Saturday, May 12, 2012
The Avengers – The Morning After
No, this isn’t another post about the Coalition. It’s a strange and sinister 1969 tale of waking up in an English town to find it deserted… But why? With a script full of tension, twists and betrayal, eerie direction, terrific music and impressive guest-star turns from Peter Barkworth, Joss Ackland and Brian Blessed, The Morning After is one of The Avengers’ strongest and most gripping episodes. Steed is landed with an unexpected (and unwilling) ally and faces unexpected (and all too unflinching) enemies in this stylish mid-point between Seven Days To Noon and Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs…
First broadcast in the Midlands 43 years ago last night (oh, all right, they showed it in London several months earlier, but it’s difficult to celebrate proper Avengers anniversaries when ITV regions all used to do their own thing), you can now find The Morning After on Disc 6 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 35 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy. You may be surprised, though, at how little Tara King appears in this episode from her season of the show; with Series 6 half as long again as any of the others, both Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee had to have a couple of ‘holiday’ episodes each. I’m a huge admirer of Tara, as I’ve gone into before in The Avengers – Game and My Wildest Dream, but Steed’s new best enemy in The Morning After more than makes up for her absence, a help and hindrance who’s surely the best of the one-off Avengers.
Having written about Seven Days To Noon a week ago, it’s appropriate to recognise the debt this story owes to that film while still being very much its own show. For me, of all the closest variations on that central idea (the original, this, Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The New Avengers – Sleeper) this is arguably the best, with a clear identity of its own and told with more economy, great visual style and an outstanding musical score. It turns the film’s central threat on its head, an idea which goes on to be swallowed whole by Invasion of the Dinosaurs; it’s probably a coincidence, but a satisfying one, that it deploys a minor young actor from the film, Joss Ackland, as a major guest star two decades later; and it may well be deliberate that it hires stock film shot for Seven Days To Noon to depict its own evacuation scenes, though intriguingly often off-cuts from the film rather than those used in the final version, such as a different edit of men hammering up an evacuation sign (Tat Wood put me onto this in his Doctor Who guidebook About Time 3, though take its thumbnail plot summary of this with a pinch and, for Homicide and Old Lace, a lorryload of salt). Its focus, punch and production values are way ahead of the Doctor Who, although that shares with Seven Days To Noon a greater political depth, while I’ve said before that Sleeper, while mostly enjoyable and looking impressive, is by far the least interesting of these, having no twists, nothing to say and, for all its attempt at ‘urban realism’, pulling almost all its punches (it even takes the near-comic relief gas from this episode and makes it the main plot). True, the others have over The Morning After the ambition and unsettling impact of a deserted London, though this story’s less iconic ‘everytown’ has its own claustrophobic effect. On which note…
The Avengers doesn’t do ‘continuity’ – but could a man in a clown mask raiding the Ministry of Technology and Scientific Innovation suggest an old enemy? No. It’s just yet another of those sort of openings, here at least done more briskly and impishly than in previous episodes, then jumping straight to a busy, noisy town somewhere in England, where Steed and Tara lie in wait for him (no spending half the episode working out how he got in or what he’s stolen). I told you this started with a fast-moving Bond mini-adventure, didn’t I? And already, it’s unsettling; Steed never carries a gun. But against quadruple agent Jimmy Merlin, an adversary as playful, as charming and as dangerous as he is, Steed jarringly arms himself. Our heroes get the jump on Merlin; he jumps back to fling down the new sleeping gas capsule he’s stolen; but Steed’s locked the door, so as the little rendezvous fills with gas, all three go down. There’s a thrilling freeze-frame for the title as the phone starts to ring and suddenly music crashes in, fast, bombastic and threatening.
The most gripping part of the story for me is on the morning after; Steed wakes first, the busy town suddenly silent save for a dog howling miserably. Only emphasising the silence, eerie music drifts into the scene, like the wind. Steed tries the phone – no connection. The same with the red callbox outside – from where he can see a car crashed into bins and abandoned. All around, things smashed and left, and not a soul. With Tara still deeply unconscious, Steed testily wakes a protesting Merlin and drags him down to the yellow Rolls, eager to hand him over now he’s captured. I love the banter between the two fabulous characters as everything the camera shows us makes us – and them – more worried, right from Steed cheerily telling Merlin to enjoy the view while he can: usually, in The Avengers, glorious countryside; here, the garage door. And Steed has to enjoy the drive while he can, too, as soon he runs into an empty truck used as a roadblock and has no choice but to handcuff the two of them together and start walking…
It helps enormously that all of this is out on location, on a sunny day, so you can see right down long, narrow, slightly claustrophobic streets. This was The Avengers’ most ambitious location shoot to date (later beaten in that, I think, by Sleeper), and for this eerie ‘everytown’ director John Hough carefully slices together non-contiguous parts of Watford, Old Hatfield and, particularly, St Albans, most blatantly when the streets suddenly give way to the Cathedral, zooming on the little pram and dollies left behind in its grounds. That always gives me a bit of a turn, as I remember the place vaguely from a single childhood visit with my Nana and Grandad (who lived in the other end of Watford), though the cathedral also offers some mirth if you watch carefully; as Steed and Merlin walk and talk, you keep seeing it poking up in the background in different shots, but never in the same place. You could say that it shows they’re going round in circles; you might just shrug that they’re cutting together lots of different locations; but it keeps looking like the cathedral is tiptoeing from side to side, stalking them.
Brian Clemens’ script is merciless, telling you nothing more of what’s going on than Steed and Merlin can see, and even as Act One draws to a close with eerie exploration shifting to sudden threat, there are no answers – just Merlin starting to ask some of the same questions as the audience. Where has everybody gone? And why? Was it an emergency? A mass kidnapping? War, plague, radiation…? Your mind races through all of Terry Nation’s favourite plot devices, not least because he’s script editor here (is this why he and Clemens fell out over who had the idea for Survivors? All so much more absorbing than Sleeper, which tells you what’s going in the pre-titles sequence). Even the bank’s deserted, notes fluttering everywhere, and no-one comes running when Steed sounds the alarm. Or do they? Now there’s a black, silent VW camper van gliding through the streets – robots? Remote control? Hypnotism? Then, just as Merlin and Steed explode into action, there’s that shockingly loud, thundering fanfare again, not a march but a dash, soldiers running through the streets to shoot a little man down as a “LOOTER!” And if you think the capital-lettered sign they toss onto him is shouting, the man giving the order to fire (camera appropriately zooming on his mouth in close-up) is Sergeant Brian Blessed!
Peter Barkworth, Merlin the spy before John le Carré, is a simply sublime guest star and, while I’d put My Wildest Dream just a touch ahead in the terrific episode stakes, Merlin makes a far better anti-Steed than the villain there. Charming and dangerous, tricky and devious, even more playful – sometimes gleeful – but far more cowardly than our hero, he doesn’t look as flamboyant (a straighter hat, a more buttoned-up look, a dark overcoat, as if he wants to stay unnoticed in the shadows) but has his own showiness, not least his conjuror’s-trick habit of producing whatever he needs from his sleeve. It’s a marvellous performance, easily the best and biggest of Barkworth’s four Avengers roles (one lost, a frosty businessperson in The Medicine Men, a well-mannered warrior in The Correct Way To Kill), dragged along, always complaining, never trustworthy – until Steed catches him out and leads him into the jaws of death. They make a very entertaining team. Look out for a particularly priceless exchange where each gives the other three reasons for investigating, or for running away, and just why Steed eventually uncuffs him…
With Linda Thorson recharging her own batteries for the week, Tara gets a couple of good moments – praised at the start, an impressive knockout punch later – but is largely asleep with a teddy (not Chilcott) and in a red and white trouser suit, which isn’t bad but makes her seem a bit young. For anyone missing an Avengers woman for a week, half-way through we meet Jenny Firston, played by Penelope Horner. She’s not bad, if a little flat, and after a rather undignified entrance has little to do save act as the exposition and then hide; if you’ve seen Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs, you may just expect to find a plucky female journalist sneaking in for the scoop, and she even has a man called Yates teamed with her who isn’t much help. Her exposition is rather stylishly by television, though it slightly clumsily underlines that they’ve not given the ‘everytown’ a name: “This town has become a ghost area” seems very laboured, when anyone would naturally say ‘This has become a ghost town’.
But why has this ghost town been evacuated, and the fifty square miles surrounding it? Spoilers follow shortly…
Late ’60s Avengers episodes look gorgeous on DVD, shot on film and in colour, and with the current full-season (or complete series) box sets they’ve not only been cleaned up beautifully but have been given a few extra features – though, while the look of the episodes mostly beats Doctor Who hands down, the value added material is still some way behind. While almost every Doctor Who DVD release has a full set of commentaries, they’re rare for The Avengers, so it’s cheering that on this (one of my favourites) director John Hough is there to give his recollections, ably questioned by Jaz Wiseman. Hough’s direction is particularly impressive here; not quite as exuberantly inventive as Robert Fuest but still with a great deal of style, equally able in building atmosphere for the unsettlingly empty streets and then in giving it lots of pace and energy as the soldiers crash into the story.
John Hough has some intriguing insights into this story in particular – how to match Peter against Patrick as the two leads so that both could let their own charisma flow and battle each other’s characters without overshadowing each other, or how though it took more hard work than usual to create so much of the empty town, it was only one step up from the way The Avengers always eschewed extras to create its own world – but, with few commentaries about for the series, it’s mostly more of an extended interview than a bantering, story-led traditional commentary. It ranges over his four episodes as full director (he returned for one especially good New Avengers) and how he started off as second unit director, having got that post on The Avengers following The Saint after he and Ray Austin managed to swap jobs. He explains how the series doing it differently led to such high quality, with good words to say about the likes of Linda Thorson, Patrick Macnee, and most of all producers Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. Though not about the Movie. And, like me, he admired Patrick Macnee’s special velvet collars, though unlike me he went to Patrick’s tailor and got one (it looks like you can see it in the Photo Gallery for Super Secret Cypher Snatch)!
