The Avengers: when vengeance got groovy

Published on Tuesday 26 April 2011 19:12

Fifty years ago, in 1961, The Avengers first appeared on TV, a series that went on to define a decade with spy action, kinky outfits, and a dollop of British eccentricity

A BOWLER and a tightly furled brolly. A jumpsuit with saucy cut-outs. A red carnation deftly slipped into a buttonhole. The pop of a champagne cork. A karate kick. An E-type slithering through idyllic English countryside. It's hard to choose one iconic image to epitomise The Avengers, a programme so stylish and influential that its effects reverberate through the television schedules of today.

"What The Beatles are to music, The Avengers is to television," says Dr Adam Locks, a senior lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Chichester, in West Sussex. "It was so intelligent for its period, and since. It created a wonderful fantasy England. During the years it was on air, from 1961 until 1969, it had something like 30 million viewers in 70 countries, and was the first British series shown on prime-time in America."

Locks is co-organiser of an Avengers Reunion weekend taking place at the end of June, which is sure to be the largest - and possibly last - gathering of many of the original writers, cast and crew. It will be hosted by Paul O'Grady, who is such a rabid fan of the show that his bedroom as a teenager was painted the colours of Tara King's flat, and who even now themes the decorations of his London flat in homage to King's digs.

Among the Chichester guests will be Brian Clemens, The Avengers' most pivotal writer, story editor and producer. The goal for the programme, he says, was to create a kind of Never Never Land: "One which we all would like to have existed, but which never has been. In some respects, we were reflecting the swinging 60s, but in other respects we were creating it, in terms of clothing, manners, behaviour and lifestyle. What it translated into was the feeling that we were ahead of the times - which was curious, because the male lead, John Steed (played by Patrick Macnee], was obviously an Edwardian dandy."

With Clemens at the helm, stories often veered into science fiction, with lashings of surrealism - a far cry from the opening episode, Hot Snow, newly revived as part of a comprehensive boxed set out soon from Optimum Home Entertainment.

Borrowing from film noir, The Avengers was conceived as a vehicle for Ian Hendry, playing a surgeon drawn into the spy game by Patrick Macnee - wearing a nondescript belted trench coat, but still ineffably cool - as mysterious secret agent John Steed.

Dicky Fiddy, a freelance television writer and researcher under contract to the British Film Institute, says: "One of the reasons The Avengers is important is that it almost single-handedly shows what happened to the action adventure series in the 1960s. When it started, it had two male heroes. At the time, the archetypal British action hero of the time is Patrick McGoohan, as Danger Man, a two-fisted, clever, but very tough character.

"Fast forward to 1969, when The Avengers ends, having run virtually through the entire decade. The next archetypal action hero is Jason King, this flamboyant, moustachioed, almost effeminate character. What is reflected in The Avengers is the change that occurred in the 60s about our view of heroics. Steed is a very dandified gentleman. He's still tough, but he's not the thick-haired thug that he could have been at the start."

When Hendry left to pursue work in films, the producers stumbled upon the innovation of pairing Macnee with female co-stars.

"It was almost accidental," says Fiddy. "Hendry left and they had a number of scripts around, some of which they rewrote. One of the people they brought in was Honor Blackman, as Cathy Gale, who played the character in a very masculine way. She was based on a breed of very particular British women who survived the Mau Mau uprising, whose husbands died and the women kept on running the farms whilst toting around shotguns and not being intimidated."

The show was sexually revolutionary, as well, he says. "Cathy Gale is Steed's sexual equal. She doesn't treat him coquettishly. It's a very adult relationship. And in the relationship with Emma Peel, you get the impression that they were lovers in the past and are now just very, very close friends.

"These relationships, especially the Diana Rigg version, were influential on both sides of the pond. The most direct influence was that Americans get their first female private eye, often clad in leather, with a pet ocelot - Honey West. Later on The Man from UNCLE gets The Girl From UNCLE, because The Avengers has shown that girl power is a good audience winner. Although shows like Charlie's Angels would have happened anyway in the 1970s, I think The Avengers was a torch bearer. Shows have struggled since to get that sexual chemistry right."

When I ask Clemens about this, he laughs. "I have always said that you could show The Avengers to your maiden aunt and she wouldn't be offended, but if you had a really dirty mind, there was an awful lot to appreciate going on under the surface, and we were aware of that. Half were saying, 'Will they?' and the other half was saying, 'Have they?'"

