Agente speciale

One of my all-time favourite series, which hits its peak with the colour Emma Peel episodes. Style, humour, character and a wonderful hitchcockian macabre atmosphere.

Macnee is one of the greatest, most charismatic, leading men to ever grace Television. Rigg has become iconic in TV history, also appreciated was the groundwork set by Honor Blackman for strong females roles.

Great show. Great music. Great production values once it hit it's fifth series. Great atmosphere all round.

PART ONE: THE EARLY YEARS (61-64)

When most people think of THE AVENGERS, they often think of the Emma Peel episodes and tend to ignore the magic that the entire series is. What began as a cheap weekly live-broadcast B&W thriller managed to become a major color series with quite high production values and also the first British TV show ever to be exported to the US.

THE AVENGERS began in 1961, as an attempt to cash in ABC's previous medical thriller POLICE SURGEON. The former stared Ian Hendry who became one of the biggest TV stars of the time. The show failed to be a hit however. So Hendry and his co-star Ingrid Hafner were called in to do a replacement called THE AVENGERS. The weekly show would pair up the widowed Dr. Keel (Hendry) with charming secret agent John Steed (Patrick McNee) as they hunted down criminals and diabolical masterminds while walking on the noir-like soaked London streets wearing raincoats. Hafner starred in some episodes as nurse Carol. Only two of these episodes are known to exist, and they have been rarely seen. After many videotaped episodes, the show became a hit and Hendry decided it was a perfect time to start a movie career. He quit the show and so did Hafner. This left co-star McNee all by himself.

The second season started in 1962 and McNee was paired up with Dr. King (Jon Rollason), a temporary replacement. After shooting left-over season one scripts, King was dropped and Julie Stevens as jazz singer Venus Smith was brought in to be Steed's new female partner. A bad one by the way. Not only was Stevens a young unexperienced actress, but the character itself was a manipulative innocent teenager that would always become the damsel in distress and have to be saved during the climax. Weak material here. However, the writers decided to pair Steed up with a different kind of female partner. One that would be written as a male character on the script, and play it like a man. And so was born television's first true independent woman: Mrs. Catherine Gale. Played to perfection by Honor Blackman, the high-tempered Cathy would always have "battle of the sexes" arguments with Steed, hit him with outrageous answers and punchlines, ("Good morning Cathy, what's for breakfast?" "Cook it and see!") and always try to erase his sexist side. Also notable were Cathy's leather catsuits that launched an entire fashion in England, as well as her weekly judo fights with male thugs. The many Cathy Gale episodes have remained in obscurity during the years for the fact that they were videotaped on low production values and transfered into poor prints with lackluster sound. This makes them almost unwatchable. And the bad guest acting and all the technical bloopers that were never fixed during editing didn't help. But all the purists who try to avoid these episodes are actually missing a great load of fun. If you overlook all the negative elements, you are left with entertaining stories that always surprise you with all the wit, poison, and humor from McNee and Blackman. You would also be surprised at how superior the material is since back then the show took itself seriously.

Some episodes speak for themselves: MANDRAKE is a slow-paced but well done suspense with a great fight scene with Blackman and wrestler Jack Parlo. THE LITTLE WONDERS is a funny episode featuring Lois Maxwell (a.k.a Miss Moneypenny) as a wicked machine-gun shooting evil nun. DRESSED TO KILL is a well done variation of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians. THE MAN WITH TWO SHADOWS was one of the first spy stories to use the look-alike element. And THE CHARMERS is perhaps one of the best episodes ever.

It is true that these shows don't even come close to the wonderful filmed seasons that would start in 1965 and they do not hold up to today's standards when compared to other shows of the time. But the biggest reason you should go back to watch these episodes is Cathy Gale herself. A wonderful actress (Blackman) and a wonderful character, Gale is one of the most important female characters of all time. She is for sure my favorite out of all of Steed's partners. Long live Cathy Gale!

When I was 16 this series meant a lot to me.