So, now, are you ready for the spoilers on what was going on?
Much of The Avengers takes place in a highly stylised fantasy of Britain, sometimes called ‘AvengerLand’, with highly stylised characters within it. Here, the threat is more grim and real-world than usual, though it’s still informed by Avengers themes and, in the extensive location shooting, brings ‘AvengerLand’ further than it’s ever been before in transforming the real world. Rather than outlandish sets, rolling countryside or picturesque villages called Little Storping-in-the-Swuff, this ambitiously turns a whole town inside-out and into Avengers country, closer to most viewers’ experiences but more unsettlingly different at the same time. And it’s unsettlingly different for Steed, too, as rather than be sent in to investigate the mystery, here he simply wakes up in the midst of it and becomes a hunted fugitive, the full force of the authorities seemingly out to kill him, a reversal that gives him new oomph.
Army nuclear expert Brigadier Hansing has detected an atomic bomb secreted by one of the unfriendly governments who backed the old Eastern Hemisphere Trade Commission in town, and enforces martial law while he’s staying in the evacuated area to dismantle the bomb. Or is he? The conspiracy goes right to the top, with Joss Ackland as Hansing moving deftly from sternly efficient, to snarling brutal orders, to just a few notches below his full Hollywood-villain-boggler of later years. Hansing’s due to be pensioned off in favour of a computer and, as with so many Avengers villains motived by either amity or animosity towards technology, turns. His good old British nuclear shock troop platoons are lying drugged in their trucks while merciless mercenaries led by the excellent Donald Douglas and the even more outstanding Brian Blessed shoot anyone on the streets and Hansing supervises not the dismantling of an imaginary bomb but the installation of a real one, ready to blackmail the government with no time for evacuation once the town’s population returns (though while he’s in it for money and pride, it’s never made entirely clear just what his “Eastern Hemisphere” backers are aiming for. It might have been interesting to hear they intended to double-cross him in turn, and blow up the bomb anyway).
I should mention the final moment designed to defuse the tension, the traditional light-hearted ‘tag scene’; in Steed’s flat, it’s immediately rather jarring, as it’s the only scene since the pre-titles where we’ve not been trapped in that unfamiliar town. Unusually, there is a link to the main plot – something else Merlin’s stolen – but it’s not a particularly good gag and, for once, not particularly well done (dialogue or lighting). And though Tara’s back, in rather a shimmery frock, Steed’s tux is a bit much. If it ends on a slight disappointment, though, The Morning After’s still been one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes, and showing great confidence in doing something so different in tone so late in the series. That confidence even shows through in what might be the best moment of that tag scene: Steed, enjoying the TV, hears one hand clapping and sighs, “Sock it to me,” the catchphrase of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was right then causing problems for the series when scheduled against it on US TV. It was very interesting to show even Steed fondly watching their opposition… But it was also stupid. Though I think it was more interesting than stupid…
First broadcast in the Midlands 43 years ago last night (oh, all right, they showed it in London several months earlier, but it’s difficult to celebrate proper Avengers anniversaries when ITV regions all used to do their own thing), you can now find The Morning After on Disc 6 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 35 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy. You may be surprised, though, at how little Tara King appears in this episode from her season of the show; with Series 6 half as long again as any of the others, both Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee had to have a couple of ‘holiday’ episodes each. I’m a huge admirer of Tara, as I’ve gone into before in The Avengers – Game and My Wildest Dream, but Steed’s new best enemy in The Morning After more than makes up for her absence, a help and hindrance who’s surely the best of the one-off Avengers.
Having written about Seven Days To Noon a week ago, it’s appropriate to recognise the debt this story owes to that film while still being very much its own show. For me, of all the closest variations on that central idea (the original, this, Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs and The New Avengers – Sleeper) this is arguably the best, with a clear identity of its own and told with more economy, great visual style and an outstanding musical score. It turns the film’s central threat on its head, an idea which goes on to be swallowed whole by Invasion of the Dinosaurs; it’s probably a coincidence, but a satisfying one, that it deploys a minor young actor from the film, Joss Ackland, as a major guest star two decades later; and it may well be deliberate that it hires stock film shot for Seven Days To Noon to depict its own evacuation scenes, though intriguingly often off-cuts from the film rather than those used in the final version, such as a different edit of men hammering up an evacuation sign (Tat Wood put me onto this in his Doctor Who guidebook About Time 3, though take its thumbnail plot summary of this with a pinch and, for Homicide and Old Lace, a lorryload of salt). Its focus, punch and production values are way ahead of the Doctor Who, although that shares with Seven Days To Noon a greater political depth, while I’ve said before that Sleeper, while mostly enjoyable and looking impressive, is by far the least interesting of these, having no twists, nothing to say and, for all its attempt at ‘urban realism’, pulling almost all its punches (it even takes the near-comic relief gas from this episode and makes it the main plot). True, the others have over The Morning After the ambition and unsettling impact of a deserted London, though this story’s less iconic ‘everytown’ has its own claustrophobic effect. On which note…
That Golden Moment
“Do you think the world’s ended, and they forgot to tell us?”The Avengers doesn’t do multi-part stories with cliffhangers – except that, made for an hour ITV slot in the ’60s, each fifty-minute Avengers episode usually splits into four ‘Acts’, each designed to come to a climax, then fade to black for the ad break. And the first Act of The Morning After is an outstanding example of the style, eighteen minutes opening with an exciting James Bond-style mini-adventure preview, then plunging into Steed’s forced exploration of a mystery in which he’s on his own – no briefing, no Mother to send him in, and no Tara to watch his back. And it’s as gripping for the audience as it is disturbing for our hero, building steadily until a sudden burst of action and the first death, inevitably, to keep you breathless through the adverts that aren’t there.
The Avengers doesn’t do ‘continuity’ – but could a man in a clown mask raiding the Ministry of Technology and Scientific Innovation suggest an old enemy? No. It’s just yet another of those sort of openings, here at least done more briskly and impishly than in previous episodes, then jumping straight to a busy, noisy town somewhere in England, where Steed and Tara lie in wait for him (no spending half the episode working out how he got in or what he’s stolen). I told you this started with a fast-moving Bond mini-adventure, didn’t I? And already, it’s unsettling; Steed never carries a gun. But against quadruple agent Jimmy Merlin, an adversary as playful, as charming and as dangerous as he is, Steed jarringly arms himself. Our heroes get the jump on Merlin; he jumps back to fling down the new sleeping gas capsule he’s stolen; but Steed’s locked the door, so as the little rendezvous fills with gas, all three go down. There’s a thrilling freeze-frame for the title as the phone starts to ring and suddenly music crashes in, fast, bombastic and threatening.
The most gripping part of the story for me is on the morning after; Steed wakes first, the busy town suddenly silent save for a dog howling miserably. Only emphasising the silence, eerie music drifts into the scene, like the wind. Steed tries the phone – no connection. The same with the red callbox outside – from where he can see a car crashed into bins and abandoned. All around, things smashed and left, and not a soul. With Tara still deeply unconscious, Steed testily wakes a protesting Merlin and drags him down to the yellow Rolls, eager to hand him over now he’s captured. I love the banter between the two fabulous characters as everything the camera shows us makes us – and them – more worried, right from Steed cheerily telling Merlin to enjoy the view while he can: usually, in The Avengers, glorious countryside; here, the garage door. And Steed has to enjoy the drive while he can, too, as soon he runs into an empty truck used as a roadblock and has no choice but to handcuff the two of them together and start walking…
“Any chance of making a deal?”And of course, in this strange setting, suddenly neither can get what they want. It’s a terrific sequence with superb cinematography as the two stroll through the deserted town, nothing but keening music to keep them company. And it’s a brilliant idea to use all the humour to build tension, every line played like a gag between them but juxtaposed with the emptiness yawning around them: the policeman’s helmet on the ground and in the foreground as we see them, tiny and lost, far beyond it; the high, old-fashioned buildings looming above them; the sack of spilled coal, the milk bottles, surely to Steed most disturbingly the abandoned pub with drinks left unfinished. And while both actors keep their tone light, their faces are at odds with their voices. Patrick Macnee’s Steed is determined but disturbed, keenly observing; Peter Barkworth’s Merlin jittery and increasingly desperate. Watch Steed knowing that “It’s lonely up there” merely reflects ‘here’; watch Merlin’s little face fall as Steed keeps raising and dashing his hopes.
“I shouldn’t have thought so, but keep talking.”
“Twenty thousand? In a Swiss bank? No names, no strings?”
“Pounds?”
“Yes!”
“Very sorry, old chap. Only deal in guineas.”
“Well, I could throw in a yacht.”
“I’ve had one.”
“My private plane?”
“It’s lonely up there.”
“String of Arab ponies?”
“Prefer palominos.”
“Well, how about… A villa? France?”
“Whereabouts?”
“St Tropez.”
“Prefer Provence.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Steed – isn’t there anything you want?”
“Yes. There’s one thing I want very much. You – behind bars.”
