Gone But Not Forgotten: The Avengers
Mrs Peel we’re needed !
It was late on a Saturday night ( well Sunday morning really ) after a particularly long session of the Marvel Super Heroes RPG ( the original version – god I feel old ! ) and I’d arrived home and was ready for bed ( saving the world really takes its toll you know ) and I turned on the TV while I made myself a drink and there was an episode of The Avengers on and I was hooked.
I’d seen the show before and I’d enjoyed it for what it was but it never made any lasting impression, this episode had killer androids and the guest star was Peter Cushing star of many Hammer horror films but probably best known as Grand Moff Tarkin from Star Wars.
Now I admit the main reason I sat down and watched the episode was because Peter Cushing was in it but it soone became apparent there was an amazing chemistry between Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg which would make even the weaker episodes of the series worth watching.
A ritual was soon formed, stagger home from our weekly gaming session, ingest large amounts of coffee or some similar caffinated drink and catch another episode of The Avengers.
For years the only episodes of the show I ever saw were the color ones until the DVDs started recieving a ( very expensive ) region 1 release, at the time I couldn’t afford to get them but I did mangage to convince a friend of mine it was a good idea that he got them, as it turns out he loved The Avengers too and quite rightly as it’s a fantastic show.
It’s amazing how much the show evolved over it’s run, it started out in Black and White and was a fairly straight forward thriller / adventure series that was filmed almost live and it often felt like you were watching a play, unfortunately most of the first series of the show has been lost and only the first 15 minutes of the first episode still exist which is tragic because those first 15 minutes are fantastic.
In the first series John Steed is really the sidekick to Dr David Keel, Keel first encounters Steed while trying to doscover who killed Peggy his receptionist and wife to be.
Eventually Dr Keel ( and the actor who played him ) moved on and Steed was joined by Mrs Cathy Gale, clad in leather Mrs Gale took no crap and was always there to assist with a handy Judo move or two for any evil doers.
Time would pass and Mrs Gale would move on ( actress honor Blackman was offered the role of Pussy Galore and the James Bond film Goldfinger ).
It was time for Steed to gain a new companion and herald in what many consider the be the shows finest era, Diana Rigg joins the show as Mrs Emma Peel ( be still my heart ).
As the show went on it became more and more quirky and fantastic and less of a standard thriller, there were death rays, killer androids, telepathic man eating plants from Venus shrink rays and a host of other wierd and wonderful plot devices.
All good things of course come to an end and Mrs Peel departed the series ( Diana Rigg was offered a role in the James Bond Movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – which also featured Joanna Lumley who would go on to star as Purdey in The New Avengers ), Rigg was replaced by Linda Thorsen as Tara King and the show ran for another two seasons before being cancelled.
There have been two less than successful attempts at bringing back The Avengers, the 70’s TV series The New Avengers, a show that I personally feel isn’t as bad as it’s often made out to be, it still has it’s moments but it just feels like a very diluted version of The Avengers and the less said about the big budget Avengers movie from the 90’s the better ( although it did have a fantastic score ).
So what is it that makes the show so great ?, it was always well-crafted despite any budgetary or technical limitations it suffered, it was quirky and had some fantastic dialog and it was very very English.
In the UK at the moment they are in the process of releasing re-mastered DVDs and they are things of beauty, it’s great that this show is finally getting the treatment that it so richly deserves.
Forget Chuck or The Man from UNCLE this is classic Spy-Fi in action and our heroes save the world with style.