Jason King 1.22 – Every Picture Tells a Story

Happily, for the benefit of regular readers wondering whether our son was going to enjoy this show again, the kid liked this one much more than many of the previous episodes, and that’s even with us pausing a few times to discuss the racism and the unflattering stereotypes in this tale written by Robert Banks Stewart and set in Hong Kong. While on a layover, Jason finds a weird error in the local version of the syndicated Mark Caine comic strip, and learns that it is being used to send messages to a local hit squad to ferret out foreign agents.

There’s really nothing wrong with the script, but the production is very, very much of its time, which means that Wyngarde gets to haul out a number-one-son accent a couple of times. Also, sadly, while some familiar faces from the period like Bert Kwouk make up the ranks of the gunmen and the lieutenants, the major roles are played by British actors like Clifford Evans in yellowface. So yes, we had a lot to talk about. Allan Cuthbertson also appears as a British intelligence agent.

As part of my decluttering, I’ve been giving my set of Titan Books’ reprints of James Bond newspaper strips one final flip-through and moving them on. Honestly, I paid $13-14 apiece for these things, read them once, and forgot what happened in every one of them. I’m so stupid sometimes. Anyway, the strip carried on long after they’d run out of Ian Fleming novels and short stories to adapt, with writer Jim Lawrence and artist Yaroslav Horak coming up with all sorts of outlandish plots and reasons for people to take off their clothes. So these were fresh in my mind as we looked at the episode and its talk of international newspaper syndication, with Jason acknowledging that he does not write the strip, but approves what happens in it and is familiar enough to recognize problems or replacements.

However, I’m sorry, but the images that make it onto the screen do not look even remotely professional, and nothing at all like a strip that would have ever seen print in any newspaper anywhere. At least when The Avengers did something a little bit similar, they had the good sense to hire Frank Bellamy to do the comic strip illustrations. Honestly, ITC, couldn’t you have phoned Yaroslav Horak?

The Champions 1.4 – The Experiment

Tony Williamson’s “The Experiment” is one of the few episodes of The Champions to pit our three heroes against worthy adversaries. This was kind of the way of things in the sixties and seventies. Regular readers will recall that I would occasionally bemoan how most episodes of, say, The Six Million Dollar Man and the like would concern themselves more with counterfeiters in turtlenecks instead of having proper robot enemies and Bigfoot more often. So it is with The Champions, typically. These are good and entertaining spy stories, but the characters’ superhuman abilities just give them an occasional edge, and some very satisfying stunts, rather than a focus for the plot.

But in “The Experiment,” they run up against a quartet of characters whose reaction speed and fighting techniques have been artificially augmented. Remarkably, the villains in charge of the operation have been reading between the lines of the various secret agency secret reports and have figured out that Richard, Craig, and Sharron have superhuman skills and lure Sharron into their scheme under the guise of an experiment so they can study her speed and reaction first-hand. Their own boss never figures that out. So it builds to an exciting climax and a very good final fight scene that had our son hopping. It’s a really entertaining episode, probably my favorite of the fourteen that I originally had back in the tape trading days. More on that in a later post.

I’ve always thought that a great guest cast can elevate a good story, and this one’s just full of familiar faces. One of ITC’s regular Americans-at-Elstree, David Bauer, is the main villain, and he also has Robert James and Allan Cuthbertson in his employ. Jonathan Burn and none-more-posh Caroline Blakiston are two of the rival superhumans, and Nicholas Courtney has a small role as a doctor. There’s also a very familiar setting. Marie often says that she doesn’t recognize actors the way that I do, but she has an eye for places, and when Richard and Craig drive through the small village of Aldbury, she immediately spotted it as the location of a pair of Avengers episodes. Aldbury, Schmaldbury, everybody knows that town is Little Storping In-The-Swuff!

The Avengers 7.2 – Super Secret Cypher Snatch

Halfway through Tony Williamson’s “Super Secret Cypher Snatch,” the stuntmen put on one of my all-time favorite car chase scenes, albeit a criminally short one. The villains are in a window cleaning van with a long ladder and go after Steed, who’s driving an open-top 1920s Rolls Royce. The stunt team excelled themselves at several points in this story, including some terrific fights and a barely-connected-to-the-plot teaser pre-credits scene in which one fellow jumps off a motorbike to tackle another dude while a helicopter hovers over them, but that bit with the Rolls is my favorite. That’s terrific driving, speeding right on the lead car’s rear bumper while bringing a ladder down on its driver.