It helps enormously that all of this is out on location, on a sunny day, so you can see right down long, narrow, slightly claustrophobic streets. This was The Avengers’ most ambitious location shoot to date (later beaten in that, I think, by Sleeper), and for this eerie ‘everytown’ director John Hough carefully slices together non-contiguous parts of Watford, Old Hatfield and, particularly, St Albans, most blatantly when the streets suddenly give way to the Cathedral, zooming on the little pram and dollies left behind in its grounds. That always gives me a bit of a turn, as I remember the place vaguely from a single childhood visit with my Nana and Grandad (who lived in the other end of Watford), though the cathedral also offers some mirth if you watch carefully; as Steed and Merlin walk and talk, you keep seeing it poking up in the background in different shots, but never in the same place. You could say that it shows they’re going round in circles; you might just shrug that they’re cutting together lots of different locations; but it keeps looking like the cathedral is tiptoeing from side to side, stalking them.
Brian Clemens’ script is merciless, telling you nothing more of what’s going on than Steed and Merlin can see, and even as Act One draws to a close with eerie exploration shifting to sudden threat, there are no answers – just Merlin starting to ask some of the same questions as the audience. Where has everybody gone? And why? Was it an emergency? A mass kidnapping? War, plague, radiation…? Your mind races through all of Terry Nation’s favourite plot devices, not least because he’s script editor here (is this why he and Clemens fell out over who had the idea for Survivors? All so much more absorbing than Sleeper, which tells you what’s going in the pre-titles sequence). Even the bank’s deserted, notes fluttering everywhere, and no-one comes running when Steed sounds the alarm. Or do they? Now there’s a black, silent VW camper van gliding through the streets – robots? Remote control? Hypnotism? Then, just as Merlin and Steed explode into action, there’s that shockingly loud, thundering fanfare again, not a march but a dash, soldiers running through the streets to shoot a little man down as a “LOOTER!” And if you think the capital-lettered sign they toss onto him is shouting, the man giving the order to fire (camera appropriately zooming on his mouth in close-up) is Sergeant Brian Blessed!
Steed and Merlin
“Your friend wasn’t very brave.”The Morning After is a great episode for Steed, as he carries most of it and almost has to carry unwilling burden Merlin – a much more sober than usual performance, though still with plenty of Patrick Macnee’s charm. Against the usual flamboyant parade of outfits, this time he’s in the same suit from the teaser right up until the last couple of minutes; this isn’t London, and there’s no friendly flat to pop back to for a change of clothes and a glass of champagne. Fortunately, the brown with that trademark velvet collar suits him, and he stays immaculate throughout, of course (even if it seems strangely improbable that, confronting Merlin at the start, he has a touch of uncharacteristic five o’clock shadow, but is as beautifully clean-shaven as always on waking a day later).
“He’s a big disappointment to me.”
Peter Barkworth, Merlin the spy before John le Carré, is a simply sublime guest star and, while I’d put My Wildest Dream just a touch ahead in the terrific episode stakes, Merlin makes a far better anti-Steed than the villain there. Charming and dangerous, tricky and devious, even more playful – sometimes gleeful – but far more cowardly than our hero, he doesn’t look as flamboyant (a straighter hat, a more buttoned-up look, a dark overcoat, as if he wants to stay unnoticed in the shadows) but has his own showiness, not least his conjuror’s-trick habit of producing whatever he needs from his sleeve. It’s a marvellous performance, easily the best and biggest of Barkworth’s four Avengers roles (one lost, a frosty businessperson in The Medicine Men, a well-mannered warrior in The Correct Way To Kill), dragged along, always complaining, never trustworthy – until Steed catches him out and leads him into the jaws of death. They make a very entertaining team. Look out for a particularly priceless exchange where each gives the other three reasons for investigating, or for running away, and just why Steed eventually uncuffs him…
“I’m too young to die!”Not a new man on the team but so fresh he sounds like it, composer Laurie Johnson adds to the feel of ‘The Avengers, but suddenly harder-edged’ with one of his very best original scores. After providing all the music for the Diana Rigg episodes, often reusing and reworking themes into old friends, Laurie Johnson had taken some time off while working on a musical, handing over several of the Tara King scores to Howard Blake. And that clearly recharged his batteries, as the soundtrack here is not just one of his best but strikingly different to his usual.
“You’re over 21.”
“If I were eighty, I’d still feel the same!”
With Linda Thorson recharging her own batteries for the week, Tara gets a couple of good moments – praised at the start, an impressive knockout punch later – but is largely asleep with a teddy (not Chilcott) and in a red and white trouser suit, which isn’t bad but makes her seem a bit young. For anyone missing an Avengers woman for a week, half-way through we meet Jenny Firston, played by Penelope Horner. She’s not bad, if a little flat, and after a rather undignified entrance has little to do save act as the exposition and then hide; if you’ve seen Doctor Who – Invasion of the Dinosaurs, you may just expect to find a plucky female journalist sneaking in for the scoop, and she even has a man called Yates teamed with her who isn’t much help. Her exposition is rather stylishly by television, though it slightly clumsily underlines that they’ve not given the ‘everytown’ a name: “This town has become a ghost area” seems very laboured, when anyone would naturally say ‘This has become a ghost town’.
But why has this ghost town been evacuated, and the fifty square miles surrounding it? Spoilers follow shortly…
Commentary and Conspiracy (Or – Spoilers – What’s It All About, Ackland?)
Late ’60s Avengers episodes look gorgeous on DVD, shot on film and in colour, and with the current full-season (or complete series) box sets they’ve not only been cleaned up beautifully but have been given a few extra features – though, while the look of the episodes mostly beats Doctor Who hands down, the value added material is still some way behind. While almost every Doctor Who DVD release has a full set of commentaries, they’re rare for The Avengers, so it’s cheering that on this (one of my favourites) director John Hough is there to give his recollections, ably questioned by Jaz Wiseman. Hough’s direction is particularly impressive here; not quite as exuberantly inventive as Robert Fuest but still with a great deal of style, equally able in building atmosphere for the unsettlingly empty streets and then in giving it lots of pace and energy as the soldiers crash into the story.
John Hough has some intriguing insights into this story in particular – how to match Peter against Patrick as the two leads so that both could let their own charisma flow and battle each other’s characters without overshadowing each other, or how though it took more hard work than usual to create so much of the empty town, it was only one step up from the way The Avengers always eschewed extras to create its own world – but, with few commentaries about for the series, it’s mostly more of an extended interview than a bantering, story-led traditional commentary. It ranges over his four episodes as full director (he returned for one especially good New Avengers) and how he started off as second unit director, having got that post on The Avengers following The Saint after he and Ray Austin managed to swap jobs. He explains how the series doing it differently led to such high quality, with good words to say about the likes of Linda Thorson, Patrick Macnee, and most of all producers Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens. Though not about the Movie. And, like me, he admired Patrick Macnee’s special velvet collars, though unlike me he went to Patrick’s tailor and got one (it looks like you can see it in the Photo Gallery for Super Secret Cypher Snatch)!
So, now, are you ready for the spoilers on what was going on?
Much of The Avengers takes place in a highly stylised fantasy of Britain, sometimes called ‘AvengerLand’, with highly stylised characters within it. Here, the threat is more grim and real-world than usual, though it’s still informed by Avengers themes and, in the extensive location shooting, brings ‘AvengerLand’ further than it’s ever been before in transforming the real world. Rather than outlandish sets, rolling countryside or picturesque villages called Little Storping-in-the-Swuff, this ambitiously turns a whole town inside-out and into Avengers country, closer to most viewers’ experiences but more unsettlingly different at the same time. And it’s unsettlingly different for Steed, too, as rather than be sent in to investigate the mystery, here he simply wakes up in the midst of it and becomes a hunted fugitive, the full force of the authorities seemingly out to kill him, a reversal that gives him new oomph.
Army nuclear expert Brigadier Hansing has detected an atomic bomb secreted by one of the unfriendly governments who backed the old Eastern Hemisphere Trade Commission in town, and enforces martial law while he’s staying in the evacuated area to dismantle the bomb. Or is he? The conspiracy goes right to the top, with Joss Ackland as Hansing moving deftly from sternly efficient, to snarling brutal orders, to just a few notches below his full Hollywood-villain-boggler of later years. Hansing’s due to be pensioned off in favour of a computer and, as with so many Avengers villains motived by either amity or animosity towards technology, turns. His good old British nuclear shock troop platoons are lying drugged in their trucks while merciless mercenaries led by the excellent Donald Douglas and the even more outstanding Brian Blessed shoot anyone on the streets and Hansing supervises not the dismantling of an imaginary bomb but the installation of a real one, ready to blackmail the government with no time for evacuation once the town’s population returns (though while he’s in it for money and pride, it’s never made entirely clear just what his “Eastern Hemisphere” backers are aiming for. It might have been interesting to hear they intended to double-cross him in turn, and blow up the bomb anyway).
“You have been found guilty of looting!”A shoot-to-kill policy is, of course, just not British – except when it is – and you can see the effect it has on Steed; not concerned for himself, but neatly underplayed doubt that they’re genuine and fear that they might be. It’s a conspiracy thriller quite unlike any other Avengers, full of twists and betrayal, and as well as cleverly subverting the motivations of Seven Days To Noon, when we see soldiers running along house-to-house searches they become far more sinister, the film’s subtext become the text. And, in villainous ’tache, it’s Brian Blessed who barks their orders, on the cusp of serious stardom, already known for Z Cars, still in a working class role, some great asides as he tells Steed he’s not a regular (he gets the drink; Steed doesn’t; he doesn’t drink like Steed does, though), but in an early example of SHOUTING!
