The Avengers

No Assembly Required

The Avengers
1961 -1969
161 episodes
From extremely mislabelled 
Studio Canal sets on DVD and Blu Ray

John Steed was not the original Avenger in The Avengers. Lots of people seem to forget that. There were also five Avengers girls and a couple of other regulars… people seem to forget that too.

I watched the early episodes in the early 1970s, between the ages of four to seven. They were on repeat in the afternoons and I watched them on our old black and white telly with my mum. I don’t recall seeing the Hendry episodes which is about right, they were put out live and only three and a third episodes of that first season have survived.

Anyway, since me and my mother had enjoyed our recent rewatch of The New Avengers so much I decided to invest in the various box sets (and single edition in the case of the episode Tunnel Of Fear, which was rediscovered years after the Series 1 and 2 box set was issued) so we could watch all the surviving episodes.

Of which, from the first season, 22 and two thirds are missing. We have everything else, though so, out of 161 episodes… we must have watched 138 episodes this time around. Not doing too badly, I guess. The series was kind of a sideways follow up to Police Surgeon, with some of the actors but none of the characters coming over to the new show.

Okay, so the first Avenger was Ian Hendry as Dr. David Keel. His fiance gets murdered in the first show, Hot Snow and, that’s all we have of that first episode. The stuff we are no longer able to see is the great Patrick Macnee turning up as John Steed. A shady man of mystery working for a shady organisation who offers Keel the chance to work for him to foil the criminals who killed his girlfriend. And, after this, to keep helping him out to eradicate criminals like them. A kind of, freelance Avenger, if you will.

I quizzed my late father when he was alive about this first season (two of which Macnee isn’t even in) and he said Steed was always an ambiguous character at this time. You were never really sure who he was working for and why… or even whether he was an actual good guy or someone very dark grey. And from the episodes with him in which have survived from this first season… well he certainly does play it like that.

But the whole thing is grim and hard hitting and not quite what the show would later become. For instance, you couldn’t imagine one of the ‘good guys’ holding up a loaded syringe and threatening to squirt one of the bad guys in the face with acid in the later shows but, that’s exactly what Dr. Keel does in one of those surviving episodes.

Hendry was pretty good in these episodes but I always liked him as an actor. Now Macnee is perceived as having a complete character change from the first series into the next seasons but, now I’ve seen how all those episodes play out, I disagree. He’s playing him the same way pretty consistently with not much of the perceived softening and just, maybe, becoming a little more sophisticated in steadying increments as the various seasons progress.

And there’s also Ingrid Hafner as regular Carol Wilson in the first series. Dr. Keel’s secretary and helper in his adventures. So technically the first Avenger girl. She does her bit as does Steed who, in the episode Tunnel Of Fear, seems just as quirky and eccentric as he does in the later episodes. Although the trademark bowler hat and umbrella aren’t a permanent, regular fixture until sometime in Series 3.

Steed and his new recruited, freelance and sometimes reluctant partners take over from Series 2. We have Dr. Martin King (played by Jon Rollason), the brilliant and very scatty nightclub singer Venus Smith (played by Julie Stevens) and, of course, Cathy Gale (as played by Honor Blackman). It was like they were doing live auditions, alternating between the co-star role week after week. Plus a few of Steed’s bosses occasionally turn up. And the stories do start getting a little quirkier and unique in places, depending on who was doing the writing.

Cathy Gale, of course, stuck... and she was the main - leather clad for the last reel hand to hand combat sequences - co-star for all of Series 3. 

The first season was shot live and the second/third seasons were shot on videotape… and it shows on all three seasons. People are constantly flubbing their lines because they were only doing one take, you get flies landing on the camera lens and you can sometimes see the crew… and in one wonderful moment you can see several of them wheeling a big old camera onto the next set through an open door. Wonderful stuff. Honor Blackman was lobbying for them to start shooting on film, which they did from series 4 onwards. Alas, by the time she got her wish she’d left the show to star in Goldfinger (reviewed by me here). There are a few references to that in the episodes themselves. In the last episode she’s going off on holiday to ‘pussyfoot’ around (a reference to her Bond character Pussy Galore) and, in the fourth series Christmas episode, Steed receives a Christmas card from Cathy Gale from Fort Knox.

