The Avengers 4.2 – The Gravediggers

This morning, I enjoyed explaining to our son that The Avengers features quite a few very eccentric old fellows with very odd hobbies. I also enjoyed explaining what the word eccentric meant; he’d never heard it before. The Avengers is set in a world where dozens of old military men and industrialists trapped in the memory of a glorious past of Empire have retired with buckets of money to indulge their peculiar whims. Often, they’re either exploited or killed by the villains-of-the-week, who frequently use the cover of the eccentrics’ hobby to hide in plain sight.

So this week, we meet Sir Horace Winslip, the first of the eccentric old oddballs in the film series. He’s played by Ronald Fraser and he’s obsessed with old railway lines and hates motor cars. He lives in a railway-themed house with an imitation dining car with sound effects and scrolling scenery, and has his own private mini-train, which our son adored almost as much as Patrick Macnee, who got to ride it. He’s been manipulated by the baddies into funding a jamming system. But Sir Horace thinks its meant to jam the engines of automobiles, when it’s actually jamming early-warning radar installations, just like in “The Deadly Missiles,” an episode of The Bionic Woman that we watched last month.

This episode was written by Malcolm Hulke and it features Wanda Ventham in a small role. It memorably climaxes with Mrs. Peel tied to the lines of the miniature railway with old-fashioned player piano music like an old “Perils of Pauline” chapter. This really did frighten our son a little, but the very fun fight between Steed and a couple of hoodlums on the runaway train kept him riveted. I told him that they used to have a mini-train like that at Zoo Atlanta that I enjoyed riding. Sadly, they replaced it with a boring old full-size train ten or more years ago.

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