I should mention the final moment designed to defuse the tension, the traditional light-hearted ‘tag scene’; in Steed’s flat, it’s immediately rather jarring, as it’s the only scene since the pre-titles where we’ve not been trapped in that unfamiliar town. Unusually, there is a link to the main plot – something else Merlin’s stolen – but it’s not a particularly good gag and, for once, not particularly well done (dialogue or lighting). And though Tara’s back, in rather a shimmery frock, Steed’s tux is a bit much. If it ends on a slight disappointment, though, The Morning After’s still been one of The Avengers’ strongest episodes, and showing great confidence in doing something so different in tone so late in the series. That confidence even shows through in what might be the best moment of that tag scene: Steed, enjoying the TV, hears one hand clapping and sighs, “Sock it to me,” the catchphrase of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was right then causing problems for the series when scheduled against it on US TV. It was very interesting to show even Steed fondly watching their opposition… But it was also stupid. Though I think it was more interesting than stupid…
Labels: Brian Blessed, DVD, Film, Jon Pertwee, Music, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers
Monday, April 30, 2012
The Avengers – My Wildest Dream
Someone in the office you want to kill? Aggresso-therapist Dr Jaeger offers a harmless way to relieve your frustrations. What could possibly go wrong? The Avengers – My Wildest Dream gives you The Manchurian Capitalist, a disorientating, violent thriller of board members killing each other in dreams, all witnessed by Steed and Tara. Guest stars include Peter Vaughan, Edward Fox, John Savident and the mighty Philip Madoc, who sadly died last month, as did stylish director Robert Fuest, who gives the episode real (or is it hallucinatory?) punch: dizzyingly shifting points of view; stunning fight sequences; showing off striking sets…
“It’s a – dream! It’s all a dream!”My Wildest Dream was one of the episodes that first got me into The Avengers when I discovered the series in the middle of Channel 4’s mid-’80s repeats (even taping the thrilling fight and car chase after Vengeance On Varos and The Mark of the Rani to fill up one of my precious Betamax tapes), and for me it’s still a favourite. You can find it on Disc 3 of The Avengers – The Complete Series 6 DVD Box Set, or Disc 32 in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection – I’ve previously offered tips on which The Avengers DVDs to buy – while original viewers in 1969 had a slightly harder job: because of concerns about the violence having too much oomph, it was shown on a different day than usual and much later in the evening. Even though there’s only one tiny spot of blood (the BBFC now classifies it a PG). Surprisingly, this was made quite early in Tara King’s season of The Avengers but held back until close to the end, despite being one of her best – Linda Thorson is at her most mature and confident, looks cool, has great timing and gets a fantastic fight, so this fits right in with her later episodes, generally her best and a fabulously strong run.
Though he remained as consultant for a while longer, My Wildest Dream was the final script by Philip Levene, one of The Avengers’ most prolific and defining writers, his scripts known for their humour, teasingly science fiction elements and general outrageousness. This, however, while witty in places, is uncharacteristically down to Earth and tense – while for me Tara King’s season of The Avengers is one of the two that best balance the silly and the sinister, this threatening psychodrama weighs heavily at the sinister end and is easily Levene’s darkest, revisiting his Death’s Door drugs and dreams but with considerably more palpable danger (plus a dash of Brian Clemens’ Honey For the Prince). And that’s greatly boosted both by Robert Fuest’s vividly in-your-face direction and Philip Madoc’s unsettlingly bipolar performance…
Robert Fuest and Philip Madoc
Artist, designer and director Robert Fuest started off on The Avengers as a set designer right in the early days, on Ian Hendry episodes that no longer exist – though you can see his designs in the surviving episode The Frighteners, and pictures of some of his work in the photo galleries for the Season 1 and 2 DVDs – and came back with a bang at the other end of the ’60s as a director in his own right, instantly becoming the best of the Series 6 helmsmen across the seven Tara King stories he directed. He returned for The New Avengers’ The Midas Touch and The Tale of the Big Why, though he’s probably most famous for the two Dr Phibes films he directed in between. Yes – they were his idea. Marvellous!
My Wildest Dream was actually Fuest’s first Avengers episode in the director’s chair, though the first of his to be broadcast was Game, a story so highly regarded it was chosen to launch Tara King, and which I’ve previously raved about for its Op-Art inventiveness and superb eye for colour. My Wildest Dream is less quintessentially Avengers, not having the same immediately joyous wacky appeal, but for me it’s even better. The cinematography is simply outstanding, with lessons learned from those 1961 Avengers taped in poky sets – watch for those inventive camera angles that liven up, say, Nurse Owen talking by showing her in her own desk mirror, or his instinctive affinity for shadows – but getting every advantage from the bigger budget, whether it’s roving cameras inside cars on location or the rapid cross-cutting stabbings that still make you jump even if what you see is rarely what you think you see. That other most prolific, defining Avengers writer Brian Clemens clearly loved Hitchcock as an influence on his scripts, but if ever there were a Hitchcockian Avengers director in his pace and energy, his inventiveness, and his gleeful black humour that nearly but not quite goes too far, it was Robert Fuest.
While Bob Fuest has always been one of the most outstanding contributors to The Avengers for me and here hits his stride so perfectly that it’s difficult to believe it was his first time, on the other side of the camera there’s the final Avengers performance from another of my favourite irregulars in the series, Philip Madoc of the gorgeous voice and predatory grin. While in his five Doctor Who screen roles he was usually the guest-starring villain, in his five Avengers episodes he was usually a little lower down the cast list, but still making a memorable impact. I love his understated Dutch banker who quietly realises when the game is up in Death of a Batman and his scene-stealing Soviet agent in The Correct Way to Kill (for which, when I reviewed it, I was for very personal reasons particularly sad that fellow actor Peter Barkworth had just died; since then, tragically, all that episode’s male guest stars have passed away), but it’s his first and his last appearances in The Avengers that are his most striking for me. Startlingly young and smooth in 1962’s The Decapod, he unleashes that fabulously wolfish grin as an ambassador who may or may not be the villain – while in 1969, his uncanny, unhinged business executive Slater persistently steals the show (and is framed on probably my favourite Avengers set just to make sure you can’t ignore him).
For my other favourite series, in Doctor Who it’s strangely Philip Madoc’s first and last TV roles that are his least impressive, while in between this great actor created two utterly terrific but unrecognisably different villains (as Jack Graham suggests in his tribute on Shabogan Graffiti). Both The War Games with Patrick Troughton and The Brain of Morbius with Tom Baker are outstanding stories, with Time Lords the ultimate villains in each but Madoc’s roles more memorable still: the War Lord, the cold alien conqueror who comes in after his junior villains have been fighting to outdo each other and dominates with underplayed, deadly, quiet wit; and egotistical surgeon Mehendri Solon, determined both to bring his master back from the dead and to establish himself definitively as the
“Your name will also go on ze list! What is it?”I’d provide an overview of Philip Madoc’s career, but he’s been in everything. A champion of and the definitive portrayal of The Life and Times of David Lloyd George; DCI Noel Bain in his own detective series, A Mind to Kill; a long-running lead role as Cadfael on the radio (and, like his TV counterpart, the Master – or is he?); probably most famously for an actor famous for his guest roles, the U-Boat Captain in The Deadly Attachment, Dad’s Army’s finest episode, who visibly almost corpses as he rejects the idea of nasty, soggy chips, wanting them “Crisp – unt light brown.” I wish Channel 4 would show again or release 2003’s eerie Y Mabinogi, for which he provided a (Welsh) voice of legend and which I’ve only seen once, in the middle of the night. And it’s telling that, on the joyous news last month that Alan Garner was at last to return to his Alderley Edge tales – the first two being such a major part of our childhoods – the first thought for both Richard and I was that, sadly, Mr Madoc would not be around to record Boneland for CD in the gorgeous way he’s read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, each of which we’ve recently listened to together.
“Don’t tell him, Pike!”
I think there was only one event I knew of at which I might have met Robert Fuest, and I wasn’t well enough to go; there were a handful at which I could have met Philip Madoc, and though I was too ill to make most of them, I’m so glad I made it to a shonky pool hall in Barking in 2008 on the DVD release of The Brain of Morbius. Though he was pleased to recall praise from other actors for his sinister War Lord, he was very clear that Dr Solon was his favourite Who character, for the script, for how much he had to do, and for how much fun it all was (miming dropping and picking up an evil brain). I remember him being presented with his own copy of the DVD, and saying sotto voce to fellow guest Cynthia Grenville as she passed him hers,
“Now, Cynthia, if I sign that, it’ll rub straight off.”Asking which one it was when presenting him with an earlier DVD release of My Wildest Dream, I told him:
“Oh? Why?”
“Because you haven’t taken the wrapping off.”
“You go a bit mad in this one. Peter Vaughan had been injecting you with new drugs.”But what I most remember was when I apologetically passed him our DVD of Doctor Who – The Power of Kroll to sign, knowing his opinion of it, and all the backstory why (and why he was much happier that his real final Doctor Who roles, many years later, included classier audio dramas like Master and Faction Paradox). Philip bared his teeth at it and asked, carefully enunciating each word, “Is this the one by the sea-side?” as if not quite actually saying ‘Why do you wish me to autograph a turd?’ Though he perked up mildly at the feature about him, A Villain For All Seasons, I felt I had to justify myself:
“Ah, yes. He was always doing that.”
“I know you don’t think much of this one, but I always find your performance very entertaining. It’s the way you look permanently pissed off – you seem to be playing someone who’s looking at his boss and thinking he could do a much better job of it.”I was rewarded with that full, dazzling, dangerous, wolfish grin.
“Just very good acting.”
That Golden Moment
“I feel so much better, Doctor. I feel so much better.”
