The Avengers - Stay Tuned

Stay Tuned is another Tara King episode of The Avengers, and this one is a corker. It was written by Tony Williamson and directed by Don Chaffey and first aired in February 1969.

Steed is getting ready to leave for three weeks holiday. As he’s about to walk out the door Tara arrives and she’s decidedly puzzled. Steed has already had his three-week holiday. Steed assumes that she’s playing a joke on him, until she advises him to check his suitcase. It’s full of dirty laundry and souvenirs he bought on his vacation. She also shows him today’s newspaper, whereupon Steed realises he has lost three weeks of his life.

He must have been somewhere during those three weeks but he has no idea where. He doesn’t remember a thing.

He also tries to crash Tara’s car, but he doesn’t know why.

The forensics people check his car. It has been in France and Italy, and it has recently been sideswiped by another vehicle.

 

And then Steed finds himself once again getting ready to set off on that very same holiday. Losing his memory is bad enough but he seems to be condemned to keep living the same events over and over again.

To solve the problem he will have to figure out why Tara lied to him. She would never lie to him. It doesn’t make sense.

Even when we start to realise at least some of what is going there’s still plenty of suspense and weirdness. Steed of course fears that he is going mad, and it has to be admitted that the evidence tends to point that way. Tara on the other hand refuses to believe that Steed has gone mad. One way or another she’s going to find the solution to the puzzle, or at least help Steed to do so.

A nice touch is Tara’s very genuine concern for Steed, which is clearly more than just professional concern.

Mother doesn’t appear in the early part of this episode. He’s on leave, so Father has taken over. Father is of course a woman, and both Father and Father’s flat add further surreal touches. And Mother will put in an appearance later - he has an important part to play in the plot.

Both Patrick Macnee and Linda Thorson are in fine acting form. Roger Delgado provides a menacing and sinister presence. 

And it’s always a treat to see Howard Marion-Crawford. He plays Collins, an agent assigned by Father to keep an eye on Steed.

And we get a good fight scene between Linda Thorson and Kate O’Mara. Honestly, what more could you want?

The bizarre psychiatrist’s office set, the mysterious room in the house in Fitzherbert Street and the man following Steed and Steed’s totally unaccountable failure to spot this man even when he’s only a few feet away from him add further bizarre disturbing touches.

The set design is top-notch. There’s a wonderful atmosphere - there’s something very wrong and unsettling about everything but Steed just can’t put the pieces together.

Stay Tuned is yet another Tara King episode that compares more than favourably the best Emma Peel episodes. Highly recommended.

The Avengers - The Interrogators

The Interrogators is a very fine Tara King episode of The Avengers, written by Richard Harris and Brian Clemens and directed by Charles Crichton. It went to air in January 1969.

I’ve always been a fan of the Tara King era and I’ve always enjoyed Linda Thorson’s performances.

This one has a very solid plot with some nice misdirection. At first we think we know what is going on. A British agent is being mercilessly interrogated by the bad guys. The chief villain is a British officer named Colonel Mannering (Christopher Lee) but we’re pretty sure he’s really a traitor working for a foreign government.

And then comes the first twist and we question everything we think we know. There will be more twists which will keep us wondering just how much we really know.

The British agent doesn’t break under torture, but one of his contacts gets assassinated. We’re not really sure how the bad guys got the information.

Mother is perplexed. Nothing seems to add up. There has to be a leak somewhere.

Tara thinks she’s found a vital clue. It’s a cigarette stub, with a very unusual tobacco blend.

Tara will end up being interrogated as well, but whether the interrogation is carried out by the good guys or the bad guys is still open to question. Tara certainly doesn’t know at this stage.

There’s a reasonable amount of action with Tara having some decent fight scenes. Steed gets to use his armoured bowler hat.

There are plenty of surreal touches. The music guy and the balloon seller are highlights. We get to see a lot of Mother in this story and Patrick Newell is in sparkling form. As usual the meetings with Mother take place in bizarre settings.

Christopher Lee provides some real menace but some nice ambiguity as well. It’s a vintage Christopher Lee performance. The acting overall is excellent and the sheer hopelessness and foolishness of the British agents under interrogation, determined to follow orders without exercising the slightest degree of intelligence, adds some amusement.

Charles Crichton directs with energy and style.

Mostly this episode works because it strikes the perfect balance. The script works as a clever spy thriller story, there is genuine suspense and mystery, and just enough outlandishness and lightheartedness. It’s a Tara King episode that stacks up quite favourably against the best of the Emma Peel episodes.

The Interrogators is highly recommended.

Patrick Macnee's Dead Duck (Avengers tie-in novel)

Dead Duck is an original novel inspired by the TV series The Avengers. It was published in 1966 and written by Patrick Macnee. At least Macnee’s name appears on the cover as the author. Of course he didn’t write it. The book seems to have been written by Peter Leslie who wrote some very decent TV tie-in novels. It is just within the bounds of possibility that Macnee may have had some slight input into the book.

Dead Duck was actually the second Avengers novel credited to Macnee, the first being Deadline in 1965.

Steed takes Mrs Peel to lunch, to a very swish French restaurant. He has told her that the duck is divine. One of the other customers would tend to disagree -he has a couple of bites of his duck and keels over dead.

It seems to have been a heart attack. For some reason Steed is suspicious (he sees a man handing over a package to a girl just after the unfortunate diner’s demise) and does some checking. There have been rather a lot of deaths from heart attacks in this part of East Anglia recently. A lot more than one would normally expect.

The victims all have one thing in common. They have all recently eaten, and all have eaten duck.

The story feels like an Avengers yarn. There’s a poacher. With a beautiful daughter who tends to point guns at people. There are two odd old men conducting research - on birds. There’s an old house surrounded by elaborate but oddly childish booby-traps.

Steed and Mrs Peel go both undercover, Steed as a journalist and Emma as a housemaid.

The story gets more Avengers-like. Steed engages in a life-or-death struggle with a bird. There’s mention of a sinister but mysterious character named Worthington whom nobody sees. There’s a South American connection. And there’s a horrifying conspiracy involving, naturally, birds.

There are two villains and they’re fine Avengers villains.

Steed finds that his gadget-loaded umbrella comes in very handy indeed. Not to mention his armoured bowler hat.

The tone strikes the right mock-serious note. And Steed’s plan to unmask the conspiracy is absurdly far-fetched but amusing.

And there are the right touches of Avengers surrealism.

A good TV tie-in novel has to get the characters right. They have to be convincing as the characters from the TV series. This novel certainly gets Steed right. It gets Mrs Peel right in terms of personality but she’s not quite as much of an action heroine as she is in the TV series. She doesn’t get sufficient opportunities to strut her stuff and demonstrate her prowess in unarmed combat.

There’s some of the witty repartee between Steed and Mrs Peel that you expect, but perhaps not quite enough.

These are minor quibbles. It’s an engagingly offbeat story with a fine crazy finale. Fans of the TV series should enjoy this novel. Recommended.

The only other Avengers novel I’ve read is a later one, Keith Laumer’s The Drowned Queen (which features Tara King), and it was quite good.