Like other American fans, I became aware of it when it burst onto American TV in summer 1966. What a revelation it was to someone who'd grown up watching American TV! It was unpredictable: it mixed mystery, adventure, science fiction, and satire in always changing proportions. The mysteries were truly intriguing, the adventures truly exciting, the eerie situations truly frightening, the fantastic explanations truly ingenious, and the jokes truly funny. In later seasons the show formularized its conflicting elements, like every other show. But in the beginning you couldn't guess what might come next.

And of course there was the sex and violence. It seems impossible now that there was once a time when there was too little sex or violence on TV, but what there was was dull and stodgy. The American network had omitted the most suggestive episodes, but left in a few lines of dialogue that startled at the time. The climactic fight scenes were much more exciting than those on American shows: dynamically staged and photographed, and with a satirical edge, which was lost in later seasons.

The writing was very good too. To us in the States it seemed even better than it was because we hadn't then seen a lot of British TV. The scripts were solidly constructed, tightly packed, and full of clever dialogue. Patrick Macnee has claimed in interviews that "there was no clever dialogue" except what he and Diana Rigg rewrote, but the lines of the supporting characters belie that.

The atmosphere of the show was new to me: a dark, bright, sharp, woozy, ordered, but unpredictable world where reality could be rolled like a die, figures of speech could become facts (a killing rain, an underground club), and you couldn't be sure that anybody was what he seemed. If I'd seen Alfred Hitchcock's early films at the time, I would have recognized this as an exaggeration of their milieu, to the verge of parody: those flower sellers and organ grinders seemingly hanging out on street corners but really doing spy business. The world of The Avengers extended beyond them to encompass killer robots and plants from outer space--but only a certain distance beyond. (The failure to observe that distance spoiled many of the later shows.)

That atmosphere stayed with me for years. It carried me through dreary jobs by enabling me to imbue mundane surroundings in schools and industrial parks with fantastic and sinister possibilities. Other shows tried to imitate it, but never successfully. How could they, when The Avengers itself had lost it and never recaptured it again?

The primary technical device for bringing about this atmosphere was the teaser. The Avengers made an art out of it. A man in a field is rained on, tries to escape, is rained into the ground. Superimpose title: "A Surfeit of H2O." The title is the punchline. A man breaks into a house and opens a door; a lion jumps out at him. Title: "The House That Jack Built." And so on.

The puzzle posed by the opener often suggested philosophical or metaphysical possibilities, but they were never followed up on. The solution generally turned out to be slightly science-fictional, and the climax, rather than expanding on the potential implications of the story's premise, was just a comic fight. But it was remarkable in itself that the series could progress from one to the other with such deftness, beginning with a cosmic inversion and steadily narrowing it down to a trivial joke.

The heroes were invincible (otherwise the stories would have been too horrifying), inexplicable (those of us who didn't know the show's origins had no idea why they were called Avengers), androgynous (Steed was the fancy dresser, Mrs. Peel did the manhandling), paradoxical (Mrs. Peel was widowed, yet somehow virginal), and timeless. (In subsequent seasons, they were turned into pop icons, but divested of most of the twists that had made them interesting.)

What was considered by common consent the best episode of all, "The House That Jack Built," I didn't see originally (it was a choice between that and a screening of "The Music Box" with Laurel and Hardy). When I finally got to see it in syndication, five years later, it was like being taken back in time and watching the series for the first time. I was just as fascinated, just as mystified, just as amazed.

I set aside my Wednesday nights especially to watch the series. Apparently not many other people did. But that was always how it was with everything that developed a cult. At the time I seemed to be almost the only one who took an interest in it. Only years afterward would people write about it as if it had been a universally shared generational experience.

The following year the news came out that The Avengers would return. And so it did--sort of. But despite assiduous effort I gradually had to accede to an awareness that it was no longer very good. It had been dumbed down for Americans. It wasn't the same. It was gone.

And now, looking back on it forty years later, I wonder (and can never know for certain): was it really so good as it seemed to me, in that one happy season of my youth? And can anything ever seem that good again?

The adventures of a suave British agent John Steed and his sexy female sidekicks...