From the disturbing, disorientating teaser to the charming, funny tag scene, My Wildest Dream brims with superb moments, taking in Tara’s most breathtaking fight sequence and probably my favourite – and one of the most barking – of all Avengers sets along the way. But the scene that sums up this episode for me may just help explain why some censors and schedulers took fright. It’s less a golden moment than a crimson one, with two brilliant guest stars and stunning direction that both surprises and shocks.
Boardroom tensions have been just a little edgier than usual at Acme Precision Combine Ltd; undergoing unconventional treatment from the sinister Dr Jaeger, one board member has already stabbed a rival then fallen to his own death while apparently believing himself to be in a dream, and now Philip Madoc’s Slater seems to be going down much the same path to conclude his own clashes with Henry Winthrop. And, as they did the first time, Steed and Tara have had a mysterious tip-off and dashed to the scene in Steed’s Great Gatsby yellow Rolls (ahead of being incredibly fashionable in the ’70s, and tipped to be so again this year). Winthrop’s home, The Lodge, is a great find – like a giant witch’s hat, it’s very distinctive, a memorable setting for a murder. We hear Howard Blake’s swirling music and sinister bass beat, as we did the first time, as Madoc explains in gleeful voiceover how Winthrop lives alone, the camera cutting from him in Jaeger’s surgery, reflected in his own knife, to his legs striding up to the house, to viciously guillotining Winthrop’s picture in his red-lit darkroom – an inspired piece of substitute violence – before he stabs, Winthrop dies, our heroes burst in —! Only for Winthrop to turn, developing film in hand, surprised but very much alive, Slater’s attack being just another drug-induced fantasy acted out with his aggresso-therapist. Or is it?
Of all the five members of the Acme Board, Slater and Winthrop are by far the most entertaining, thanks to Philip Madoc’s superb turn as a man who, doped out of his head, is the one who most enjoys it all and then is most miserable in withdrawal (only in being separated from his dreams and his doctor, of course – what do you mean, ’60s drug metaphors? It’s not a metaphor, he’s just drugged to the eyeballs) and, as his main rival for direction of the company, the marvellous John Savident. Another man of many memorable guest parts, he’s probably best-known for Coronation Street – never mind – and here he grabs the camera in just one scene, surprised by the intruders, shocked by news of deaths in the company, but preeningly confident that it’s just a false alarm and, if not, he can handle anyone with the gun he keeps to hand.
But outside, in another car among the daffodils, Jaeger’s cool, calm orderly Dyson is losing his cool and his schedule as he frustratedly tries to bring the lurching, incoherent Slater round just enough to prod him out of the car and into the Lodge. Tara sees him go, just too late, and the hallucination plays out all over again, Winthrop gasping horribly and lurching right into our faces like – sorry, I’m quite fat, too, but it’s an irresistible simile – a harpooned whale just as our handily unimpeachable witnesses burst in once more and, satisfied at acting out his fantasy again, Slater thanks his doctor, smiles, and offers his knife to them to put away for his next go…
The Avengers has always shown death, and frequently great violence, often of a fantastic nature, which the directors imply rather than present in gory horror – people shredded, bloodlessly, in The Hidden Tiger (with which this has a twist or two in common) or The Winged Avenger spring to mind – but while those make you fill in the blood, the sheer speed and savagery of the stabbings in this episode, the way the camera plunges around, even when most of the time it’s only dummies that the knives are plunging into, makes this far more startlingly visceral than earlier stories that should, in theory, have been more gruesome. And of all the scenes, this one’s the most striking, in part because all four actors are compelling, but also because in the darkroom everything already looks like it’s drenched in blood – and it’s the only moment when Fuest really pushes it as we see a splash of proper blood on Winthrop’s beached front and Slater, fascinated, pokes his finger in it for a moment to look at it before turning to Steed and Tara. He’s going to have a hell of a comedown…
Steed and Tara
I love The Avengers and, unlike some, in particular the sixth series with Tara King – that glorious fanfare opening with knights, roses, running along the bridge in sunshine and colour to open every episode, and with mysteries solved by Patrick Macnee at his most urbane and authoritative and Linda Thorson wide-eyed but winning through. Both lead actors are on top form in My Wildest Dream, with Linda Thorson especially giving one of her best performances: here, Tara is resourceful, witty, stunning in one of the series’ most physical fights and puts off an unwelcome admirer with considerable style (and a cheer from me when she throws him flying). She even gets to do such effective detective work in following leads that Steed gives her twelve out of ten.
It’s a great day for Steed and Tara’s outfits, too. Tara’s given two looks with culottes, which really suit her, a pleasant pale blue and white ensemble and a terrifically cool one with a leather jacket that she looks far more comfortable in than if she was forced into one of Cathy Gale’s old catsuits (something Diana Rigg never liked). That’s what she wears when checking out Slater’s optical workshop at Acme, when Fuest’s direction really lets rip in a massive Pop-Art punch-up between her and Dyson, as both hurl each other across an enormous room filled with blue, red and yellow glass, framed through jagged broken glass and targets and then finally leaping out through the door and into an almost as kinetic car chase, all to the accompaniment of some of Howard Blake’s most exciting music and then Laurie Johnson’s (which I remember from the likes of Something Nasty in the Nursery). Outstanding. The follow-up fight’s briskness is a bit of a let-down, not to mention showcasing unsafe taste in decoration, but you can almost hear her saying, ‘Well, haven’t we done this?’
Steed, too, looks good – particularly in grey with a striking copper tie, but also in his dark blue suit, blue shirt and maroon tie or rich chocolate-brown suit with trademark deeper brown collar and matching tie. He can even get away with a yellow shirt and olive-brown suit, just as she manages to look businesslike in a bright kimono, though both of them have brief bad moments (ironically, the only outfit she’s complimented on on screen is a green tartan best left to a Scottie dog, while it’s a good job that the closing tag scene has such wit and warmth to distract you from his hideous brown striped trousers and roll-neck). His best scene here, on the other hand, is far more laid-back than Tara’s physicality – once she’s tracked down Dr Jaeger, he goes in for the kill. Or, far worse, the piss-take…
Bad Therapy
“You’re not in my dream. Go away.”
Madoc is outstanding as he’s pulled from one reality to another, always told what to think by forceful medical figures, confused but sullen and resisting – and never more memorable than once he’s been whisked away after killing Winthrop, to be discussed by Steed and Tara with pompous Dr Reece, who believes everything in the world can be dealt with by “New drugs, you know,” and who keeps confronting him with the nasty reality. It’s a good scene in itself, as everyone simply insists on their own point of view and has no interest in listening to the people they’re talking to, but it’s elevated to brilliance by Fuest’s direction and Robert Jones’s hilariously untherapeutic set design. Yes, rather than being put in a comfy bed on a friendly ward with flowers round a little window, Slater has been put in the Observation Room. And I can never help but hoot as Reece stalks away from Slater, both of them still talking across each other, and the massive white space with a threatening red stripe down the middle, pointing to the patient, is revealed, the word “OBSERVATION” picked out in large, unfriendly letters along the whole back wall. Just to perfect it, it doesn’t have a door, but another wall, which simply glides in front to snap shut and leave poor Slater stranded. Walls just shouldn’t move like that. And Reece’s moving phone mounted on it does strange things to your head, too.
“A catharsis! A release of all repressions and hatreds! A man lives out his dream – his wildest dream!”Peter Vaughan is another of my favourite actors, another I’d love to meet, and another with a list of roles as long as your arm. Probably best-known as Porridge kingpin Genial Harry Grout, today (like top Avengers guest star Julian Glover) he’s reaching a whole new audience in Game of Thrones, though not so far in its sexposition scenes, high fantasy’s answer to the Topless News Channel. And his Jaeger here is utterly compelling, a self-confessed quack who genuinely believes that he’s ahead of his time, a pioneer. He is a real doctor, too – but of what (perhaps Valeyard is a German title)? Intense, mesmerising, vaguely Germanic, he’s My Wildest Dream’s other outstanding performance, in a role that has much in common with Ronnie Barker’s Mr Cheshire in fellow Avengers classic The Hidden Tiger – an obsessed, focused, brilliant technocrat (and a bit round-faced and in Porridge)!
While Laurie Johnson does a splendid job taking over the music for The Avengers once it goes into film from Series 4 onwards – not least in providing the main title them with that perfect fanfare – for some of Series 6 he was busy with a musical and recommended new composer Howard Blake, later of Flash Gordon and The Snowman fame; this was the first of ten episodes for which Blake provided much of the score in a similar but sharper style, and arguably his best (up with Who Was That Man I Saw You With, which provides the opposite bookend to his Avengers soundtrack CD release).
Between them, it’s Peter Vaughan, Howard Blake and of course Robert Fuest who seize our attention from the first here in a gripping teaser sequence as the first member of the Acme Board narrates his stalking his ideal victim to a harsh jazz beat, up the fire escape, into his room, a vertiginous spin and plunging his poniard in to stabbing brass – then reeling out into reality, disorientatingly now set to floating, dreamlike music, where it’s only a dummy with the man’s face that he’s knifed, egged on by Jaeger’s shouting and injections. After which he’s picked up for work by none other than the man he’s just ‘killed’… Dr Jaeger believes so passionately in himself that he’s the centre of the episode for most of the way through, dominating members of the Board and the voice that keeps urging, compelling. Madoc’s scenes with Vaughan crackle with conviction as two superb actors spur each other on – one sweating, sullen, in denial, then finding release; the other lashing out with sheer charisma to force Slater into accepting his point of view, revealing his innermost fears and hatreds, then delighted as he makes a breakthrough:
“Excellent! That’s really excellent, Mr Slater! ‘Kill’… ‘Destroy’… And ‘erase’! I particularly like ‘erase’!”And as his ‘patients’ stab and stab again the dummies with the faces of their tormentors, though you know it’s only a dummy, though you know no-one’s really being murdered – this time – you can’t help feeling queasy at the violence with which sawdust gouts out onto the glass table through which we’re seeing Jaeger’s rapt face.