Part male fantasy, part action hero, Avengers girls didn't really need Steed, notes O'Grady. "I used to love the fighting. Diana Rigg was quite balletic, but I used to like Tara King because she'd punch them like a man and would have a brick in her handbag.

"I thought it was a wonderful world they lived in. They had fabulous flats, wonderful cars. They'd get up in the morning, drink a bottle of champagne, then they'd go off and do a bit of investigating, have a fight, and then come back and have a large brandy. They didn't seem to do any actual work, just interesting stuff. And every single character they came across was eccentric. It was a sort of Alice in Wonderland world. There was never anybody with a regional accent. I think in three episodes in the entire series we saw a black face. The criminals were all eccentric retired colonels and diabolical masterminds who were complete lunatics."

That was deliberate, says Clemens. "If you place it in the real world, you don't believe a word of it. Once we got to the Cathy Gale series I started to write some fairly gripping but weird stories, leaning more toward the surreal. It's more fun. Otherwise you're writing Z Cars or any other police series. I wanted a liberation. Significantly, a year or 18 months after us, along came Bond (the film of Dr No], which was a similar surreal liberation. Bond is in its own fantasy world. We began and Bond followed on."

The show's development was also revolutionary, says Fiddy. "Going from live to video tape to film, from black and white to colour. And the way it absorbed a lot of what was happening in the 60s in the storylines. First, when Cathy Gale came along, you had to make a leap of faith to believe that she could fight and beat up men. Once you've made that leap, you're already in a heightened reality, so you can start toying with other things. You can make the criminals less realistic, the situations more hyper.

"By the time Emma Peel comes along, Brian Clemens takes centre stage and becomes one of the producers and script editors. He's always had a flair for the more surreal and fantastical, for outrageous ideas and plot twists. It is under his guiding hand that the series turns from what it was into the fantasy show that it's mostly remembered as now.

"The show has had a lasting legacy. People like Chris Carter, who invented The X Files, is on record as saying that when he came to the relationship between Mulder and Scully, he wanted to base that on Steed and Emma. What's happened, especially in American television, is that the really big shows are now being run by people who were into those shows of the 60s and 70s, people like Joss Whedon, Chris Carter and JJ Abrams. Their sensibilities are filtered through cult TV, cult film and cult comics in a way that the previous generation hadn't been.You got a lot more action heroines such as Buffy and Sydney Bristow in Alias, because they grew up with shows like Avengers, Charlie's Angels, Honey West."

Clemens savours memories of his time on The Avengers. "As soon as I was allowed creative freedom, it was heaven without having to die and go there. It was the happiest thing I've ever worked on. We did the impossible and enjoyed doing it. We had wonderful talent. Around that time the British film industry had almost collapsed, so we were left with cameramen who'd worked with Polanski and directors who'd done major movies. They enjoyed the show, because they were allowed to flex their muscles."

O'Grady speaks for a lot of fans when he says, "The Avengers had a lifelong effect on me. The Avenger girls, in particularly, were extremely honourable. Everything was done by the book, and they were honest as the day was long. They were great role models."

BOWLER FACTS

• The Avengers Complete 50th Anniversary Collection is out on DVD on 9 May from Optimum Home Entertainment, priced 199.99. The Avengers: A Celebration, 50 Years of a Television Classic, by Marcus Hearn, is out now from Titan Books, priced 24.99. For information about The Avengers 50th Anniversary Reunion weekend being held at the University of Chichester from 25-26 June, visit: blogs.chi.ac.uk/theavengers/.

• Catherine Woodville, who plays Ian Hendry's murdered fiance in the first episode, became Patrick Macnee's second wife.

• The first Avengers fashion show was held in October 1963. Macnee wore Hardy Amies, while Honor Blackman wore clothes designed by Frederick Starke.

• Blackman's first leather fight suits were green.

• John Dankworth wrote the first theme tune.

• Among the more than 1,100 guest actors were Charlotte Rampling, Peter Bowles, Brian Blessed, Christopher Lee, Gordon Jackson, Yootha Joyce, and Donald Sutherland.

• In France, it's known as Chapeau melon et bottes de cuir ("Bowler Hat and Leather Boots"), in Germany, where the show was huge, it's called Mit Schirm, Charme und Melone ("With Umbrella, Charm, and Bowler").

• America met Tara King (Linda Thorson) in March of 1968, but she didn't make her debut in the UK until that September.

• John Steed only calls Mrs Peel 'Emma' once, in The Forget-Me-Knot's farewell scene.