“Look — (Stop Me If You've Heard This One) — But There Were
These Two Fellers...”
Turning on my television, one Sunday morning, I found an
unfeasibly young-looking John Cleese, wearing a bow tie, trying to prevent a
woman from entering a room containing shelves filled with eggs, on which were
painted clown faces, as a mark of copyright. (There is a real Clown Egg Register,
but they moved to using ceramic eggs in the 1980s.) Later, I saw a group of
henchmen taking orders from Punch & Judy puppets, before killing their
targets using slapstick, and also a comedy writer, played by Bernard Cribbins,
wildly spouting one-liners before he is killed, in a room filled with
scrunched-up pieces of paper, filled with aborted attempts at writing a joke.
Yes, I also thought “The Avengers” – the “actual”
“Avengers,” not the Marvel Comics one - was supposed to be about espionage, but
this episode, using the long title above, came during the show’s sixth and last
season in 1968-69, by which point it had become a parody of espionage shows, of
Britain in the Swinging Sixties, and of itself. In the United States, “The
Avengers” was shown on ABC, the same network as the Adam West “Batman” series,
and even if the punches and gunshots were real here, the overall tone was much
the same. In fact, the story of the show shares some similarities with a later
ABC show – “Happy Days.”
When it began in 1961, “The Avengers” was the story of a
police surgeon, Dr David Keel (Ian Hendry), who is contacted by John Steed
(Patrick Macnee) to solve cases, with stories that played the idealism of the
former against the professionalism of the other. Hendry was the star, and
Macnee did not spear in every episode. A few episodes of this first series
still exist, and they are very engaging, with quite a bit of grit and grime you
do not expect if you have only seen the later episodes. In the early 1960s, UK
television dramas were filmed as if they were live broadcasts of a stage play,
with multiple cameras, sets and a few film inserts, with as much tension coming
from this set-up as from the stories themselves – a couple of fluffed lines
will make their way through, but it doesn’t matter.
Ian Hendry would leave “The Avengers” for a film career, and
the show was changed – Steed’s character became more defined as working for a
branch of British intelligence, and his trenchcoated look was swapped for
Saville Row suits. A couple of different helpers were tried, but the impact of
Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, a tough, leather-suited anthropologist with
skills in hand-to-hand combat, defined a new sexual tension that became
integral to the show - Macnee and Blackman would later record the novelty song
“Kinky Boots” together.
When Honor Blackman would leave for her own film career,
starting with “Goldfinger,” “The Avengers” stopped production for six months,
in order to work out how to proceed. This is where the “Happy Days” analogy
comes in, as “jumping the shark” comes from the moment Arthur Fonzarelli jumped
over a shark tank on a motorcycle, and the show stopped being about Richie
Cunningham. With “The Avengers” handed over to a team that dealt more with film
than TV, the show was consciously turned into the most expensive advertising
campaign for British tourism, with stately homes and countryside on view. This attracted
ABC, who began commissioning episodes of “The Avengers” for the US, with the UK
seeing them later – this change of affairs turned the studio-bound show into a
Technicolor action spectacle shot entirely on film, and shot like a feature
film, with the equivalent of a million-pound budget for every episode.
The characters changed again. John Steed was the epitome of
a gentleman spy, with the origin of his orders no longer explained, apart from
saying that he, and his sidekick, “were needed.” Plots could now incorporate
science fiction, comedy, or whatever the writers wanted, anything as an excuse
to show off the style of the show. A need for Blackman’s replacement to be
someone also with “man appeal” – “m. appeal” - created Emma Peel, with Diana
Rigg’s character holding their own as much as Cathy Gale, with superior skills,
including in chemistry (both scientific and sexual – Macnee thought Steed and
Peel did go to bed together away from the camera).
The last series of “The Avengers”, with Linda Thorson’s more
innocent Tara King replacing Rigg’s Peel, was supposed to be a return to a
grittier type of story, but this swung wildly with stories in the older style,
which led to the episode featuring John Cleese and Bernard Cribbins. When ABC
cancelled the show, no-one in the UK recommissioned it, and the show died -
until French and Canadian investment led to “The New Avengers” in 1976.
By the end of the 1960s, the influence of “The Avengers” was
very much in evidence – we would not have the ATV/ITC string of more outlandish
shows like “The Persuaders!”, “The Champions,” “Jason King” and “Randall &
Hopkirk (Deceased)” - although they can also claim their lineage from “The
Saint,” starring Roger Moore, which itself became more frivolous over time. The
superficial gloss of “The Avengers” is fascinating to watch back, reflecting
its time perfectly, but now I know what the show was like when it started, that
has also become a good watch, even if it is entirely unrelated to what it would
become.
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