Of course, it all falls apart. That’s what happens when Steed walks in.
From the moment Steed charmingly praises Jaeger’s receptionist, Janet Owen – “What a nice voice you have. Soothing” – and she’s one of the least charmed respondents in TV history, and Jaeger makes the mistake of letting this relaxed, charming man who claims to think he’s a horse into his consulting room, Jaeger’s galloping downhill faster than you can say ‘woo’. Suddenly, the Doctor is in need of some aggresso-therapy of his own. And the other big guest star you’re likely to recognise might just help…
Not Liking Steed, and Simply Not Like Tara
“Who is it you hate?”Oh, poor Teddy. No, scratch that – the Hon Teddy Chilcott is an utter git, a self-obsessed upper-class twit who’s clearly met Tara at one of the parties she hates and just will not leave her alone. It’s rare that any of the Avengers get a love interest, and here she’s very plainly not interested – even in Edward Fox. Handsome but querulous, he disapproves of her “cloak and dagger nonsense” and even more so of Steed. The impression is that he just doesn’t want a woman to work, but it is perhaps possible that he’s particularly pissed off by secret agents – might he afterwards be so scarred by this experience that he applies himself to the secret service in order to control them, and winds up M? Never! But, sexist git as he is, the way Tara simply keeps ignoring him is very funny, from her replying to his fishing for a compliment (“Persistent,” she suggests), to her priming Steed with excuses to get away, to the marvellous moment when he lies in wait to surprise her with flowers… And his despicable follow-up, where his sexism is notably only sustained by false advantage, the swine, and exactly how he gets his comeuppance. Then, satisfyingly, he’s beaten up for a third time, now by Jaeger’s nurse / receptionist, and deployed as a sinister pawn in which, at last, you can see Fox as the Jackal to be.
“Steed.”
“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed.”
“Who is it you hate?”
“Steed!”
Nurse Owen is, though, the only element of My Wildest Dream that doesn’t entirely come off for me – and not just because I never warm to a sinister medic called Owen. She starts off as the intriguing voice on the phone that keeps propelling Steed into the plot, giving him tip-offs that are just too late to save the murder victims, and when called on to be cold and enigmatic, Susan Travers is perfectly decent. My problem with her comes when she gets to do the action scenes – also rather well – and also gets many costume changes: striking in dark blue with red stripes at collar and cuffs; all right in pale orange frock; nasty in pale mud; sofa-like in brown stripes. Paired with an older, authoritative man (ignore Dyson, who in his sharp suit and shades just wants to be Alfie), too, it suddenly becomes obvious who she’s meant to be – who else gets all those outfits, intelligence, and to knock men out? She and her partner are evil reflections of Tara and Steed. And though they’re both quite serviceable, they just don’t have an ounce of the charisma needed for those parts. He even has a fat, ugly car. Our heroes agree, too, as at the climax Tara wallops one villain in passing and the other’s easily carpeted. But that does make the ending a little unsatisfying; I like to imagine them recast with actors a little less dull and, once all is revealed, being something more of a challenge.
The tag scene as Tara psychoanalyses Steed is, of course, light, frothy, bubbly – in a word, champagne. As a boy, little John confesses, he would creep to his father’s study for a splash of soda water. He really wanted lemonade, but his father wouldn’t have the palate-rotting stuff in the house. This tickled me when I saw it as a boy, because I remember similarly stealing into the kitchen by night to make some Andrews’ Liver Salts, not because I liked the taste, but because at least it fizzed! So, wonders therapist Tara, does that explain his liking for…?
“No, the insatiable craving, the perpetual desire, the uncontrollable urge to lay my hands on a bottle of champagne, that’s a very very different reason…”
“Dare I ask?”
The bottle pops.
“Because… I happen to like it.”
They drink, and cue the music!
Labels: Books, Comedy, Doctor Who, DVD, Faction Paradox, Music, Obituary, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Philip Madoc, Pictures, Quackery, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 2, The Avengers Season 6
Friday, September 30, 2011
Which The Avengers DVDs Should You Buy?
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!
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.
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…
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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
Why The Avengers Matters
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…
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
Thursday, May 26, 2011
The Avengers – Game
The most fabulously Sixties of all Sixties TV shows, The Avengers, is fifty years old this year – and twenty-seven years ago today, I was hooked by a repeat on Channel 4. It starred Linda Thorson as Tara King, and for me she’s always been as terrific an Avengers woman as any other. Her series of The Avengers was the last and perhaps the best, mixing colourful camp with the more sinister atmosphere of the earlier years. Where better to start than with Game, the larger-than-life postmodernism (and larger-and-deadlier-than-life Snakes and Ladders) that really opened her time on the show?
My introduction to The Avengers was the episode Who Was That Man I Saw You With? and though I’d thoroughly recommend it, Game was both chosen to launch Tara King at the time and is one of her stories that even her detractors praise. You can watch both, beautifully restored for DVD, in The Avengers Complete Series 6 box set, or in The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection. Way back in 1999, I was commissioned to write a piece on Game for Cult Times, and that forms much of the article below, originally published in Cult Times Issue 45 as File Under… Cheat! Cheat! Cheat! I’d love to encourage you to buy their magazines, but sadly Visual Imagination went under a couple of years ago; they produced some wonderful stuff while they lasted (and were among the very few houses that’s ever paid me for writing).
Game was the first Avengers story broadcast with Tara King as Steed’s main partner (after the season opened with a more muted handover episode), and starts the new era off in great style. Enjoyable, surreal and intense, this is one of the most visually striking episodes the series ever produced. And even for The Avengers, it plays games with the audience – confident that everyone’s enjoying it all enough to laugh along with the joke that both it and the audience know it’s a TV programme.
Breaking Out of the Screen
The Avengers itself is a great big cheat that encourages everyone to play along with a fantasy of Britain that never really existed, rather than a ‘real’ thriller show. Usually it’s Steed’s playful attitude that gives the game away. Game is different and as postmodern as even this consistently fourth-wall-breaking series gets, with persistent nods to the audience that it’s not only an exciting piece of action-adventure television – which it is, very much – but also a work of artifice.
“Take me, for example. Did I create myself… Or did others create me?”The story has two directors: vividly in-your-face first-time director Robert Fuest, delighting in thrilling Op-Art style; and, within the story itself, villain “Monty Bristow,” who’s just as in-your-face for the characters, moves all the pieces and first appears watching his plans unfold on TV… But is as unreal as an Avengers villain gets. Officially dead, he’s taken making a new life to extremes – it’s not his real face, it’s not his real name, and he’s not really as good a sport as he pretends. At dinner with an expert on fiction, he all but asks, ‘Who wrote me?’ Technically that was Richard Harris, whose script is a story all about how these stories go, with Bristow almost a killer Avengers fan. He knows the series to a tee, describing his killer game based on Steed’s lifestyle as requiring courage, strategy, cunning, and a damsel in distress, while the inside of his mansion is filled with giant games that are as blatant studio sets as any in the series. Steed wins through at the end despite odds of six to one against, yet earlier fails when Bristow offers him odds of only one in six of failure – because the underdog always wins in fiction, and Bristow knows from The Avengers ‘formula’ that means Steed will make the wrong choice.
“Evens, Brigadier. That’s very fair… Much fairer than – say – six to one against. That’s what you gave me!”Bristow wants revenge on the six army officers who court-martialled him in Germany twenty years earlier. All are to be killed in giant games based on their current jobs – and to make certain of that, Bristow cheats whenever any of them looks like ‘winning’. A Brigadier, for example, is a natural games player and treats life as a game anyway, as befits the man with the most ‘serious’ job. Watch him win – and watch how our villain loves people trying, but only if they fail. Bristow is such a control freak he doesn’t even let people roll their own dice (you could see him working for the Labour Party). As the final victim, Steed is given the most challenging “Super Secret Agent” game in many parts, but keeps subverting the way it works, as if he’s overwriting his own ‘director’s cut’ over Bristow’s version of the plot. Bristow’s face twists even on their first meeting, when Steed’s read the script and knows who he really is; when Steed, not just a better gamesman but a better cheat, goes on to dodge facing a symbolic six assailants alone, Bristow stamps to his feet in disbelieving anger like a child facing defeat.
“Cheat! You cheated. You cheated! Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!”
Steed and Tara
Patrick Macnee’s Steed becomes more understated the more that Peter Jeffrey’s Bristow loses control, but never stepping out of line of the episode’s blatant postmodernism – his marvellously inappropriate look of mild surprise on being told, “The safe contains a bomb” is perfect, just as Steed is perfect to foil Bristow. On one level, it’s simply about class; gentlemen are ‘allowed’ to cheat, as long as they treat the cheating as a game too, and Bristow can’t even cheat with good grace, let alone lose. On another, notice that while Steed is more than capable of killing, he more often chooses not to – and that while Bristow cheats in order to kill, Steed’s bit of cheating that most infuriates him (and most breaks the rules of TV thrillers) is using a gun not to kill, but to give life.
So while many action heroes are honest and upright, but kill with abandon, Steed is the reverse. Being a secret agent is always less important to Steed than having fun, and if he can have more fun by cheating… Ever since he was the shadowy partner to respectable Dr David Keel, each of the ‘other’ Avengers played it straight while Steed never fought fair, whether beating Tara in an outrageous game of “Steedopoly” in her first principal story here, or cheating his way to a fencing victory over Mrs Peel in hers. That was the biggest mistake in the movie version released a few months before I wrote this originally: while nowhere near as bad as it was cracked up to be, it did get the central character badly wrong by having their Steed claim always to play by the rules while his partner breaks them, when it’s quite the opposite. The only ‘rule’ the other Avengers break is their gender.
