Patrick Macnee tells the story of how, one day in Toronto, he bumped into Peter O’Toole who asked, as you do, what Macnee was up to these days. Oh, says Macnee, I’m doing The Avengers.
“But Patrick!” wailed O’Toole. “You’re always doing The Avengers!”
I loved that show. There had never been anything quite like it on British TV before, and there’s never been anything quite like it since. And do you want to know what I loved best? Season Four, 1965 to 66. I was eleven years old.
Season four was the first set of shows made on 35mm with the American market in mind. I’d been aware of the series before that, but I can’t say it had been a favourite. Those earlier episodes had been studio-bound. Studio-bound TV drama (I now realise) always had stolid theatrical pacing while multiple cameras cut around the performances, pretending to be film.
The seeds of it were all there in the live shows, and it was working for plenty of viewers, but it wasn’t yet working for me. My mother had taken against Patrick Macnee for no reason at all (“Look at him. The big girl”) and that didn’t exactly help.
I also have to say that I found Honor Blackman’s Cathy Gale a little, er, scary (I don’t think it was my young age. I still find her scary now!)
I never quite ‘got’ the stories, and the dialogue-heavy studio scenes moved at a finger-drumming pace. Those electronic cameras and vision-mixer cutting were particularly cruel to the staging of fight scenes – in Quatermass and the Pit they’d addressed the problem by shooting the sequences of physical action on film and dropping them in. The live-studio Avengers didn’t, so the action could never be very extensive, or overly convincing.
But here’s why I think it’s important that Macnee was “always doing The Avengers“. I’ve been involved in the setting-up of a number of shows – some you’ll have seen, many that you won’t because they never got any further than the drawing-board – and I know how tricky the creation of a format can be. I also know that never, in a million years, could you sit down and devise The Avengers as it appeared in that 1965 season.
That’s because The Avengers, 1965, hadn’t been devised; it had evolved. The elements had been cooking and changing for three seasons. Steed had mutated from mysterious authority-figure to unpredictable dandy, mainly thanks to a constant seepage of Macnee’s own personality into the role. When Ian Hendry, the original series lead, left the show, his replacement by Honor Blackman meant that a conventional man-shaped place in the structure was unconventionally occupied by a woman. This shook up and redefined viewer expectations much as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley would later redefine the big-screen heroine. Sidney Newman might have been the show’s originator, but it was the dominating narrative touch of Brian Clemens as both writer and producer that gave the series its increasingly light, tight and surreal flavour.
And then it went to film. Honor Blackman dropped out to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel took over in a piece of casting that had adolescent boys of all ages weeping in gratitude. The mix that had been brewed up in the creaky and low-res live-action studio now exploded with the application of top-drawer production values. The result was unique and confident. It didn’t so much mirror the swinging sixties as play a major part in defining them.
And you know what else? It was uncompromisingly British, through and through. It didn’t conquer the American market by pandering to American forms and expectations, as so much product since has attempted to do. Like Danger Man, like The Saint, like Monty Python, like any cultural product of ours that the US has taken to its heart, it had a zero prostitution factor in its casting and its subject matter.
Season four was the black-and-white season, with such classics as The House that Jack Built, Castle De’Ath, The Cybernauts, A Touch of (gulp) Brimstone. Season five went to colour and hit the same level of triumph with knobs on. But it’s those episodes in ‘sparkling black and white’, as the American trailers described them, with their stark op-art world and King’s Road sensibility, that made the first and deepest cut for me. There is a place forever in my heart where the door to Emma Peel’s flat has a big eyeball on it.
The Thorson episodes were fun, and I tend to underrate them consistently. And The New Avengers had its moments, if you can manage to forget the sub-par Canadian-shot episodes, but by then it had become a show that, with its ITC-style triangle of The Father, The Lad, and the Desirable Tomboy, you absolutely could have sat down and devised.
You couldn’t grow a show like The Avengers now. Our schedulers think they’re being bold if they commission more than four of anything, and from the first broadcast they’re watching the ratings and poised ready to kill.
The Avengers was great. The Avengers was ace.
Let’s not even talk about the feature film, eh?
8 responses to “The Avengers”
How funny you should have posted about this right now. Last night I watched “The House that Jack Built” and “The Joker” (two Rigg episodes, one in b&w the other in colour, with identical plots) both brilliant in different ways, but both focussing on Mrs Peel rather than Steed.
I agree with you about Cathy Gale – a bit too ‘scary’ for me as well. When Diana Rigg came on board, everything changed. The Linda Thorson season is underrated, it seems, by everyone but me! There are some brilliant stories in her season – “All Done With Mirrors”, “Fog”, “They Keep Killing Steed” and “Look (Stop me if you’ve heard this one) But There Was This Man…” – and Tara develops beautifully.
I love The Avengers. If I’m feeling down or had a bad day, just watching the opening credits cheers me up. Doctor Who has always been my favourite television programme, but The Avengers comes a damn close second. It’s pure genius and the Fennell/Clemens/MacNee/Rigg combination should never be forgotten. They made the show the phenomenon it was.
I just hope that 2entertain/Canal+ can sort out whatever problems they have with regard to getting the series re-released on DVD properly this time (the Contender releases I have are dreadful) and get MacNee involved in some way before he’s no longer with us 🙁
By the way, I should also say that I loved BUGS from the day it started (1995!), Brian Clemens involvement being very clear to anyone who knew The Avengers. Having said that, my favourite episodes were all your Cyberax stories. Jean-Daniel and Cassandra – fabulous characters! I always hoped Jean-Daniel survived “A Cage For Satan” and would return (horrifically burned of course) to wreak his softly spoken revenge…
I’ll have to post something about BUGS at some point. When the show first came out, all the commentators made Avengers comparisons. And then they’d complain because we weren’t The Avengers.