Okay, so Diana Rigg turned up as her replacement for Series 4-6 (not 4-5 as Studio Canal will have you believe… I’ll get to that soon) and her character, Emma Peel (named after a shortening of the industry term Man Appeal to M Appeal), is certainly the one that casual watchers seem to remember. The Avengers was at the height of its popularity by this point.

She’s confident like Cathy Gale and she’s also, at least at first, still just a freelance with her own brilliant life going on at the same time but, by the time of her departure, something subtle and wordless has shifted the tone and, somewhere around  the time of opening sketches playing around the theme of “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed!”, which followed the title sequence, she somehow ended up as a full employee of… well, whoever Steed works for. Indeed, regular boss figure Mother, played beautifully by Patrick Newell, becomes the regular for the final, extended seventh season and his first episode is Emma Peel’s last one, which also introduces new Avengers girl Tara King, played wonderfully by Linda Thorson. At the end of the episode, after Mrs. Peel’s long thought dead husband turns up alive and well in an Amazon jungle, Steed tells Mother he needs a replacement and asks specifically for Tara King.

By this time, the show was getting more and more surreal and leaning more and more into the comedy… with deadly agents turning invisible using a kind of chameleon paste, fake time travel plots and even an episode as a remake of The Maltese Falcon (with Stratford Johns and Ronald Lacey filling in for Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre).

The casts throughout the various series were great with lots of returning actors like Peter Cushing (this and The New Avengers) and Christopher Lee and some actors that were reappearing as different people so regularly… people like Roy Kinnear, Philip Madoc, Peter Bowles, Julian Glover and Warren Mitchell… that they were almost drawing regular paychecks on the show.

There were some great title sequences too. The first three seasons had different, often alternating titles set to Johnny Dankworth’s original theme music for the show with Laurie Johnson coming in on the music for Seasons 4-7 (with some help from Howard Blake). It’s funny, even though Diana Rigg (who was certainly brilliant in the show) was not my favourite Avengers girl (I preferred Julie Stevens, Honor Blackman and Linda Thorson), I preferred the two title sequences she got over her three seasons, my favourite being her original black and white stills montage, which carried on the style (to some extent without the posterisation), of the previous sequences.

Oh, about that Laurie Johnson opening music from seasons 4-7... this would be the one that is most often remembered from the show but, the one you always find on commercial recordings (and to be fair, my favourite iteration), is the new arrangement of it he wrote for the final season with Tara King. There’s a lot more punchiness to it but my favourite section is a bit of counterpoint melody which plays on the second part of the main melodic line. Now it’s just a thing I always knew from the music but watching it now against the images, I finally realised that it’s a specific melody for Linda Thorson’s new character. Just after it starts on the titles we focus on Tara and, it’s also used as leitmotif for her character on occasion when she comes on screen in various stories. She even plays it herself on an organ in one episode. So, watching it now, that music totally makes sense to me and as each episode progresses, it pushes that connection. So I was surprised when... oh no, I’ll get to the 1998 movie in another review. 

And I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed most of the episodes I saw from the entire run of the show, including the one with the triffid creature from outer space. It’s all pretty good stuff and they even ran a spoof episode on my favourite TV show, The Prisoner, at one point.

And, with an aside to acknowledge stylish directors like Robert Feust (who would go on to direct the Dr. Phibes films and The Final Programme, reviewed here) I have to also acknowledge the slap dash way in which Studio Canal has decided to release these…

For starters, on the Blu Ray called Series 5, you have both Series 5 and the much shorter Series 6. With Season 7 turning up in the next set under the title Series 6! Worse than this, which is pretty bad already, they choose to present all the episodes in production order rather than their intended broadcast order. Which is totally different. So you’ll constantly be chopping and changing discs to find the real next episode throughout the entire run. Which is exactly the kind of rubbish presentation I would expect from Studio Canal but it doesn’t lessen the sting of the thing.

And that’s me pretty much done with The Avengers. A series I would totally recommend with the slight warning that, on most episodes, the visible camera boom will be your constant companion. And if you want to read up on the further exploits of John Steed and the brilliant follow up series, you can read my review of The New Avengers right here.