Peter Leslie also wrote a couple of the Girl from U.N.C.L.E. novels.

The Avengers, four early Mrs Gale episodes

Some early Cathy Gale episodes of The Avengers, from late 1962 and early 1963. They feature what I call Steed Mark 2. Steed Mark 1, seen in the one or two surviving first season episodes, is a rather nasty piece of work with an edge of sadism to his character. He’s a spy, espionage is a dirty game and he plays it dirty. With the second season and the introduction of two female co-stars (Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale and Julie Stevens as Venus Smith were intended to appear in alternate episodes) the personality of Steed changed somewhat. He became more charming and there was plenty of witty banter with his female co-stars. Steed was still far more ruthless and manipulative than the Steed Mark 3 most people are accustomed to from the Emma Peel era but he was ruthless and manipulative in a charming way.

Steed would continue to evolve, gradually becoming a dandy with a love for vintage cars and the finer things of life. Interestingly enough he does not yet have his Bentley. In Traitor in Zebra he drives a very nice 1930s Lagonda.

He would also slowly become more obviously upper-class, more obviously a polished well-educated gentleman, albeit one with very few moral scruples.

Initially no-one was quite sure how Honor Blackman was to play Cathy Gale. The idea of having an expert in unarmed combat with a penchant for black leather emerged gradually during the first Cathy Gale season (May 1962 to March 1963).

The relationship between Steed and Mrs Gale was exceptionally interesting. She doesn’t really trust him completely, and with good reason. He manipulates her and he sometimes neglects to tell her things that she really is entitled to know.

The reason The Avengers lasted so long and became increasingly successful has a lot to do with the way the series was constantly evolving. The basic setup remained but the David Keel, Cathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King eras all have their own flavour. The differences between the Cathy Gale and Emma Peel eras will be startling to those who are only familiar with the Emma Peelers.

Traitor in Zebra

Traitor in Zebra was written by John Gilbert and aired in November 1962. There’s a security leak in a top-secret defence establishment, HMS Zebra, which deals with laser tracking systems. A young sub-lieutenant named Crane has been accused of espionage. Steed and Mrs Gale have the job of finding out if he’s really the traitor. Steed goes undercover as a naval psychiatrist and Mrs Gale as a research chemist.

The local village is a small tight-knit community and the circle of possible suspects is fairly small.

This is early Avengers so it’s a straightforward spy thriller plot without any elements of the surreal or the fantastic. There is some gadgetry but it’s all plausible technology. In fact the technical stuff basically makes sense.

The methods by which the secrets are passed is quite ingenious.

It’s always fun to see William Gaunt (later to star in The Champions). He plays another young officer who is keen to help clear the name of his friend Crane.

It builds to a very satisfying very tense finale in which Steed’s ruthlessness is very much in evidence.

There’s quite a high body count. At this stage The Avengers was still a fairly hard-edged spy series that portrayed espionage as a game in which nice people often get killed, and the good guys can’t afford to be too squeamish about using violence.

The problem with this episode is that John Gilbert’s script is a by-the-numbers spy story and all the plot twists can be seen coming. In fact the viewer more or less knows exactly what’s going on early on, although Steed and Mrs Gale obviously don’t. It’s a competent episode.

Intercrime

Intercrime was scripted by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. It went to air in December 1962. A couple of safe-crackers are murdered on the job, or at least one is murdered and the other left for dead. The survivor, Palmer, provides Steed with the first clues to what’s going on. It’s already suspected that an international crime syndicate is operating in Britain. There’s been a string of major robberies and the MOs don’t fit with the habits of any known local criminals.

Palmer, in a semi-delirious state, lets slip some important information. A key operative in the crime syndicate, Hilda Stern, is about to arrive from Germany. She is arrested and is to be deported but Steed gets a brainwave. Why can’t Mrs Gale impersonate Hilda Stern and infiltrate the organisation. Mrs Gale is not happy about this idea at all but is pressured by Steed into agreeing (typical of the uneasy relationship between them in this season).

As you might expect Cathy’s fears that this was going to be an insanely dangerous idea prove to be well-founded.

The weakness of the script is that Intercrime is so ruthless that inevitably some of its employees are going to turn against it.

This is a solid enough episode with some decent tension (Cathy Gale really does get into a very sticky situation). The plot is routine but the idea of an international crime super-syndicate is a good one. And Intercrime really does seem like a formidable enemy.

It’s interesting to notice how feminine Cathy Gale looks. Skirts and very feminine hairdos. This was not yet the black leather-clad Cathy Gale. This is also a Mrs Gale who uses guns rather than judo to deal with bad guys.

Quite a good episode.

The Big Thinker

The Big Thinker was written by Martin Woodhouse and screened in December 1962. There are problems with a new experimental super-computer called Plato. The problems might be caused by sabotage.

Cathy inveigles her way into Plato’s domain by posing as an anthropologist hoping to use Plato to translate dead languages. Computer whizz-kid Dr Kearns is an obvious suspect. He’s brilliant but erratic, he chases women, he drinks and he gambles. All of which could make him susceptible to pressure to betray the project.

There are some really nice scenes in this one, especially when Cathy’s flat gets broken into. The gambling scene between Mrs Gale and Broster is also excellent.

What’s nice is that the computer is more than just a McGuffin. It plays a central role in the story and also becomes a character. The idea that Plato isn’t just a computer but in fact the whole complex is also rather nifty. It’s not very original but it’s made to work here. You get the impression that Martin Woodhouse has actually put a bit of thought into the computer angle.

Mrs Gale is still very feminine but she has picked up a few unarmed combat skills.

Anthony Booth is terrific as Dr Kearns. He very wisely doesn’t try to soften the character - Kearns is arrogant and obnoxious but he’s vastly entertaining and the fact that nobody likes him plays an important story in the story.

Warlock

Warlock was written by Doreen Montgomery and went to air in January 1963. This was the episode that was supposed to introduce Mrs Gale but the producers were not satisfied and ordered a lot of reshooting.

In this episode Steed and Mrs Gale tangle with black magic. A physicist suffers what appears to be a stroke, but it isn’t. He then disappears. Steed found him clutching a hex symbol.

International spies (headed by a sinister fellow called Markel) are using black magician Cosmo Gallion to induce scientists to part with vital secrets. Mrs Gale just happens to be an expert in psychic and occult phenomena.

What’s interesting is that Gallion and Markel have totally separate and mutually contradictory agendas. Markel wants a secret rocket fuel formula; Gallion wants occult power.

It ends with Gallion performing a black magic ritual at which it appears that he intends to sacrifice Mrs Gale. The ritual scene tries to be as sexy and you could get away with on British TV in 1963, with a blonde girl dancing in a very skimpy costume. Wearing nothing but very brief panties on her bottom half was pretty startling in 1963. The mixing of voodoo and black magic is amusing and adds some spice. Of course all the occult stuff is a hopeless mishmash worthy of the Sunday papers but this is television and it’s supposed to be silly fun.

You have to remember that in the 60s the British press was continually creating moral panics about witchcraft in modern England.

