The New Avengers

Purdey Hair

The New Avengers
ITV 1976-77
Two series
26 episodes
Studio Canal Blu Ray Box 

When I was around four or five years old, in the very early 1970s, I used to watch repeats of The Avengers on TV and I remember liking it a lot. I saw the Honor Blackman episodes (indeed, I must have seen many of the episodes I suspect are now no longer with us from the first season), the Diana Rigg episodes and the Linda Thorson episodes... and I believe some of my earliest name fictional character recognitions were Kathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King*… along with other usual suspects like Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Doctor Who and Scott Tracy.

And of course there was the solid rock of a character in every episode, the male lead in pretty much every incarnation of The Avengers... John Steed, with his bowler hat and umbrella. Played, as always, by the great Patrick Macnee.

So it was with no small amount of excitement when the 8 year old version of myself received the news that a brand new series of The Avengers, entitled rather practically as The New Avengers, would be on my TV screen soon.

It was on fairly late on a Saturday or Sunday evening, if I’m recalling correctly… and we sat down to watch the first episode, The Eagles Nest, about a group of modern nazis who has been keeping Hitler’s body on ice all these years, until medical science was able to resuscitate him. And I have to say, it was pretty good stuff. We all loved it as a family and it even had Peter Cushing in the episode, as the scientist the new nazis kidnapped to get the job done right.

Now, not long after the show had started, my mother and I were run over by two cars which hit each other before mounting the pavement, out of control, and clobbering us. Since my jaw bone from my ‘against all odds’ still attached head couldn’t be wired back in the normal way, I had to take a few years off school to allow it to heal itself. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess but the problem was, I was stuck in hospital for the first week or two and the nurses on the children’s ward wouldn’t let me stay up with the television on to watch The New Avengers. Which I was very concerned about at the time. Although I did have the special souvenir magazine put out by TV Times to comfort me at some point, which was pretty thick and covered a lot of the show (and predecessors)… an issue which I’m pleased to say I still have to this day.

So, alas, I didn’t see a fair few of the episodes on its original run, which makes me happy to be finally catching up with them again after all these years, in a new Blu Ray set put out by Studio Canal, which looks good but is way too expensive for what is, after all, just 26 episodes.

And I watched these all recently with my mum and it’s still great. Patrick Macnee was still charming as Steed and his two new, supporting Avengers, Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and Joanna Lumley as the amazing Purdey (shortly before she would amaze us all again by taking on one of the title roles in Sapphire And Steel), are brilliant.

Some of the episodes… and this is no surprise since the show was using the same writers and producers of the bulk of the original incarnation… are able to capture the surreal and fun spirit of the originals and, others are a bit more humdrum but, even so, the chemistry between the three leads and the dialogue writing for them, was absolutely brilliant and I was a little surprised that these whimsical ‘to and fros’ between the characters still hold up today.

For instance, when Purdey pulls her bra off to give to Mike to use as a slingshot to get them out of a jam, he says “Why didn’t you burn it with all the other ladies?” To which she replies, “I didn’t need to. I already knew I was liberated.”

There were guest directors as well, such as Robert Feust, who you may remember directed The Final Programme (reviewed by me here). And, of course, many actors and actresses who would suddenly turn up for an episode (because who wouldn’t want to be in The Avengers) such as Jenny Runacre, Jon Finch, Ronald Lacey, Deep Roy and even the great Caroline Munro.

They even have a bit of a reunion, with Ian Hendry returning for an episode, although not as the co-starring lead character he played alongside Macnee in the early years of the show. Not to mention an episode where the two bad guys are played by Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins, who would bring exactly the same chemistry they had here to the producer’s next TV show, The Professionals.

Not only that, the set includes the last four episodes, shot and produced in Canada, proudly proclaiming before the pre-credits sequence that it’s The New Avengers in Canada, before going onto the usual action sequence which would then freeze at the crucial part... followed by the wonderful animated credits sequence that came in from about halfway through the first season… and then going back to the freeze frame and concluding the opening scene. As was the format of all the episodes.

And of course, all the music, including the wonderful new opening title music which cunningly utilises his old baseline from the original show in a new way, is by the original show composer Laurie Johnson, who came on in the early days of the show after original composer Johnny Dankworth left. The show is filled with good music including a few sly nods to Johnson’s mentor, composer Bernard Herrmann.

And with episodes dedicated to such antagonists as killer birds, a giant rat in the sewers and a homicidal building… it’s just a fun packed snapshot of what late 1970s TV could be. The New Avengers makes for a nice, if prohibitively expensive slice of TV heaven that audiences of a certain age should surely enjoy and a worthy successor to the original show. Go on, give it a go.

*I’m not forgetting Avenger girls Ingrid Hafner as Carol Wilson and Julie Stevens as Venus Smith... but that’s for another review (coming to a blog near you, sometime late 2026 or early 2027).