I’ve always liked this episode, in part because the guest cast is, as always, just so terrific. Recognizable faces this time: Allan Cuthbertson, Ivor Dean, Donald Gee, Simon Oates, and Nicholas Smith. Although Ivor Dean kind of lets everybody down by forgetting to hold his breath when he’s supposed to be playing a corpse. But it’s also just a fine story, structured well enough to give the audience plenty of clues how the villains are breaking into a top-security establishment while we wait for the heroes to figure it out.

Also this time: it’s the return of Patrick Newell as Mother, who we met in “The Forget-Me-Knot.” I think here’s one point where The Avengers starts to fumble. Steed and his associate do not need a boss. Back in the videotape days, Steed occasionally reported to a character called One-Ten, played by Douglas Muir. Another boss figure, Charles, appeared twice in season three. Steed reports to a colonel by telephone once in season four, and there was Major B, head of “the floral network,” in “Who’s Who???” For the most part, these characters only appeared when there was one of those very rare plots that dealt specifically with Steed’s organization. That’s the case when we first met Mother.

Unfortunately, we can blame the American network for Mother becoming a semi-regular. He appears in 19 of the last 26 episodes. Some muckity-mucks at ABC apparently decided that they really liked the character in “The Forget-Me-Knot” and asked the producers to keep him around as a semi-regular. Since ABC had, against expectations, renewed the series for a full run, I guess that humoring them and hiring Newell was the least the producers could do!

About those expectations… I’m a little overdue in talking about this here, but the renewal of this show really was unexpected. Next time, I’ll talk about the nearly unique set of circumstances that led to these 26 episodes being made at all… and why everybody kind of knew up front that they’d be the last episodes they’d make for quite some time.

The Avengers 6.2 – Death’s Door

For the third year running, ABC brought The Avengers in to bat for a show that they axed in December. This time out, it was a western called Custer which ran for 17 weeks opposite Lost in Space on CBS and the mighty The Virginian on NBC. I would say that The Virginian‘s 90-minute format has worked against it in the long term. It wasn’t shown nearly as often in syndicated repeats in the 1970s and 1980s as other westerns and so is largely unknown today by under-fifties, but it was really freaking popular at the time. Neither The Avengers nor Space got particularly great ratings in this slot, and indeed CBS didn’t renew Space after it finished its run.

Weirdly, Lost in Space cruised to its cancellation despite leading in to two of the most popular sitcoms of the day, The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. The Avengers, meanwhile, was the lead-in to one of the most unusual of the sixties, which, coming from the decade that brought you sitcoms about witches, genies, cavemen, talking horses, talking cars, identical cousins, and families of Addams and Munster, really is saying something. The Second Hundred Years starred Monte Markham as a 33 year-old prospector who was frozen in a glacier in 1900 and thawed out 67 years later, only to find his infant son is now a 67 year-old man. I’ve looked at some bootleg bits of this show on YouTube and it really is an oddly entertaining artifact, but I’m not sure whether ABC was really trying all that hard on Wednesdays with a lineup of The Avengers, this deeply weird sitcom, and a movie of the week.

The American run of Diana Rigg’s last episodes actually began with one produced and shown last in the UK, “Mission… Highly Improbable,” which we’ll get to in June. “Death’s Door” was the second one shown in Britain and the fourth one here. It’s a mess, which is why I’m just sticking with the British transmission order for these! It was written by Philip Levene, and the guest stars include Allan Cuthbertson and a fellow named William Lucas, who often played tough guy parts in the sixties. Not at all a bad episode, although I think our son was a little disappointed that the tag scene this time wasn’t as funny as the last one.

The Avengers 4.4 – Death at Bargain Prices

Wow, I’d forgotten just how good “Death at Bargain Prices” is. It has a great reputation, and many fans say it’s one of the best episodes of the show, with good reason. It’s a terrific script by Brian Clemens, one of the great ones where we don’t know what the villains’ plans are at all and figure it all out along with our heroes. We know that the criminal scheme is based around a fancy department store, where Mrs. Peel is soon working undercover, but don’t quite know who among the staff are the real baddies or what they’re doing, or who can be trusted. The house detective could very easily turn out to be a villain, and we’re left wondering whether he will betray Mrs. Peel for a few minutes.