This highly popular and long running spy show was the brainchild of Canadian born producer Sidney Newman. It began life as a medical crime drama called "Police Surgeon" starring Ian Hendry as Dr David Keel a pathologist working for the London police. When this failed to take on with the public, the character called John Steed was created. In the first episode of the revamped show renamed "The Avengers", John Steed helps Dr David Keel to avenge the death of his wife because he happened to be after the same man. Steed and Keel would collaborate many more times to rid the streets of criminals. The new show took on much better but Ian Hendry departed after the first series and was replaced by Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, the first of the better known sexy sidekicks that would put the show firmly on the British TV show map. Blackman lasted two series and was then replaced by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, a sexy auburn haired leather cladded woman who was expert at karate as well as having skills in a wide range of subjects such as chemistry. By now John Steed's English gentlemen image had been fully opened up, his bowler hat and umbrella was inspired by the film "Q-Plains". Steed's image also consisted of suave suits and he drove vintage cars, first a 1927 4 and a half litre Bentley and occasionally a speed six Bentley (circa 1926) and later a 1927 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost in the Linda Thorson series. In one or two episodes, Steed could be seen driving a 1927 Rolls Royce Phantom One. Emma Peel drove a 1966 Lotus Elan and Tara King was often seen behind the wheel of a Lotus as well.

By now the show had cracked the American market and it's success lead to the use of colour film for the last two series. Diana Rigg left in 1967 and her replacement was a young Canadian actress called Linda Thorson who played a young agent called Tara King. There was initial doubts about her suitability to the part, but the script writers modelled the character as a young agent who Steed was grooming and her skills developed as the series progressed. The series was a tremendous success in the UK, but in America it was less so. Therefore in 1969 the show was cancelled. However, in 1976, a revival series entitled "The New Avengers" surfaced co-produced by original producers Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens and a French production company (see separate review). Alas, financial problems saw the show cancelled after a year.

"The Avengers" is without doubt one of British TV's finest hours. In almost every episode superb character actors were drafted in to support Macnee and his co-stars. The plots were usually tight and the combination of fantasy and a unique brand of British humour rose the show well above the average sixties spy show. The most representative segments of the show are without doubt the Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson series. The Honor Blackman series has dated badly because the primitive video tape production techniques are less effective than the later filmed episodes and the style of the show was never really opened up until Diana Rigg joined the show. The writers most associated with the look of the programme are Brian Clemens and Philip Levene. There is only one episode of the Ian Hendry series left in existence and the majority of these were transmitted live.

Finally, here is a list of my recommended episodes, all are available on DVD.

Diana Rigg series: "The Gravediggers", "The Master Minds", "What The Butler Saw", "Room Without A View", "Epic", "The Living Dead" and "The Forget Me Knot" (in which Emma Peel left and Tara King joined).

Linda Thorson series: "Love All", "Requiem", "The Morning After", "The Rotters" and "Bizarre" (the very last episode in the series saw Steed and Tara take off in a rocket).

An absolute masterpiece in British television, The Avengers is a timeless, witty, fantastical series which is as, if not more, popular today than it was more than 40 years ago.

This series has something for everybody - gangsters, diabolical masterminds, glamorous girls, car chases, fights and endless glasses of champagne.

It is interesting to see how the series developed from its humble beginnings in 1961. Playing it straight in the early days it gradually became more and more way-out with wackier and wackier plots and characters. The Cathy Gale and Emma Peel eras are regarded by many to be the high point of the series although there are high spots in virtually every point in the show's history.

Only one episode exists from Series 1 with the mysterious, shadowy Steed being a much more sinister character to Ian Hendry's open Doctor Keel. Then we have much verbal sparring and innuendo between Steed and the delicious Cathy Gale and her kinky boots. Film and eventually colour were introduced with the feline Emma Peel and her high kicks and the show closed the 60s in gaudy, cartoonish style with the naive Tara King and her snazzy Lotus Europa.

This is British television at its best and a true legend in broadcasting. The 1970s version, The New Avengers, has it's own charm in a way but is best regarded as a totally separate entity as this original series was...well...original!