The relationship between Steed and Mrs Gale is not yet clearly defined. She seems to be very disapproving of Steed at this stage. Steed is very obviously hoping to seduce her.

A well-crafted very enjoyable episode.

Final Thoughts

Four pretty good episodes with Warlock being the best of them.

I've reviewed other Cathy Gale episodes -in these posts - the Cathy Gale era The Mauritius Penny/Mr Teddy Bear and the Cathy Gale era.

The Avengers - Emma Peel in colour, part one

I think that almost everyone would agree that the colour Emma Peel episodes of The Avengers are not quite as good as the black-and-white ones. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they’re not quite as consistent, but the best of them are as good as any of the black-and-white episodes.

Here are four episodes that received the coveted four-bowlers rating on the excellent The Avengers Forever website. Do they deserve those ratings? On the whole I think I do.

Who’s Who???

Who’s Who??? was written by Philip Levene. One of the most popular ideas in 1960s/1970s action/adventure spy series was the double idea - having someone impersonate the hero and impersonating him so perfectly that the double can’t be distinguished from the real hero. It’s an idea that I intensely dislike. I think it’s lazy writing. Who’s Who??? however manages to give the idea some genuinely clever spins. Instead of doubles we have the villains using a machine that can transfer the mind and the soul of one person into another person’s body. So in this case instead of having two Steeds and two Emmas we have enemy agents Basil (Freddie Jones) and Lola (Patricia Haines) who now inhabit the bodies of Steed and Mrs Peel while Steed and Mrs Peel inhabit the bodies of Basil and Lola.

And (in a very nice touch) we have Freddie Jones and Patricia Haines doing a very creditable job of capturing Steed and Emma’s personalities and mannerisms while Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg behave convincingly like Basil and Lola. They still look like Steed and Mrs Peel but they behave in a totally different manner. It also means we get to see Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg kissing frequently and Patrick Macnee patting Diana Rigg’s bottom but it’s OK because we know that they’re actually Basil and Lola.

The purpose of the mind-swap is to use Basil and Lola, posing as Steed and Emma, to break the British floral spy network - a spy network consisting of agents using flowers as code names. The headquarters of the floral network (with an enormous Union Jack covering an entire wall and half the ceiling) is another amusing touch, as is the pompous major in charge of the network.

The end result is much cleverer and more amusing than the straightforward hackneyed double trope. And it gives Macnee and Rigg a chance to play totally different roles - Basil and Lola have none of the sophistication of Steed and Mrs Peel. They’re low-class hoods and both Macnee and Rigg have fun with that. Diana Rigg is particularly good as the gun-chewing rather tarty Lola.

The brain-swap idea was far from original but I don’t think its ever been done with more style and wit. Brilliant stuff.

The Hidden Tiger

The Hidden Tiger was also written by Philip Levene, one of the best of the writers of The Avengers. It begins with two men torn to pieces, apparently by big cats. Judging by the mayhem inflicted, most likely lions or tigers. So Steed turns to big game hunter Major Nesbit, the first of the many wildly and delightfully eccentric characters who populate this episode.

After several more unfortunates are gored to death the trail leads Steed to P.U.R.R.R., the Philanthropic Union for the Rescue, Relief and Recuperation of Cats. But they only rescue domestic cats and whatever killed those people had to be much much bigger. A domestic at couldn’t kill someone, could it? P.U.R.R.R. is run by a Mr Cheshire (played with some wonderfully odd mannerisms by legendary comic Ronnie Barker). Also working for P.U.R.R.R. are a Dr Manx and a young lady named Angora, played deliciously by a very feline Gabrielle Drake (of UFO fame).

The cat-themed sets are wonderfully witty.

One could fill pages with all the cat-themed double entendres in this episode. As Mrs Peel remarks at one stage, "Pussies galore!” Diana Rigg also does a remarkably sexy 

purr.

This episode has exactly the right mix of wit and cleverness. The plot is outlandish and has the right touch of the surreal. It really is great stuff.

Murdersville

Murdersville was written by Brian Clemens. And it’s a bit of a mixed bag. 

It starts superbly. Little-Storping-in-the-Swuff is the perfect, idyllic, picturesque little English village.It’s full of loveable eccentric rustics. It has a cosy pub. It’s the sort of place to which anyone would love to retire. And then, completely out of the blue, we witness a brutal murder. The villagers witness the murder, and take no notice whatsoever. Immediately we know that we’re in the bizarre surreal world of The Avengers. And all this happens within the first few minutes. It’s a brilliant start to the episode.

Little-Storping seems like such a wonderful place in which to spend one’s retirement that Mrs Peel’s childhood friend Paul has decided to do just that. Mrs Peel drives him to the village to help him settle in. And then we get another touch of the bizarre. Two of the loveable village rustics go on a destructive rampage, smashing all of Paul’s most treasured possessions.

Paul’s manservant Forbes disappears. Mrs Peel finds a body in the woods. And Paul disappears. Mrs Peel decides it’s time to call the police but it soon becomes obvious to her that there’s something very sinister going on and that she shouldn’t trust anyone in Little Storping. 

This is where the plot starts to get a little wonky. What Mrs Peel should do is quite obvious - she should take off in her car to go and fetch the cavalry. But she doesn’t. The plot requires her to behave irrationally and to make things easy for the bad guys. Patrick Macnee only makes brief appearances in this episode so it may be that Brian Clemens had to find a way to keep Mrs Peel in the village on her own even though it makes no sense.

This episode showcases a side of Mrs Peel that we haven’t seen before. We’ve seen her in tight spots before and we’ve seen her frightened before but we’ve never before seen her in a cold vengeful rage. We’ve also never seen her kill in a cold-blooded ruthless way. But in this episode that’s exactly what she does. We see her display raw emotion. This is definitely a major plus.

We also get to see her in a chastity belt, which we definitely haven’t seen before. 

Her telephone call to Steed is a wonderful comedy moment. There’s some delicious dialogue. There’s a pie fight. The episode is a weird mix of light-hearted zaniness, genuine terror and deep emotion. And mostly the disparate elements do come together.

There’s an enormous amount to enjoy here if you can ignore some really glaring plot holes. A very good episode that just misses out on greatness due to the wonkiness of the plot.

Epic

Epic was written by Brian Clemens. Some people consider this to be one of the best-ever Avengers episodes and some consider it to be one of the worst.

Has-been silent era film director Z.Z. von Schnerk (Kenneth J. Warren) has decided to make a comeback. He still has his original stars from the silent era, Stewart Kirby (Peter Wyngarde) and Damita Syn (Isa Miranda) under contract but he needs a new face and he’d decided on Mrs Peel. He’s going to make her a star. Posthumously. The film will be The Destruction of Emma Peel and it will climax with a real-life death scene. He has Mrs Peel kidnapped and she finds that she’s in the middle of a movie but she hasn’t read the script. She gets shot a couple of times and when she discovers that the guns are loaded with blanks she treats the whole thing as a joke. Until she finds a real corpse on the set. Not all the guns in this are loaded with blanks.

