebies. But, well, ‘our leading ceramics firms’ doesn’t set your pulse racing, does it, and though it’s not his most gorgeous day for outfits, you realise something’s wrong with the design when he’s wearing, say, a charcoal pinstripe and grey tie, or a chocolate-brown overcoat, and you start thinking, ‘Oh, that looks nice’. Neither charcoal pinstripe nor brown are looks that I usually find among his most appealing, but virtually everything else looks simply horrid. The villains, for example, wear dark glasses, black suits, white shirts and ties or ‘clinical’ white coats, surrounded by white walls, yet don’t look remotely as bold as the brilliant stylings of the previous black and white season did – more that they simply forgot to add enough colour to the picture. And as for ‘eccentric tycoon’ Jeremy Raven’s beige cardigan in his beige office… Why go to the bother of switching to colour and obviously spending so much money on sets if they’re so drab they might as well be shot in sepia?

‘What of Diana Rigg,’ you may well ask? She has a few nice bantering scenes with Steed, some of them with rather contrived drilling and chiselling to show off her artistic side, and the closing gag where she affects to have run out of champagne and really frightens Steed is a treat. And there are two sets of chocolates. Sadly, she doesn’t get the chance to do the same sort of amusing play-acting he does here, merely – inevitably – ending up tied to another chair and threatened with just plain nasty torture. Her wardrobe is something of a torment, too, but not for want of trying. Early on, she’s seen in that simply horrible mustard-coloured dress with the most unflattering cut and white highlights, with the walls in the hospital she’s visiting using exactly the same colour scheme, making it surely one of the ugliest Avengers scenes ever committed to film. Then she turns up in a vivid purple ‘Emmapeeler’ catsuit which improves her look no end, before more unflattering dresses strike, in white with an ill-considered square chest or very pale lilac that just looks washed out. At the climax, of course, she’s been sewn into an outrageous black catsuit showing the maximum amount of flesh, with metal buckles and a distinct lack of practicality. Unused to filming in colour, were they just slinging every outfit they could think of on Mrs Peel and hoping one of them would work? ‘That looks good. That looks dull. That looks ridiculous but sexy. That looks hideous, and what were they thinking?’

I don’t have a problem with the determinist caricature of ‘everyone can be driven instantly mad by their convenient phobia’ – picking up something vaguely ‘real’ and exaggerating it out of all proportion is something that suits The Avengers. It’s just that six leading industrialists become gibbering wrecks and one flings himself through a window as a result, and we get to see it happen to most of them in sadistic detail, to piercing music. This gloating nastiness goes on and on for about half the episode, and really doesn’t appeal. Neither is it directed with enough oomph to make it tense or scary for the viewer, even when it comes to an elaborately staged but dreary fight involving lots of dirt and a bulldozer, and in which Steed somehow fools his assailant by getting him to fall for exactly the same feint he used to get Steed into it (though it seems to go on for ever, someone must have liked it. It turns up again in a later story that’s the nearest the series came to ‘So It’s Come To This, An Avengers Clips Show’). Were the colour cameras so much bigger and clumsier that they’d just not learnt how to shoot exciting fights with them yet, or was it down to the director or film editor not having the knack? Either way, so much of this episode drags that for once you get the feeling it would have been better at ten or even twenty minutes shorter.

Still, there are some interesting details with the Business Efficiency Bureau. Identifying the fatal weaknesses in their clients’ competitors with the help of reams of probing questions should put you off all those questionnaires constantly thrust in front of us in modern life, while their offices have sinister automatic doors and white walls only livened by sparsely typed inspirational phrases such as ‘Observation is the root of decision’ or ‘Analysis reveals motivation’. They’re not quite evil enough to have posters of dolphins, though. Perhaps my own fear is of hospitals, as I find the ‘operating theatre’ chic of their HQ distinctly off-putting, and the revelation that the harsh lighting hides someone who’s afraid of the dark doesn’t entirely convince me, as Steed appears to deduce it because the man wears dark glasses. Eh? Mrs Peel, it must be said, does stand up well to her lie-detector-aided interrogation, revealed as so extremely well-adjusted that for their purposes she’s without fear, having learned to live with them. To modern viewers, BEB head Mr Pemberton’s gloating peroration may be especially chilling:

“Our territory is the mind. Our merchandise is fear. The dark balloon we try to hide…”

Gosh! So they’re doing PR for the Tories, then? In the end, it’s not without its moments, but with neither the tension of the bolder black and white episodes nor the vivacious fun you associate with the switch to colour, this feels like a definite wrong turning. That it’s still not at all bad is a testament to the series’ quality, but it’s a relief that most of the episodes that follow are far superior – and next week’s is one of the very best…

Labels: Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5