Tara and Steed make a splendid team throughout. She’s confident and determined, but with a refreshing innocence, giving the impression of working harder than her invulnerable predecessors. She earns her successes in moments like the cat-like spring to the ground that slashes the odds for the super closing fight, where the Avengers thump opponents in sync. Game was a flying start for her with viewers, rarely bettered until such fabulous stories as Pandora and Requiem, right at the end of her run. She has a good clothes day here in red-based outfits with waistcoats, though a bad one in green; Steed excels in rather a stylish navy suit and dark maroon tie and looks good in grey as always, but sinks to a dreadful patterned shirt in the otherwise diverting tag scene. Together they look terrific approaching a long swing like pall-bearers, with Tara in mourning colours of pale lilac blouse with black waistcoat and culottes and Steed in brown, but in step; but that same suit comes a cropper when partnered with Tara’s lime-green outfit, making them together look like mint choc chip.
Watch out for Tara’s confrontation with a remarkably queeny manager in a monocle at “Jig Creations” – “Royalty has walked through that door,” he tells her. Of course it has, dear.
“Tell me, what do you do on long winter nights?”…breathes Linda Thorson, and sweeps out, leaving the wicked butler to pop up from behind a giant pink jigsaw piece. Sublime!
“I ride a bicycle.”
“What else?”
The Substance of Style
Much of Game’s superb eye for colour comes from former designer Robert Fuest, establishing him instantly as one of the great Avengers directors (the first story he filmed was the stunning My Wildest Dream, with this his first to be broadcast; he went on to direct Dr Phibes and other films). Giddy cuts between scenes grab your attention right from the opening teaser, where a game of Scalectrix contrasts with a driver on an indoor racing track, who crashes and is thrown from his car but hits the ground outside – his racing goggles full of jigsaw pieces… Avengers have found dead bodies in playgrounds before, but Fuest makes them uncanny, just as Bristow makes these invitations to a killing a mockery of the usual process of discovering clues.
Robert Jones’ set design splendidly realises the games, while the best of the well-chosen locations is Bristow’s big old house, in reality the Grim’s Dyke Hotel at Old Redding, Harrow (my heart gives a little skip, as I used to play near there on childhood holidays with my Nana and Grandad). You might also recognise it as the mad investor Maxtible’s house in top Doctor Who story The Evil of the Daleks. There’s fab music, too, from forgotten Avengers composer Howard Blake, at times strangely reminiscent of Inspector Gadget or – more appropriately – Batman.
Most of Game is so enjoyable that you barely notice any weak points (but you’ll notice a spoiler in a moment). True, friends of Steed being bumped off becomes a repetitive New Avengers trope later, but it’s not boring yet; there’s a moment where the ashtray with which Steed has been knocked out suddenly vanishes in the next shot, but perhaps the wicked manservant is just very tidy. The main irritation is the end – Sir! Madam! Please avert your gaze if you don’t want to know! – where Bristow dies by his own weapon, which is the most overused, least diverting of all Avengers clichés. But at least it was a razor-edged playing card rather than a gun, and in this story about Avengers stories, it had to be a cliché, didn’t it?
No description of such a feast for the senses can do it justice. The Avengers is a show to be seen for its fabulous surface style, and rarely more so than with Game. Sit back and let Steed and Tara’s duel with a diabolical mastermind enthral and amuse you – you won’t believe your eyes.
Five Reasons To Watch Game
- Scary Life-size Games
You knew children were violent, didn’t you? The villain kills people with giant games: acting out Snakes and Ladders on a huge ladder into nowhere is pretty scary for acrophobics; you’ll never feel so crushed by word games as you do here; but the best is Super Secret Agent, where Steed has to pass a mini-Avengers episode to win. Naturally he wins, and isn’t it time they marketed it?
- Tea in the Trenches
Weary soldiers trudge across a battlefield as Tara strides out in a gorgeous navy and deep rose outfit, looking butcher than the lot of them. She’s there to take tea with a Brigadier in his dug-out: “They’re all dead.” “Oh dear. One lump or two?”
- Clock-Fight
Calamity! Tara’s anti-magnetic, shockproof, waterproof, chronometer-time watch has stopped! Only Steed’s Aunt Emily’s battered, brassy, ancient alarm clock with one hand missing can tell them that dawn approaches – and prompt Steed to give Tara a quick spank, if you’re into the kinky stuff (don’t mention the gymslip)…
- Tara the Bodyguard
Discovering Steed is to be the next victim, Tara seizes a gun, piles a barricade of chairs around him and promises Steed he’ll be “very well looked after.” Bless her.
- The Butler Did It
Later famous for The Sweeney, Garfield Morgan makes a wonderful manservant – he’s so violent! He actually beats each Avenger in fights, his lurking around corners is a treat, and his genuine playfulness makes him a better sport than his boss, the ever-suave and villainous Peter Jeffrey.
And Guest-Starring…
The Avengers excelled in featuring top British actors in perfect guest roles. Five in particular stand out as their ‘Old Reliables’, each appearing at least four times, giving scene-stealing star turns with curiously consistent character traits. You know you’re onto a winner with ‘Villainous Peter Bowles’, ‘Loveable Roy Kinnear’, ‘Villainous Julian Glover’ or ‘Demented John Laurie’ – and if you’re lucky enough to see Pandora, two turn up at once! Game stars ‘Old Reliable’ number five, ‘Villainous Peter Jeffrey’, who you may know from many movies and as the wicked Count Grendel in The Androids of Tara – no, not a plot to replace our favourite Avenger with robots, but a just as camp Doctor Who story (as well as the less well-known but equally brilliant The Macra Terror). His first Avengers appearance is in the black and white Emma Peel episode Room Without a View as a mildly comic ministry official, but his villainous credentials are assured by a strange trilogy of stories as lead villain. Each of these characters is bent on revenge against an Avenger; each uses a playing card motif; each has a dubious continental connection. Oh, yes – and each is dead! Game was the middle story in this trilogy; for the first, Peter Jeffrey gives a performance of barely controlled hysteria as German smuggler Max Prendergast in The Joker, a sinister episode from the colour Emma season. A thoroughly disturbing psychotic who uses cards as interior decorations, he cuts up pictures of Mrs Peel and is revealed on screen in similar ‘slices’ of close-up. Chillingly, he tells her: “I’m dead, Emma. You can’t kill me twice.” Following Game, Jeffrey turns up again as wily spymaster Perov in The New Avengers’ House of Cards. After Steed humiliates him, Perov fakes suicide and launches a set of sleeper agents, the “House of Cards,” against our heroes. His dastardly plan even calculates that the first sleeper, David Miller, will betray him to Steed – then Perov makes the mistake of fighting Purdey…
Labels: DVD, Personal, Peter Jeffrey, Reviews, Style, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 6
Friday, February 27, 2009
The New Avengers – Dead Men Are Dangerous
12.30, tonight, BBC4 – stay up, set your DVD recorder or set your alarm! There’s been much to enjoy in BBC4’s repeats of The New Avengers, but tonight’s haunting Dead Men Are Dangerous is the one I enjoy the most. A beautiful, tragic character piece, with a disturbing opening sequence and a nail-biting conclusion, it’s the best episode by a long way. The series’ strangely friendly Cold War rivalries give way to the bitter, deadly rivalry of a friend. This is simply magnificent television.
Less off-beat – unless you count the distracting ‘Ooh, which Tory MP is that weirdly made-up actor of a cast of thousands meant to be? And why, with all the people they got right (Geoffrey Howe was uncanny), did they mess up John Sergeant so badly?’ effect – was last night’s Margaret, which I found rather gripping and even made me feel a twinge of sympathy for her. I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of her fall, and who I was with; a Green who I’ve not seen for many years and a hard right Tory who shed a tear, then had a brief moment of rejoicing when news broke that John Major was to stand as the continuity Thatchianity candidate (within months he was snarlingly calling him a “bloody social democrat”). That second chap’s a Lib Dem these days… Still, looking back at that time, House of Cards still knocks spots off Margaret.
For me, though, the really stunning shows this week have been in the repeats. On Tuesday, ITV4 showed The Prisoner’s finest hour, Dance of the Dead, with its intricate plotting, insane ending and commanding Number 2 (though they mucked up the transmission); on Wednesday, ITV3 showed Robin of Sherwood’s greatest episode, The Greatest Enemy. The last half of that is still one of the most compelling and moving TV experiences I’ve ever had, and like Dance of the Dead – and unlike most ‘action’ shows where death is common but disposable – it’s an intelligent meditation on death. So, too, is The New Avengers’ Dead Men Are Dangerous with its lingering death and killer nostalgia, beating Dance of the Dead for twisty foreboding and vying with The Greatest Enemy for elegiac tragedy, all making three very fine series which have each had their very finest stories repeated within a few days of each other, remarkably. Next Friday (concluding the Monday after), as it happens, BBC3 is repeating the best story since Doctor Who returned to the screen in 2005. Human Nature is more about love than death, though death and, particularly, war still come through.
But back to tonight, and the main thing that comes to mind is that Patrick Macnee is simply outstanding in this story; funny, gentle, wounded, authoritative, even athletic – he’s lost some weight between seasons and looks really good on it, and he’s extraordinary whether standing mourning his destroyed memories to sombre brass or dashing desperately through the woods to trace a chilling loudspeakered message. His old friend turned jealous enemy Mark Crayford is an equally brilliant performance by Clive Revill, though Mark’s bitterness offers fewer layers for his character. The episode hinges around their two gripping face-offs, beginning and ending the story, each stolen by Steed’s heartbreaking reply to Mark’s challenge.