This is the surrealism of The Avengers pushed to an extreme. It’s also an extreme exercise in metafiction. Z.Z. von Schnerk and his faded stars can no longer tell the difference between movies and reality. But of course there’s no reality here because this is The Avengers and it’s a TV series so it’s not reality either. And that’s how Diana Rigg plays it - as if she wants the audience to be aware that this is a TV show about a man making a movie, but the movie he is making is essentially a movie about movies, packed with references to other movies.

The surrealism really works in Epic. It’s not just clever but at times genuinely disturbing and spooky (such as the wedding and funeral scenes). But then at the same time it’s all a joke. Mrs Peel isn’t sure whether she’s supposed to be scared or amused. The viewer isn’t sure whether to be scared for her or just amused.

The metafictional touches continue into the very clever tag sequence. Are we watching Mrs Peel and Steed or are we watching Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg on the set of The Avengers?

This episode has been criticised for being soulless but that misses the point. Any genuine emotion would have spoilt the effect. Epic draws attention to its own artificiality. These are not real people. It’s all just make-believe. Mrs Peel mimicking the MGM lion is a joke within a joke. The fact that Mrs Peel makes no serious attempt to escape from the movie studio is not a weakness in the plot. It’s just another part of the joke. The fact that the plot of the episode is nonsensical is part of the joke.

I think I have to come down on the side of the people who love this episode. It revels in its own archness. At times it’s almost too clever for its own good but somehow it gets away with it because we’re supposed to notice the ostentatious cleverness. Kenneth J. Warren (very obviously channelling Erich von Stroheim) and Peter Wyngarde are outrageous and delightful. Epic is great fun.

Final Thoughts

All four episodes are in their own ways Avengers classics. Murdersville has its flaws but its strengths easily make up for them. Epic is an episode that will always divide fans but I adore it. Great stuff.

The Avengers - A Touch of Brimstone

Yes, this is it, the infamous banned episode of The Avengers, A Touch of Brimstone. Or at least it was banned by the network in the US during the initial run of the series there. It was screened in Britain in February 1966, despite censorship difficulties, and became the most-watched episode of the series. The censorship difficulties were caused by Mrs Peel’s notorious appearance as the Queen of Sin, and most of all by the scene in which Mrs Peel is whipped.

It’s also famous for featuring one of the great Peter Wyngarde’s finest performances.

It all starts with a series of pranks. The pranks are the sort of thing that would appeal to teenaged boys except that the victims are public figures, often foreign diplomats, and they’re causing all sorts of international repercussions.

Steed has a strong suspect in mind, the Honourable John Cleverly Cartney (Peter Wyngarde), a clever but dissolute minor aristocrat. Cartney has revived the Hellfire Club. There were in fact several real-life Hellfire Clubs in Britain during the 18th century, the most famous being the one established by Sir Francis Dashwood in 1749. They were places in which young gentlemen could indulge themselves in all manner of debauchery and libertinage.

Cartney’s club has the same aims as the original Hellfire Clubs - debauchery with political overtones.

Steed thinks he can get a lead through the young and foolish Lord Darcy, one of Cartney’s cronies. Mrs Peel’s job is to get close to Cartney. She certainly has no trouble attracting his attention. And no trouble getting invited to a meeting of the Hellfire Club.

Steed of course will have to join the Hellfire Club as well, and go through the initiation.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Cartney is planning something much more ambitious than a club for drinking and wenching.

We get some fine fight scenes, including a sword-fight and including Mrs Peel memorably (and wittily) despatching one of the bad guys while dressed in her bondage costume. And of course there’s the whipping scene, which is more a case of Cartney trying to whip Mrs peel rather than actual whipping her.

There’s as much implied sexuality as you could get away with in Britain in 1966 (and obvious a lot more than you could get away with in the US) but I suspect that it was the all-pervasive atmosphere of sex and decadence that sent the American network into a panic rather than any one particular element.

The eighteenth-century costumes are great and the Hellfire Club set is wonderful (especially with the snake slithering about). The opening scene with the chair moving toward the camera establishes an atmosphere of mystery right from the start and provides Peter Wyngarde with a great entrance.

Diana Rigg is very sexy in her bondage outfit and gives another fine performance. Mrs Peel seems genuinely disturbed by the Hellfire Club which gives the episode a sense that this time she and Steed really are up against not just regular bad guys but something truly evil - a villain who glories in his immorality and cruelty.

Steed gets plenty of heroic stuff to do with both swords and umbrellas.

Look out for Carol Cleveland (a regular on Monty Python’s Flying Circus) as Cartney’s girlfriend Sara.

Naturally it’s Peter Wyngarde who steals the show. Nobody could do decadence the way Peter Wyngarde could. Wyngarde would go on to make another memorable appearance in the series in Epic. He would gain much greater fame in Department S and Jason King but I don't think he ever did anything better than A Touch of Brimstone.

James Hill directed. He directed some of the best-known episodes of The Avengers, including The Forget-Me-Knot, Something Nasty in the Nursery and one of my favourite episodes from the Tara King era, Look - (Stop Me If You've Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers... There’s a publicity still for A Touch of Brimstone showing Mrs Peel as the Queen of Sin holding Hill on a leash.

A Touch of Brimstone was written by Brian Clemens who needs no introduction to readers of this blog.

Mrs Peel’s fetish-inspired Queen of Sin costume, consisting of a corset, long black boots with stiletto heels and a dog collar with three-inch spikes, was designed by Diana Rigg herself. And I haven’t mentioned her snake.

There’s real villainy here but there’s plenty of humour as well. The Avengers had a knack of striking just the right balance, never taking itself too seriously but never quite descending into mere silliness. It was an outrageous series but it was outrageousness done with wit and style in a manner that modern television simply cannot replicate.

A Touch of Brimstone effortlessly lives up to its reputation. Very highly recommended.

The Avengers - 5 episodes, 5 Avengers Girls

It’s fascinating to see the way The Avengers reinvented itself so completely so many times. It’s not just the succession of different Avengers Girls. The one constant element in the series was Steed but he wasn’t constant at all. He evolved in most intriguing ways. In fact there were five subtly different Steeds. Each of these Steed variants has a quite different relationship with his female partner. What I’m planning to do here is to look at five episode, one featuring each of the five Avengers Girls.

The first version was the season one Steed. It’s difficult to make judgments on that first season since only one complete episode survives but it’s obvious that Steed was a rather hardboiled and very cynical character with a streak of genuine nastiness. That original version of The Avengers was intended as a gritty, realistic and hard-edged spy series.

The second version is the Steed of the Cathy Gale era. He has now acquired definite charm but it’s a sly sort of charm that he turns on and off when it’s useful to him. He is still cynical and calculating, and at times breathtakingly ruthless. Cathy Gale is clearly, especially in the 1962 season, a part-time operative whom Steed has recruited and he tells her as little as he can get away with. Which she resents. He lies to her and he uses her. She’s not exactly an innocent victim though. She’s well aware of Steed’s deficiencies of character and she’s well aware that espionage is not a game for children. Being a part-time spy can be fun, but she has no illusions about it.