It all turns out to be agreeably grandiose, and climaxes with a dynamite fight scene that entertained our son almost as much as it did me. He really hooted when Steed deflects a dagger with a cricket bat into a dartboard, leading me to explain what a cricket bat is! Everything about this hour is incredibly impressive, especially the sets for the department store. The whole thing is about as flawless as it can be.

And there’s another batch of splendid guest stars! Maybe there’s not as many as last time, but heck, six is awfully hard to top. This week, Andre Morell, T.P. McKenna, and Allan Cuthberson, who’s practically typecast at this point in his career as a stuffy snob with a carnation in his buttonhole, all turn out to be villains, although I’m embarrassed to say that I somehow couldn’t place Morell, despite knowing him from at least six other films and TV episodes I could mention. This won’t be the only time that an actor who played Professor Quatermass appears in The Avengers, either; Andrew Keir is in a couple of the color episodes.

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (1969)

Here’s a movie that I might have read about somewhere or other, but it never really sank in until we started this blog and I did a little reading about the film of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Then I realized there were more screen versions of Captain Nemo than I was aware. This one, however, could have remained adrift. It is a boring, boring movie.

Captain Nemo and the Underwater City has an interesting international cast, bringing Americans Robert Ryan, as Nemo, and Chuck Connors to the UK for a production at MGM’s Borehamwood Studios. Luciana Paluzzi, best known at the time for her role in Thunderball, is also here. Thunderball is my least favorite Bond film, in part because of all the endless underwater scenes. This film has a similar problem.

The movie opens in the mid-1860s with a liner bound for Bristol sinking in a storm. Connors is playing a US senator, and he goes overboard, along with characters played by Nanette Newman, Allan Cuthberson (a claustrophobic engineer), Bill Fraser and Kenneth Connor (criminal brothers), and Christopher Hartstone (the token kid). They get rescued by divers from the Nautilus and brought along to Templemer, an underwater utopia that Nemo and his followers have constructed.

Then he refuses to let them leave. Complications, and boredom, ensue.

The problem is that this movie will end as soon as somebody gets out of there, and there is no reason to hold them, or even bring them below in the first place. The film is set during the American Civil War, when nobody on the surface had access to Nemo’s technology. As with the previous two films about Captain Nemo that we’ve watched, people are amazed by it. Nemo’s concern is that people from the warring world above will interfere with his utopia, but that’s not possible. Nobody can reach him.

A secondary problem is that we don’t even reach the character conflict of the film – the “why” nobody can leave – until its halfway point. Nemo tells them that they will remain in Templemer for the rest of their natural lives, but before there are any protests, debate, or character drama, he shows them his underwater farm for an eyeball-bruising ten minutes of scuba footage. Reefs, schools of fish, bubbles. There’s a reason why we’re never going to watch Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea for this blog, and why Thunderball puts me to sleep. Heck, I don’t even like Stingray very much.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, because the film was written by Pip and Jane Baker, who are notorious for some legendarily awful Doctor Who episodes, but directed by the reliable James Hill, who directed some very good episodes of The Avengers, The Saint, and most of Worzel Gummidge. So the movie settles into a mediocre gray area, with nothing of interest beyond some interesting sets and the acting of Bill Fraser, who was then best known as Sgt. Claude Snudge in three related BBC comedies and is very amusing here. Well, there is a neat scene where Allan Cuthberson’s bid for freedom goes terribly wrong, but not even a hundred foot mutant manta ray monster could keep my interest. Chuck Connors is lantern-jawed, gravel-voiced, and soporific in a part which, four or five years later, Doug McClure would play about once every summer.

Our son was actually more patient with this movie than I was – he got a little restless, but never seemed about to fall asleep like me – and he pronounced it “pretty cool.” The scene where Cuthberson’s escape plan goes wrong did frighten him into going behind the sofa, but he applauded early on and enjoyed the animals in the city, which include a pelican, a seal, and some penguins. The submarine chases and fights with sharks and monsters are pitched just right for kids, and perhaps if you can watch this movie in the company of one, then at least one of you will enjoy it.