Los vengadores

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.

Definitely 60's and it is obvious. Yet this is still one of the most fun shows ever made. John Steed is the epitome of British class, right down to the Bentley in British Racing Green (notwithstanding the Tara King years).

Then there is Emma Peel, mmmmm Emma Peel. Aside from Diana Rigg's obvious physical charms her real appeal is the strength of her character. Totally confident, cool, classy, and capable (driving a Lotus Elan was also a big plus) Diana Rigg created a female character (which was resisted by the producers tooth and nail I understand) that surprised me even though I first saw the show over 20 years after it went off the air. Emma Peel was devoid of the traditional female stereotypes that permeate the airwaves always in need of rescue and if not are total cartoons. She could kick ass and frequently saved Steed's butt in the process. Mass media still has a major allergy to original, tough female characters which is a testament to the originality of the character.

Something was lost after Tara King took over. It was a return to the stereotypes and the show lost something for me, that and I didn't like Steed's new car, just didn't have the same class as his former Bentley.

Still I highly recommend watching it, fun plots, wry humor, over the top villains, great characters, and an impossible lack of blood. How can you not have fun watching this?

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?

PART TWO: KINKY BOOTS AND BOWLER HAT (65-68)

THE AVENGERS was already a popular show in England during the early 60s. However, it all backfired when Honor Blackman decided to leave the series in order to star in GOLDFINGER. When season three ended, ABC decided to pull the plug on THE AVENGERS and sold the series to Telemen Limited. Albert Fennel and Brian Clemmens were both recruited to keep up the standard. Plus, a big revolution happened: The series moved from videotape to film and the budget was also sightly improved.

But even knowing Patrick McNee came back, the studio faced a major problem: Cathy was gone. Since Blackman had already made the character so popular, it was decided a new partner would be created to be paired up with Steed. So Elisabeth Shappard was cast as Emma Peel (Man appeal! Get it?) and production started. But it was soon noticed Sheppard's cold beauty and persona was not right for the role. So Sheakespeare stage actress Diana Rigg was cast as a replacement. The show premiered in 1965 as a completely different deal.

And of course, the rest is history... Diana Rigg brought the charm and kindness that Blackman lacked, altrough she lacked Honor's strenght and toughness. Patrick McNee also played a very different Steed: He went from a James Bond-like sexist macho man to a more kind gentleman spy. The new AVENGERS became so popular that it was exported to the US. Yes, the fourth season was indeed revolutionary. But what made it so much better than the previous seasons? The most obvious answer would be Emma Peel, or the bigger budget, but I would give credit to the writers. This time, the scripts were much sharper and the show never took itself very seriously. And then there is the wonderful chemistry between McNee and Rigg. The Steed/Emma relationship was subliminally romantic and funny. They always enjoyed great lines togheter.

Some season four episodes are good even for today's standards: THE GRAVEDIGGERS has a hilarious silent film spoof climax. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT was a clautrophobic "girl alone in a house" sort of thriller. THE CYBERNAUTS brought a strong sci-fi element. TOO MANY CHRISTMAS TREES brought the Steed/Emma chemistry to he highest calibur. And let's not forget a TOUCH OF BRIMSTONE that gets the award for sexiest episode ever.

The UK didn't order a season five, but the US did. The series moved from B&W to color, the budget was even higher, and the action increased as well. Gone were the sloppy season four fights and the large male stunts used to double Rigg. Now, the fights were better coreographed, and Cyd Childs (Who looked a lot like Diana Rigg) would be in charge of the kung fu moves that would take out the female baddie of the week. Included were the "we're needed" introductions that were made in order to format the show a-la MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. The US backers also demanded Emma Peel to be more femenine and Rigg decided to replace her leather catsuits with jumpsuits that woulkd go down in fashion history as Emmapeelers.

No doubt season five was fun, but the show went from spy adventures to spoof comedies. Just look at the plot lines: THE HIDDEN TIGER dealt with cats progammed to attack their owners. ESCAPE IN TIME was about time-traveling! And FROM VENUS WITH LOVE was about an alien beam that would kill scientists! You just couldn't watch the show as a thriller anymore.

Even Rigg got tired and decided to leave the series. Linda Thorson was cast as Tara King for season six. Of course, the only reason was that Linda was the girlfriend of then-producer John Bryce. The character of Tara King was the femenine partner that the US backers wanted. The girl was so dependent of Steed that she carried a brick on her purse. It looks like Venus Smith all over again. The fact that Linda was a totally unexperienced actress didn't help. Season six began, with quite good rantings that kept up the standard.

Most fans usually hate season six because of the absence of Emma Peel, but I dare say this season was a great deal of underrated fun. Not as silly as season five or as serius as the first three seasons, this era of the show saw Steed and Tara on trully good adventures. LOOK... teamed them against killer clowns (?). SPLIT! dealt with agents shifting personalities through brainwashing. And STAY TUNED is one of those rare episodes where Steed almost cracks!

Even the character of Tara King became more tolerable as the season progessed. She even had a Steedless episode (ALL DONE WITH MIRRORS) where she put both Emma and Cathy to shame. She soon didn't need the brick (*sight*) and her intelligence was also improved. In France, she is ten times more popular than Emma.

However, the show's rantings in the US were poor due to the bad time-slot of putting the show against LAUGH-IN. The US didn't order more episodes and without the US support, THE AVENGERS ended.

THE AVENGERS was indeed a revolutionary and magic TV show. Many later sows (HART TO HART, REMINGTON STEELE) owe a lot to it.

Sure there is the 1976 revival and te dreadful 1998 movie, but that is another story...