Propellant 23 is a remarkably fine example of the Steed-Cathy Gale dynamic. She agrees to help him on the case but she is plainly irritated, she is plainly annoyed because she feels he is concealing vital information from her and using her. It’s also clear that there are times when Steed’s combination of cynicism and ruthlessness repels her. So why does she bother getting mixed up in his cases? The best guess is that it amuses and excites her.

There’s a faint suggestion that Steed exerts a kind of psychological dominance over Cathy (and that this is probably true of his relationships with women in general). There’s also a faint suggestion that this might be something that excites Mrs Gale, that she might be the kind of woman who would be attracted to such a man. There’s that subtle hint of mild perversity in The Avengers of the Cathy Gale years that interestingly enough is largely absent from the Emma Peel and Tara King eras. That touch of perversity was certainly noticed at the time. Given Mrs Gale’s penchant for leather and boots and her skills in unarmed combat most people have assumed that if Steed and Cathy had had such tastes that she would have been the dominant party. In fact when you watch the series it seems more likely that it’s Steed who would have been the dominant partner.

Box of Tricks was the third Venus Smith episode of The Avengers and when it went to air in January 1963 it marked the debut of Venus Smith Mark II. Venus started life as  a sultry torch singer but when John Bryce took over from Leonard White as producer he decided to re-invent the character - to make her younger and more bubbly. So Julie Stevens found herself having to change her whole approach to the rôle.

Steed gets Venus a job singing at a club but he really wants her to keep an eye on the magician whose young lady assistant emerged from the disappearing box quite dead a couple of weeks earlier. We naturally assume this is the box of tricks referred to in the title but actually there’s a different box of tricks which is connected with the other main plot strand, involving a leakage on information from top-secret meetings chaired by General Sutherland.

The plot contains some good ideas but it doesn’t quite hang together. It also features an espionage conspiracy that is a little too dependent on the stupidity of the chosen victim.

On the other hand it is a very amusing episode. Steed’s cynicism is on full display as he gets information out of some of the girls at the club and then brushes them off in breathtakingly casual fashion. He gets some great lines out of it. His undercover stint as an eccentric hypochondriac millionaire is very funny.

Steed’s relationship with Venus is interesting. She is obviously aware that Steed works in counter-intelligence and is willing to help out although there is certainly a touch of manipulation to the arrangement. She needs all the singing work she can get and he gets her gigs in exchange for her help on certain cases. As is the case with Cathy Gale he tells her only what he thinks she needs to know, which is virtually nothing. She simply has to obey instructions. Like Mrs Gale Venus is to a considerable extent manipulated by Steed although in this episode he does seem quite fond of her, in his way. And in his defence one could point out that since she’s a complete amateur she’s probably safer not knowing too much and just obeying orders. On the whole she does a pretty fair job at carrying out his instructions. On the surface she’s an airhead and a chatterbox but she’s actually quite sensible (which of course is why Steed bothers to use her as an agent).

With the arrival of Mrs Peel we get Steed version three. The charm is now genuine. And the partnership with Mrs Peel is a genuine partnership. She’s also an amateur spy and her motivations are much the same as Mrs Gale’s - excitement and amusement. She does however obviously now have official status with the shadowy department that Steed works for. Steed does not attempt to manipulate her the way he manipulated Cathy Gale. There’s definite mutual respect and mutual affection, and while the mutual sexual attraction is obvious it’s more than just sexual attraction.

It has to be admitted that this third incarnation of Steed is quite inconsistent with the earlier versions, although I suppose one could try to argue that he’s a bit older, he may have mellowed a little, he may have been softened slightly by genuine emotional feelings toward Mrs Peel. Maybe he’s grown up.

Death’s Door shows the Steed-Mrs Peel dynamic in operation. They work effectively together because they trust each other. It’s a clever little Brian Clemens-scripted episode. There’s a vital international conference taking place but the British representative gets to the doorway leading to the conference room and refuses to enter. He’s had a dream and is now convinced he will die if he goes through that door. His dream comes true in every respect. And it seems that the same thing is destined to happen to every British representative. Steed and Mrs Peel do everything they can think of to convince Lord Melford that there’s no danger, but to no avail. Obviously someone is trying to wreck the conference but how can dreams be made to come true with such uncanny accuracy? The solution is well thought-out and manages to be both outlandish and convincing.

The dream sequences are quite impressive with an atmosphere that is surreal without resorting to silliness and genuinely unsettling. We also get to see how a man can be shot without a gun in a nicely executed little action set-piece.

The fourth Steed, the one of the Tara King era, is a subtle and perfectly plausible evolution from the previous version. The main difference is that his relationship with Tara is rather different. There’s a faint suggestion that she sees him as just a bit of a father figure, and that he sees himself in this light. Given that Tara is a professional spy and Steed trained her this of course makes perfect sense. There’s also definite sexual flirtation (if not more) between them.

Bizarre is one of the more notorious Tara King episodes. It was the very last episode of The Avengers (if you don’t count The New Avengers) which may be one of the reasons it has such a poor reputation. It seems to bring out all the bitterness of fans with the ending of the series.

Bizarre starts with a young woman discovered lying unconscious in a field, in her night dress. It doesn’t take long to figure out that she must have fallen from (or been pushed from) the night express which passed by about an hour before she was found. But how to explain her strange story about the dead man in the coffin who wasn’t dead?

There was a coffin on the train, bound for Happy Meadows. So Steed heads for the Happy Meadows cemetery to have a talk with Mr Happychap (Roy Kinnear), the man who runs the place and who believes that death can be fun. The case seems to involve a number of dead people but it is not clear exactly how dead they are, or how permanently dead they are. They are obviously very dead and very genuinely dead but they don’t stay that way. There’s also a travel agency that can arrange holidays in paradise, an agency run by the self-proclaimed charlatan the Master (Futon Mackay).

Mother gets quite a bit to do in this episode, which is fun by me since I always enjoy Patrick Newell’s performances. Roy Kinnear and Fulton Mackay dominate proceedings which is what you expect when you have two such fine comic actors and you let them loose. While the other supporting players naturally get overshadowed they’re actually uniformly good.

The final Steed, in The New Avengers, is a middle-aged version of the fourth Steed. The slight father-daughter vibe that existed with Tara is certainly there with Purdey. Most of the flirting is between Purdey and Gambit although the very strong emotional bond between Steed and Purdey suggests a past romantic involvement.

The Midas Touch is from the first season of The New Avengers and it’s top-notch stuff. For starters there’s a clever script from Brian Clemens. There’s a mad scientist, a Dr Turner, but instead of the usual mad scientist motivations this one is driven purely by a lust for gold. It’s a nicely bizarre slightly perverse touch. His brainchild is Midas, a young man who is a carrier of every disease known to science but he is immune to them all. He is in perfect health. Anyone he touches dies an agonising death. The mad scientist offers the services of Midas to a crazed power-hungry foreign politician.

The mad scientist is genuinely creepy and is played with gusto by David Swift. He’s a classic Avengers diabolical criminal mastermind. Ed Devereaux chews every piece of scenery he can get his hands on as the evil politician. His performance is a major highlight and again it’s classic Avengers stuff. Dr Turner’s gold collection, including plenty of naked golden ladies, provides the necessary  weird setting.