After so many New Avengers episodes in which an old friend of Steed’s lurches in and dies on the carpet, to be avenged by our heroes through the rest of the story, Dead Men Are Dangerous both gives that recurring theme its finest ever treatment and turns it on its head: while for once you can genuinely believe that Mark was Steed’s oldest and best friend, this time the old friend is dying because Steed shot him (reluctantly but efficiently, as you’ll see in the opening scene), and his death is to be avenged not by the Avengers but on them. It’s an especially fine use of the top Avengers cliché ‘a dead man who isn’t dead’, too, with a twist to that as well…
I love Dead Men Are Dangerous so much that I would love to spend hours on my usual sort of long, discursive review to tease out every subtle moment. And the ones with Gambit. But I’m having a bit of a time today – though not as much as Steed, obviously – so I’m having to write rather more quickly. Were I writing a longer review, there are all sorts of issues that I’d be discussing in detail. Instead, I’ll mention some of them to whet your appetite and see what they prompt you to come up with when you watch it:
Instead, I’ll finish with a word from someone else. I usually enjoy Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier (originally published and pulped as The Avengers Programme Guide), but I very often disagree with them, not least on my favourite episodes. Just this once, though, our tastes converge, and their review puts it beautifully. If you ever chance across a copy of the book, do pick it up, but if you can’t find it, here’s a sharply edited extract:
‹Older
“The only thing that can’t be replaced is the love and life of an old friend.”It’s been an interesting week for slightly or very off-beat programmes on TV, whether you call them comedy-thriller, sci-fi, fantasy, horror… I can never quite warm to the artificial umbrella of “telefantasy,” can you? Anyway, last Sunday we had the gripping penultimate episode of Being Human – a striking series that defies categorisation, and which I’m pleased to say has this week been recommissioned. Demons, on the other hand, had just one episode that hit the mark (the one with Mina’s vampire son) but several that were just rubbish, and after nosediving ratings ITV have this week cancelled the series. It should have been better, but the right series will be back.
Less off-beat – unless you count the distracting ‘Ooh, which Tory MP is that weirdly made-up actor of a cast of thousands meant to be? And why, with all the people they got right (Geoffrey Howe was uncanny), did they mess up John Sergeant so badly?’ effect – was last night’s Margaret, which I found rather gripping and even made me feel a twinge of sympathy for her. I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of her fall, and who I was with; a Green who I’ve not seen for many years and a hard right Tory who shed a tear, then had a brief moment of rejoicing when news broke that John Major was to stand as the continuity Thatchianity candidate (within months he was snarlingly calling him a “bloody social democrat”). That second chap’s a Lib Dem these days… Still, looking back at that time, House of Cards still knocks spots off Margaret.
For me, though, the really stunning shows this week have been in the repeats. On Tuesday, ITV4 showed The Prisoner’s finest hour, Dance of the Dead, with its intricate plotting, insane ending and commanding Number 2 (though they mucked up the transmission); on Wednesday, ITV3 showed Robin of Sherwood’s greatest episode, The Greatest Enemy. The last half of that is still one of the most compelling and moving TV experiences I’ve ever had, and like Dance of the Dead – and unlike most ‘action’ shows where death is common but disposable – it’s an intelligent meditation on death. So, too, is The New Avengers’ Dead Men Are Dangerous with its lingering death and killer nostalgia, beating Dance of the Dead for twisty foreboding and vying with The Greatest Enemy for elegiac tragedy, all making three very fine series which have each had their very finest stories repeated within a few days of each other, remarkably. Next Friday (concluding the Monday after), as it happens, BBC3 is repeating the best story since Doctor Who returned to the screen in 2005. Human Nature is more about love than death, though death and, particularly, war still come through.
But back to tonight, and the main thing that comes to mind is that Patrick Macnee is simply outstanding in this story; funny, gentle, wounded, authoritative, even athletic – he’s lost some weight between seasons and looks really good on it, and he’s extraordinary whether standing mourning his destroyed memories to sombre brass or dashing desperately through the woods to trace a chilling loudspeakered message. His old friend turned jealous enemy Mark Crayford is an equally brilliant performance by Clive Revill, though Mark’s bitterness offers fewer layers for his character. The episode hinges around their two gripping face-offs, beginning and ending the story, each stolen by Steed’s heartbreaking reply to Mark’s challenge.
After so many New Avengers episodes in which an old friend of Steed’s lurches in and dies on the carpet, to be avenged by our heroes through the rest of the story, Dead Men Are Dangerous both gives that recurring theme its finest ever treatment and turns it on its head: while for once you can genuinely believe that Mark was Steed’s oldest and best friend, this time the old friend is dying because Steed shot him (reluctantly but efficiently, as you’ll see in the opening scene), and his death is to be avenged not by the Avengers but on them. It’s an especially fine use of the top Avengers cliché ‘a dead man who isn’t dead’, too, with a twist to that as well…
I love Dead Men Are Dangerous so much that I would love to spend hours on my usual sort of long, discursive review to tease out every subtle moment. And the ones with Gambit. But I’m having a bit of a time today – though not as much as Steed, obviously – so I’m having to write rather more quickly. Were I writing a longer review, there are all sorts of issues that I’d be discussing in detail. Instead, I’ll mention some of them to whet your appetite and see what they prompt you to come up with when you watch it:
- Several of what I regard as absolutely the finest Avengers stories feature an Avenger under some horrendous pressure targeted at them in particular; a strong element of this story, however, is that Steed has his friends around him, so he’s less isolated than Mrs Peel in The House That Jack Built or Tara King in Pandora.
- After getting hooked on The Avengers through intermittently catching Channel 4’s 1984 repeats, a couple of years later I spotted a few New Avengers slipping through the schedules (probably on ITV, as late-night schedule-fillers). Back then, I was still at school and could afford very few video tapes – usually just enough for Doctor Who – and so I only ever recorded two episodes of The New Avengers, both of which I watched repeatedly. Fortunately, this was one of them.
- This builds on and perfects various elements and themes seen in several previous New Avengers stories; I could, for example, make a list of incidental similarities as long as your arm with the rather fine House of Cards (how many can you spot? And, no, it’s not the Ian Richardson one I mention above), while thematically and plotwise it’s very similar – though far superior – to the rather disappointing To Catch A Rat.
- This was the first episode of the second series of The New Avengers, and despite building on what came before it has a very different tone; you’d expect the second series to feel very different from the first. In fact, it does, but not in a good way. Unfortunately, as well as being strikingly better than any episode from the first thirteen, it makes the remaining twelve from the second year look even worse than they are – a few are serviceable (next week’s is OK) but, on a steep decline from here to the end, some of them get pretty bad.
- There are some splendid guest stars, including Gabrielle Drake (that woman in the purple wig from UFO), Trevor Adams (that great bloke from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and Fawlty Towers, with my old name) and, of course, the extraordinary Clive Revill as the villain – who you may remember as one of the earliest Babylon 5 villains (sadly not in the one where a main character’s dying old enemy devotes his last days to getting even) and as the man who played Emperor Palpatine before Ian McDiarmid did, despite Mr Lucas later airbrushing his performance from The Empire Strikes Back.
- Steed, Gambit and Purdey are all superbly characterised and in each case we learn something new about them; each also reveals something about their tastes in alcohol. Steed’s is as refined as ever, but poor Mike evidently stretches no further than lager and the occasional stout, given that he thinks Purdey’s vodka and lemonade is a new invention. In fact it is, but neither because of the lemonade nor the vodka, but thanks to Purdey being rather more creative than that.
- Though I often wince at the sexual politics in The New Avengers, this has rather a mature and lovely three-cornered relationship between the leads, despite one of Gambit’s more unconvincing ‘conquests’ (at least the situation’s so absurdly improbable you may laugh)… But it also, unusually, has a touch of a very ’70s sort of homophobia – like the otherwise entertaining Carry On Abroad, it’s from a time when they could now feature a minor character who the audience will recognise as gay, but only because ‘they’ are swishy, weak, dishonest and generally unreliable (I once wrote a psychology paper about that). Here, improbably, there’s a fey gay thug. On the other hand, he isn’t too distracting, it could be more in the actor’s and dresser’s interpretation than in the script, and it may be there to distract you from the more subtle but far more powerful homoerotic undercurrent between the villain and Steed. As a hint to Mr Crayford’s character, listen to the James Bond theme Goldeneye.
- And Purdey offers a suggestion for Steed’s one and only failing, though in the villain’s eyes his one and only failing is in fact…
Instead, I’ll finish with a word from someone else. I usually enjoy Cornelltoppingday’s The Avengers Dossier (originally published and pulped as The Avengers Programme Guide), but I very often disagree with them, not least on my favourite episodes. Just this once, though, our tastes converge, and their review puts it beautifully. If you ever chance across a copy of the book, do pick it up, but if you can’t find it, here’s a sharply edited extract:
“This is by far the best episode of The New Avengers. The difference is in the fondness with which it’s written… Steed and Purdey have a bittersweet relationship with real heart. But mainly this is Steed’s story. The damage done to his property is horrifying, but he doesn’t care a jot as long as the people he cares for are safe. It’s all rather wonderful, and is written with a nostalgia and grace that could have got the show another season if this had been the new format. Very special.”
Labels: Being Human, Conservatives, Joanna Lumley, Reviews, Robin Hood, Star Wars, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 4, The Avengers Season 6, The New Avengers