I reckon BUGS was far closer in spirit and intent to later three-handed ‘team shows’ like Department S or The Champions. Or even The New Avengers, which was barely The Avengers at all.
Then I realised. Those commentators hadn’t got a f****** clue. I felt better after that.
Yes, its funny isn’t it how critics change their minds SO quickly. When the first series of BUGS started, Time Out gave a stunning review, SFX loved it etc… Then Series 2 came along and all of a sudden it wasn’t ‘cool’ anymore, despite being a far superior set of episodes.
Then it hit the wilderness years where it was howled at with derision. However, like all these things, it goes in circles and now I find the genre “fans” are starting to appreciate it again. It’s now being called a ‘guilty pleasure’ in a laughably post-modern excuse sort of way. Which, of course, misses the point that it was escapist entertainment at a time when it was sorely needed. Cracker, The Lakes and countless other worthy but grim dramas were making television unbearable to watch. BUGS was a welcome antidote.
Sure it didn;t get everything right (what does?) and Stuart Doughty constantly trying to avoid the ‘genre’ tag in every interview he did didn’t help. But there was a firm following for BUGS and whilst it may not have been The Avengers, it fitted into that niche of The Champions, The New Avengers etc.
Series 2 and 3 were (in my mind at least) the best series of the four. Everything was working really well, the cast and crew seemed to be producing an exciting, entertaining show with it’s tongue placed just far enough in it’s cheek to not take itself too seriously. I loved it and still do.
Just a shame that the DVDs have no interviews or commentaries with cast or writers. I’d love to know more about the behind-the-scenes workings of the show. I was having an online conversation with Colin Brake about it some time ago but we lost touch…
It would have been great to have Colin on the commentary mike. Just about all the episodes that I didn’t do went through his hands in one way or another.
Revelation Films produced the DVDs – I did some stuff with them and found them an outfit with a serious enthusiasm for the product but not much cash to throw around on extras.
Small point of interest – Alice, who handled publicity for Revelation, was related to Albert Fennell.
Small world!
I did do an on-camera interview for the boxed set which I thought was going to be merged in with other extras, but they pretty much used all of it in a stand-alone disc. I went and stood out on the banks of the Thames with HMS Belfast behind me, slowly freezing to the spot on a cold wintry day. I reckoned that one day people would look at it and say, “See, there’s where he got the pneumonia that killed him.”
Ah, the BOXED set. I’m one of those unfortunate fans who was so surprised to see BUGS available on DVD so quickly, I bought them on their original release! Made a change from the ropey VHS copies I kept for years 🙂
I’ll look forward to some blogs about the show in the future. Glad to see the pneumonia didn’t finish you off 🙂
It’s a rainy afternoon in July, and feeling a cold coming on, I’ve spent the afternoon curled up on the couch, watching episodes from the ’67 season of The Avengers.
I was 12 in 1967, the first year I remember seeing this show on American television. It was THE coolest thing, by far, on the tube – must-see TV on Friday nights. My all-time favourite espisode was ‘The Joker’ – she did the hanging-onto-her-sanity-by-her-manicured-fingernails bit to a T in that one. And it was different from the other episodes in that it was darker and more sinister; the tension was heightened greatly (in my 12-year-old imagination, anyway).
I was CRUSHED when Mrs. Peel’s hubby showed up from whereverhewas, and she left. I hated Tara with a passion, and stopped watching it after she entered the picture.
Fast-forward 40 years to last spring, when I was browsing through Amazon.com for dvds for my school’s library collection: there it was, a 1967 dvd of my fave old series, on sale no less. I bought it and, subsequently, several other dvds to complete the ’66 and ’67 seasons. And 40 years after first thrilling to ‘The Joker’ I enjoyed it all over again.
You’re absolutely right, there never will be anything like The Avengers ever again, and I’m fine with that, as long as we can enjoy the original whenever we like.
It’s a rainy afternoon in July, and feeling a cold coming on, I’ve spent the afternoon curled up on the couch, watching episodes from the ’67 season of The Avengers.
I was 12 in 1967, the first year I remember seeing this show on American television. It was THE coolest thing, by far, on the tube – must-see TV on Friday nights. My all-time favourite espisode was ‘The Joker’ – she did the hanging-onto-her-sanity-by-her-manicured-fingernails bit to a T in that one. And it was different from the other episodes in that it was darker and more sinister; the tension was heightened greatly (in my 12-year-old imagination, anyway).
I was CRUSHED when Mrs. Peel’s hubby showed up from whereverhewas, and she left. I hated Tara with a passion, and stopped watching it after she entered the picture.
Fast-forward 40 years to last spring, when I was browsing through Amazon.com for dvds for my school’s library collection: there it was, a 1967 dvd of my fave old series, on sale no less. I bought it and, subsequently, several other dvds to complete the ’66 and ’67 seasons. And 40 years after first thrilling to ‘The Joker’ I enjoyed it all over again.
You’re absolutely right, there never will be anything like The Avengers ever again, and I’m fine with that, as long as we can enjoy the original whenever we like.
Re THE JOKER — you may want to check out this 3-CD set:
http://tinyurl.com/57dbtp
It’s a Laurie Johnson career retrospective and a great bargain. The first disc contains over 70 minutes of Avengers incidental music including the full-length “mein liebe rose” track used to torment Mrs Peel in the episode. Although, strangely, it’s minus the German vocal.
I’m thinking of having it played at my funeral. Imagine how it’ll creep everyone out!