But this is The New Avengers so that means lots of action and violence doesn’t it? It certainly does. The violence is actually quite restrained but it has plenty of macabre and perverse overtones. The action sequences are not only terrific, they’re done with style and wit. Purdey and Gambit arguing over who directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the middle of a thrilling high-octane car chase is a lovely touch. Purdey gets to demonstrate her prowess with the high kicks in a fine fight scene and it makes sense since it’s the only way she can fight this particular opponent.

There’s plenty of amusing dialogue with Purdey and Gambit indulging in some good-natured banter. Gambit is a character who has slowly grown on me. He’s more likeable than usual in this episode and he gets some good lines which Gareth Hunt delivers pretty effectively.

The New Avengers established Joanna Lumley as a major sex symbol and this episode shows why. And of course the sexiness is combined with definite hints of perversity - Purdey tied up and drooled over one of the mad scientist’s flunkeys being a case in point. And of course there’s Purdey climbing the gate and managing to give the audience a good long look at her panties. Very un-PC and I’m surprised they got away with it but I doubt that any male viewer would have been complaining. Joanna Lumley is in fine form in The Midas Touch. She gets lots to do and does it all well.

This is an episode that has enough of the flavour and stylistic dash and quirkiness of the original series combined with excellent 70s action sequences, and that’s the right combination for The New Avengers.

The Avengers - five Tara King episodes

Some thoughts on several miscellaneous Tara King episodes of The Avengers.

Love All
Love All (written by Jeremy Burnham) takes a basic idea, a security leak within the highest levels of Whitehall, that The Avengers had done over and over again but it takes that idea and adds some wonderful twists to it and develops it with an enormous amount of style and wit. The result is one of the best of the Tara King episodes.

This is an episode in which nobody wants to take Tara’s theory about the security leak seriously. She thinks it’s all about love, that love is the only explanation for the particular kinds of odd behaviour that senior civil servants are suddenly displaying. Steed and Mother both scoff at Tara’s theory but it turns out that she was right. But this is not just another story of powerful men being caught in a honey trap by a glamorous lady spy. In this case they’re trapped by the most unglamorous female you could possibly imagine, a frumpy cleaning lady.

How the scheme works is pretty clever. There are lots of other clever ideas as well - the automated romance novels are a lovely touch.

This is one of the Tara episodes that compares very favourably to the best episodes of the Emma Peel era.

My Wildest Dream
My Wildest Dream has everything you want in an Avengers episode. Philip Levene provides a witty clever script about men who commit murders in their dreams only they’re not dreaming. There’s  a superb guest starring performance by Peter Vaughan as an evil psychiatrist, plus there’s the always wonderful Philip Madoc as one of the sleep killers. As a bonus there’s a delightful comic performance by Edward Fox as al elegant young man-about-town who is besotted with Tara.

There’s plenty of great visual style with the observation ward set being especially good. There’s plenty of action, with Tara getting an absolute corker of a fight scene (and it’s really quite a brutal and realistic fight). Steed and Tara both get plenty to do in this episode. Robert Fuest’s direction is lively and imaginative.

There are some nice unexpected plot twists. And you have to love the idea of an aggresso-therapist. This is one of the best Tara episodes, and Linda Thorson was really starting to hit her stride and get a handle on her character.

On the whole as very fine episode.

Pandora
In Pandora (scripted by Brian Clemens) Tara visits an antique shop and that’s the last thing she remembers until she wakes up in a strange house. She is wearing an Edwardian dress and her hair is done in Edwardian style. According to the morning paper it is the year 1915 and everybody is calling her Pandora.

Steed is rather concerned as Tara failed to show up for a luncheon engagement and there are some puzzling circumstances to her non-appearance. The key to finding her may be  the Fierce Rabbit. The Fierce Rabbit agrees, but has his own agenda.

This was Linda Thorson’s favourite episode, which is not altogether surprising since she gets to play a woman on the edge of madness. There are some great supporting players. Julian Glover gives a nicely twisted performance while John Laurie (a truly wonderful character actor) has fun as the Fierce Rabbit.

Director Robert Fuest throws in some suitably disconcerting camera angles but he doesn’t go overboard with the hallucinogenic stuff. It’s effectively moody and there’s an atmosphere of unhealthy obsession. The sting in the tail is rather neat as well. This is a pretty good episode.

Homicide and Old Lace
Homicide and Old Lace is almost universally regarded as the worst ever episode of The Avengers.

This episode has an interesting history. The departure of Diana Rigg coincided with a change of producer. John Bryce took over but after a handful of episodes had been filmed he was dumped and Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell were hurriedly recalled to duty. The question was what to do with the material that had been shot under Bryce’s supervision. Clemens took parts of one of these unaired episodes, The Great Great Britain Crime, combined them with some new material and some material from earlier Emma Peel episodes and added a framing story and the result was Homicide and Old Lace.

Malcolm Hulke and Terrence Dicks are the credited writers but Brian Clemens added so much new material that he has to take much of the blame for the results.

It opens with Mother’s aunts surprising him on his birthday. They persuade him to tell them a real-life story. So he proceeds to tell them a tall tale of an outrageous crime. John Bryce’s intention as producer had been to return The Avengers to something much closer to the gritty realism of the very first season, and so one assumes that The Great Great Britain Crime was intended to have that gritty realistic feel to it. But as recounted by Mother it’s pure outrageous melodrama and totally fanciful and in fact quite silly.

Patrick Newell’s telling of the story is quite amusing, and the hyper-critical running commentary on the tale by the aunts has its funny moments. It does have one major thing going for it - Gerald Harper’s delightful performance as the dedicated but bungling security chief Colonel Corf.

On the whole though it ends up being a bit of a mess, although it is mildly amusing and not quite as awful as its appalling reputation might lead you to expect.

The Rotters
Written by Dave Freeman The Rotters starts with the murder of a government forestries expert and we then get one of the more bizarre scenes involving Mother. It became one of the major recurring jokes of this era of The Avengers that whenever Mother had to brief Steed and Tara it would always be in an outlandish setting. Sometimes these interludes were quite inspired. Sometimes (as in this case) they were just seriously weird, but they were usually at least mildly amusing.

Which brings us to the subject of Mother. In the earlier seasons we never saw Steed’s bosses. It was always implied that only Steed had contact with his superiors, and that his partners (David Keel, Venus Smith, Mrs Gale and Mrs Peel) were agents that Steed had recruited on his own initiative and that he was allowed to run them as he saw fit. That changed in the Tara King era. Steed and Tara were both clearly professional secret agents and the character of Mother was introduced as the spymaster figure. Not everyone thought this was a good idea but on balance I think it worked. Tara obviously had a different status compared to Steed’s earlier partners, she was a professional rather than a gifted amateur and the spymaster figure helped to emphasise that. Patrick Newell was always delightful and Mother and his silent assistant Rhonda added an extra dash of surrealism.

In any case, getting back to The Rotters, there’s a diabolical plot here and it really does revolve round wood. Wood rot can be a remarkably rapid phenomenon. It can be practically instantaneous. This can be remarkably useful, but not necessarily in a good way. In fact dry rot might well be the key to world domination (or at least it might be if you’re a crazy person). It’s a ludicrous premise but it works.

A good episode of The Avengers requires some oddball guest characters. The Rotters has that. In fact it has an amazing number of eccentric characters. It requires a reasonably imaginative villain or villains. The Rotters has that as well. The central idea doesn’t have to be wildly original but it does have to be offbeat. In this case it’s offbeat and it’s fairly original. The Rotters gets bonus points there. Most of all it has to be executed with energy and style and this episode scores there as well. It gets extra bonus points for two killers with impeccable manners and good taste.

So there we have it. Five Tara King episodes chosen totally at random. Four of them either excellent or at the very least extremely good (My Wildest Dream, The Rotters, Love All, Pandora) and one stinker that still has some mildly amusing moments (Homicide and Old Lace).

Adventure and Comic Strip: Exploring Tara King’s The Avengers (book review)

There have been quite a few non-fiction books on The Avengers, but not too many dealing specifically with the Tara King era. So that in itself is a strong recommendation for Rodney Marshall’s 2013 tome Adventure and Comic Strip: Exploring Tara King’s The Avengers. An even better recommendation is that Marshall takes a very favourable view of this period of the show’s history.

Having said all this I’m not entirely sure I can recommend this book. The big problem is that it’s kind of thin. There’s really not much to it. Basically it’s just an episode guide, and not a very detailed one. On the plus side he doesn’t give us just a synopsis of each episode. There is a bit of analysis. It’s not too in-depth but it’s a bit more than just fanboy gushing. On the whole he avoids pretentious academic jargon and he generally doesn’t try to ram his political views down the reader’s throat (which is a very unusual thing for a book published in our modern age).

The episode guides are reasonably stimulating and he shows a real understanding of the appeal of the series.

The biggest plus is that Marshall doesn’t start out with the prejudice that of course the Tara King era was inferior to the Emma Peel era and that of course Linda Thorson was a poor replacement for Diana Rigg. Marshall approaches the series with an open mind and finds a great deal to like about the Tara King episodes. Since I happen to be a very big Tara fan this naturally inclines me to approve of the book.

You just can’t get away from the fact that there’s not a great deal of text here. And there are no illustrations.

Marshall is incidentally the son of Roger Marshall, one of the great British television writers of the 60s and 70s.

Adventure and Comic Strip is a welcome reassessment of a much maligned period of the history of one of the great television series so I’m inclined to recommend it in spite of its thinness.

The Avengers #6 The Drowned Queen (novel)

Like most successful television series of its era The Avengers gave rise to a number of tie-in novels. These seem to have all been original novels rather than novelisations of episodes. The cover of The Drowned Queen indicates that it was the sixth Avengers novel but in fact there had been eight previous novels, not all of them from the same publisher. And some of the Avengers novels seem to have been published only in the US while others were only available in the UK so it does get a mite confusing. The Drowned Queen was the first of the Avengers novels to feature Tara King.

The Drowned Queen is certainly very ambitious. Steed and Tara King have gone undercover as crew members on the Atlantic Queen which is making its maiden voyage across the Atlantic.  The Atlantic Queen is not however a conventional ocean liner. It is a submarine ocean liner! It carries two thousand passengers and will make the entire voyage submerged. Trouble has been threatened, hence the presence of Steed and Tara on board.

It soon becomes evident that there is indeed a plot to sabotage the vessel. In fact there may be multiple conspiracies. When Steed engages the chief engineer in conversation he discovers that there may also be real questions about the submarine liner’s safety, even in the absence of sabotage.

There’s dirty work at the crossroads and the bad guys are prepared to go as far as murder. In fact they’re prepared to go much further than that.

There’s a reasonable amount of action and there is some genuine excitement. There’s also the kind of high-tech stuff and gadgetry that you normally get in a Bond movie but that was beyond the budget of a TV series in the late 60s. There is actually a bit of a Bond movie flavour to this tale.

Steed will have to learn to pilot a midget submarine and to deal with Hindu magicians, boa constrictors, pet sharks, predatory widows, card tricks, dangerous blondes and mermen. Steed is very much the hero here with Tara unfortunately playing a somewhat secondary rôle.

I’ve read a number of TV tie-in novels from the 60s recently and I’m starting to realise that writing an original novel based on a TV series was actually a lot trickier than you might think. It’s not that easy for a writer to take characters developed by another writer and keep the characterisations consistent and it’s even more difficult when the characters were originally created in a different medium. A related challenge is to capture the tone of the TV series.

The Drowned Queen doesn’t quite succeed in these two respects although it’s a brave attempt. The author, Keith Laumer, was an American and that might have been the problem. Although it achieved some popularity in the United States The Avengers was one of the most quintessentially English TV shows of the 60s (in fact that was probably a large part of its appeal to American audiences). To get the authentic feel of Steed and Tara as characters probably was something that required an English writer.

On the other hand Laumer does get the right mix of action, adventure and humour. And he is fairly careful not to descend to slapstick, which would have been quite wrong for an Avengers story, and he does try to avoid taking an overtly American approach to the humour.

One of the interesting challenges of a tie-in novel like this is that there is the opportunity to go beyond what could be done on television at the time. That’s both an opportunity and a danger if you take it too far or start moving in a direction that conflicts with the essential character of the TV series. In this case we have an author who was a reasonably successful science fiction writer so it’s no real surprise that he gives us a story that pushes things more overtly in a science fictional direction compared to the series (although the series most certainly dabbled in science fiction). He also takes the opportunity of giving us a story on a larger scale than would have been possible on 1960s television. The Drowned Queen would have required special effects that would have been out of the question on TV. So it is intriguing to see a story that explores possibilities that the TV series could not have explored.

The question is, does Laumer go too far? Has he created a novel that is just too science fictional to be an Avengers story? I don’t really think so. While he was certainly writing a science fiction novel he was aware that it was supposed to be an Avengers novel so he’s careful not to get bogged down on technical stuff and he (quite rightly) isn’t the slightest bit interested in making the story scientifically plausible.

The Avengers could be outrageous but it always managed to avoid descending into mere silliness. Laumer mostly tries to avoid mere silliness as well, and mostly he succeeds. He doesn’t quite manage the wit of the TV series but the book is fairly amusing. It’s also fast-paced and it’s definitely fun. If you’re a fan of the series it’s recommended.

The Avengers - The Mauritius Penny/Mr Teddy Bear

A couple of 1962 Cathy Gale episodes of The Avengers for this post.

Mr Teddy Bear was one of the very early Cathy Gale episodes of the Avengers and was apparently one of Patrick Macnee’s favourites. It was recorded in August 1962, going to air in Britain a month later.

Martin Woodhouse wrote the script. Woodhouse was a doctor by training and he believed that not only would it be desirable to include scientific concepts in his stories, it would be even better if these scientific ideas were plausible.

Woodhouse went on to write a number of episodes featuring both Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale and Julie Stevens as Venus Smith, as well as one of the Diana Rigg episodes (the excellent A Sense of History).

Mr Teddy Bear is a notorious and very successful hitman. He has just masterminded the ingenious murder of a prominent military man, the murder taking place live on television. He is not just a hitman but a bit of a showman as well. One-Ten (Steed’s boss who appeared as a semi-regular character in the early Cathy Gale episodes) has decided that enough is enough. Mr Teddy Bear must be stopped. The plan is to use Steed as bait. Mr Teddy Bear will be hired to kill Steed. This should bring him out into the open. Of course if the plan goes wrong it will be very unfortunate for poor old Steed.

Mrs Gale is to be the one who makes contact with the assassin. She will be the one who hires him to kill Steed.

Mr Teddy Bear is no fool and Steed will have some uncomfortably close brushes with death in this adventure. And it builds to an effective and exciting climax.

This episode dates from the days when the series was shot live on videotape, a practice which was certainly limiting when it came to attempting any fancy visual tricks (although the talking bear is a nice touch). Fortunately such tricks are not really necessary if you have a good director working from a good script and, most importantly, if the lead actors have a form grasp of what characters tick and what makes the relationship between them tick. That’s very much the case here. It’s a good story but it’s the characters who make it great television. Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman had already developed a wonderful chemistry.

This is the early version of Steed, a more cynical and more ruthless operator than the later Steed. There are times when Mrs Gale definitely does not approve of Steed’s cold-bloodedness. That makes the relationship between them rather interesting. There’s flirtatiousness and there’s clearly an element of sexual attraction but there’s a bit of an edge as well. Cathy is a bit cautious about Steed.

The Optimum Region 2 DVD release includes an excellent audio commentary for this episode which features writer Martin Woodhouse.

Mr Teddy Bear is a truly superb episode.

The Mauritius Penny on the other hand has some major problems. It starts promisingly enough, with murder and mayhem in the world of philately. A very rare stamp has come on the market. The trouble is that this stamp is too rare - it just isn’t possible that such a stamp could suddenly turn up out of the blue. One murder in the world of stamp collecting would be odd enough. When Steed and Mrs Gale witness a second murder during a stamp auction it’s obvious they have stumbled onto something big.

Mrs Gale happens to know quite a bit about stamps. Steed unfortunately knows nothing of the subject. The fact that he doesn’t realise that there’s no such thing as a Maltese twopenny blue almost gets him killed.

Had the script stuck to stamps it might have been amusing and offbeat but writers Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks have a different agenda and the script degenerates into heavy-handed political messaging. And it’s neo-Nazis once again. The obsession of television writers in the 60s with this topic was truly excessive and truly embarrassing. It could be made to work quite well if writers treated the subject as an opportunity for outrageous conspiracy theories and silly fun but this story is more like an earnest political lecture, with endless speeches. As the focus switches away from the stamps the fun seems to evaporate.

A very fine guest cast, including Richard Vernon and Alfred Burke, almost saves this one.

This is one episode that does suffer a little from the limitations of the shot-live-on-videotape format. Too much of the episode is focused on a dull political meeting (that seems to go on forever with speech after speech) in a nondescript hall.

So two episodes, one excellent and one not so good.

The Avengers - Don’t Look Behind You (1963) and The Joker (1967)

Brian Clemens was never troubled by the idea of recycling script ideas that worked but there was one occasion in The Avengers when he not only recycled some ideas, he recycled an entire script. The script in question was Don’t Look Behind You, transmitted originally in 1963 as a Cathy Gale episode. Four years later it was remade, in colour, as the Emma Peel episode The Joker.

The remake is every bit as good as the original, some say it’s even slightly better, and that’s saying something since Don’t Look Behind You was an absolutely superb story.

It’s certainly worth watching these two episodes back-to-back.

Since Don’t Look Behind You was shot live on videotape and The Joker was shot on film there are naturally some major differences in the feel of the two episodes. There are also some changes to the script itself.

Don’t Look Behind You gets off to an extraordinarily creepy start as we see a man, an obviously somewhat deranged man, cutting up a photograph of Mrs Gale from a magazine. 

We know something twisted is on the way but the story then persuades us that everything is all quite innocent. Mrs Gale has written an article on medieval influences on fashion and design and as a result has been invited to the country house of a very eminent elderly medievalist. It’s a wonderfully spooky 16th century house and the set design is truly magnificent.

Of course being shot on videotape gives the episode a very stagey feel but this is one of the episodes in which that staginess works wonderfully well and adds to the menace, to the slowly building terror and the growing sense of weirdness.

The old medievalist’s ward, the deliciously crazy Ola (Janine Gray), seems to be the only one at home and when she is called away Cathy is left alone. Then an eccentric young man, who we assume has read far too much beat literature, appears on the scene. He seems like he could be quite dangerous but is he the one Cathy needs to worry about? She certainly needs to be worried about somebody. There is someone in the house who is stalking her but he appears to be intent on sending her mad first. And he’s succeeding.

Although it falters just a little towards the end this is a slow burning exercise in terror that works admirably. Honor Blackman admits that she had trouble making this episode as she was genuinely creeped out by the whole idea. Steed only appears sporadically in this story so Blackman has to carry things on her own most of the time, which she does to great effect.

Peter Hammond is regarded by many as the finest television director of his era and on the basis of this episode that reputation was well deserved. He uses an incredible number of mirror shots but they suit the feel of the story and genuinely enhance the atmosphere rather appearing gimmicky.

One recurring them in the 1963-64 era of The Avengers is that Mrs Gale does not entirely trust Steed, and she has good reason for her suspicion. The Steed of the early seasons of The Avengers is a much more ruthless and cynical character than the later Steed and he is quite prepared to use people, including Cathy, if it suits his purposes. His personality has a real edge to it (which Patrick Macnee conveys very effectively) that was softened considerably in the later years of the series.

The major change in The Joker is that we know from the start what is going on. That’s not entirely a bad thing. It does convince us that Mrs Peel is in very real danger, but on the other hand the subtle menace in Don’t Look Behind You is in some ways more effective - both the viewer and Mrs Gale are presented with a situation in which we know something twisted is going on but we have no idea what it is.

There are some slight but important differences in the performance. In Don’t Look Behind You the strange young man is more frightening because he really does seem totally out of control. And Janine Gray as Ola seems much more convincingly mad and thus more potentially dangerous than Sally Nisbett in The Joker. Peter Jeffreys in The Joker and Maurice good in Don’t Look Behind You are both excellent villains, terrifying but oddly sympathetic.

In The Joker Emma is invited to the home of a famous bridge player rather than a famous medievalist and the set design is more surreal compared to the Old Dark House of Don’t Look Behind You. Both episodes look terrific in their own ways. 

In The Joker Sidney Hayers throws in a couple of homages to the earlier episodes by using mirror shots, not quite as expertly as Hammond but they’re still effective.

It’s impossible to fault the performances of either Honor Blackman or Diana Rigg.

For my money Don’t Look Behind You is one of the great episodes of the series, probably in the all-time top five. The Joker is not quite as good but it’s still excellent. If you haven’t seen them watch both. If you’ve seen them then both are worth watching again. Both episodes are reminders of just how good The Avengers could be.