The Persuaders! 1.20 – Read and Destroy

We had a funny moment watching tonight’s episode of The Persuaders!. I’ve lamented that my family simply are not very good recognizing actors. It’s mainly the kid, but his mom doesn’t have an eye for them either, you know, like most people who are more sensible than I am. However, they will occasionally recognize locations. And why not? We’ve watched at least a few episodes from about ten different series made over the course of about a decade at either Elstree or Pinewood and used locations within about thirty miles of the studios. This region is affectionately known as Avengerland, and it really leaves me wanting to go back to Britain in 1970 with a car and a camera.

So tonight’s episode guest starred Kate O’Mara, Nigel Green, and Joss Ackland, all of whom I love seeing in old movies and shows. I watched Green just the other week in The Ipcress File. He played a bent intelligence officer in that, too. But did my family join me in actor-spotting? Nope, they jumped at the stadium where Danny meets an American spy, jointly concluding that it was the same stadium as was seen in the first episode of Man in a Suitcase. For the record, I was iffy. The climax of the first episode of Suitcase was filmed at White City Stadium, and this was filmed at Watford’s Football Ground. The only thing I know about Watford is that according to one of the mean gunslinging bastards in “A Fistful of Travellers’ Cheques,” they can’t play football to save their lives. So, thanks to the great people at the Avengerland site for clearing that up!

Anyway, “Read and Destroy” is very amusing and unpredictable, and our son enjoyed it very much. Had I guessed he was going to enjoy this show as much as he did, we’d have done all 24 for the blog, which will be concluding next month. As it is, I think we’re going to watch the remaining 18 episodes next year sometime. It really was such a fun and downright delightful program, easily among my favorites of the many great, great programs filmed in Avengerland. It’s a shame that ABC used it for cheap filler instead of something to get behind and promote in a big way, but then again if The Persuaders! had continued, I guess Roger Moore wouldn’t have been available to play James Bond. On the other hand, maybe some imaginary second season episodes might have been made in Los Angeles, to let Tony Curtis’s character be at home and Lord Sinclair the fish out of water. If only!

Jason King 1.6 – As Easy as A.B.C.

More home movie footage, this time from Vienna and Venice. In fact, a few seconds of Peter Wyngarde climbing the steps of some old cathedral or other and catching sight of a pretty blonde was used in the previous episode. It’s part of the delightful charm of ITC shows when they go to the back of the same studio buildings and use their own underground parking lot for every hotel parking lot in Europe, but you know, that Jaguar’s only going to go over the cliff just one time in each series.

In fact, there’s probably more of Wyngarde in this blobby 8mm film this week than there is new footage at Elstree. Tony Williamson’s “As Easy as A.B.C.” feels like a budget saver; the main characters are two villains played by Nigel Green and Michael Bates who have started copycatting the absurdly detailed and improbable robberies in Jason King’s novels. At one hilarious point, they hire a young lady played by Ayshea Brough to be his escort and steal his newest plans and notes. These three actors are in the studio at Elstree inside a restaurant, while Peter Wyngarde is in Venice dining on the patio. Paul Stassino also shows up, right at the end, as an Italian police inspector who hopes to dress as well as Jason King does.

Also here this time is a squeeze-of-the-week played by Yutte Stensgaard, and she really should have been a semi-regular. Her character is an expert in judo, and by far our son’s favorite scene had her flinging one of the villains around. It was a terrific little fight scene. Jason probably wins a few more brawls in his own show than he did in Department S, but he could definitely use someone like her around more often. Overall, this installment made a lot more sense to our son than the previous one, and he liked the fights. He really wasn’t completely taken with it, probably because it spends more time with the baddies than he’d prefer. I think Williamson had to overlook a couple of huge plot holes to make the story work, but Green and Bates are entertaining enough that I didn’t mind much.

The Avengers 7.18 – Fog

Well, since we’ve been talking about sword sticks and people trapped in the wrong time, here’s an Avengers episode about a mysterious murderer from 1888 suddenly stalking the fog-bound streets of the East End. Our son enjoyed this one a lot, and thought that the “Black Museum” of torture devices and old weapons was incredibly creepy.

I’m always happy when he enjoys something more than I do. I think Jeremy Burnham’s “Fog” is a disaster. It’s not the worst Avengers – join us for that next week – but it’s a show that commits the cardinal sin of being boring. In its defense, it has Nigel Green in it, and he makes everything a little better. And I like the stupid, yet incredibly believable, name for a pub that Mother concocts as he and Steed extemporize the details of a previously unknown murder by the hideous Gaslight Ghoul. The pub is called “Saddle of Mutton.” Oh, and Paul Whitsun-Jones is in it, briefly, and I like him, too.

I’ve been bothered for years about why “Fog” fails so badly. A lot of it is plainly obvious: the episode begins with some comedy that bombs like a lead balloon, as a “Russian” who doesn’t speak any English – he doesn’t speak any Russian, either – blathers and bumbles for agonizingly long minutes. Never a good idea to lead with your worst material. The stars seem like they’re sleepwalking through the production, the music is a dirge, and the plot is hopelessly predictable. It’s just not fun.

But I think there’s more to it than that. “Fog” reminds me a little of one element of the Doctor Who serial “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.” It’s set in a London of old Victorian stereotypes: organ grinders, flower girls, cobblestone streets, a Jack the Ripper wannabe. It’s the London of fiction and memory, and not the real world, but it isn’t the London of The Avengers, either. There’s no sense of why they’re trying to tell a story about the murders of foreign diplomats while dressed with the trappings of some other show entirely.

It certainly doesn’t help that it’s all obviously made in the studio and so the entire environment feels fake, cheap, and phony, while the rest of the series luxuriates in being and feeling real, even at its most fanciful. It’s The Avengers doing a bad cover version of an inferior program. At least it isn’t a clip show.

The Avengers 5.6 – The Winged Avenger

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the Batman show had a huge impact on popular media. It wasn’t just the rush of television series about superheroes, most of which were doomed to fail pretty quickly as the craze faded, but the influence of a bigger-than-life and often deliberate, camp, approach to action and adventure. American shows like Lost in Space, The Man From UNCLE, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea made the move from black and white to color pretty smoothly, but within a year, they were all getting really ridiculous, with unbelievable villains, deathtraps, monsters, and outrageous acting.

The Avengers navigated the bombastic change with a lot more grace than the show’s American counterparts, but they still took the time during this larger-than-life period to parody Batman with this very silly and very fun story by writer Richard Harris about a comic book character – “superhero” doesn’t seem quite right – who has come to life. The Winged Avenger looks like Hawkman wearing a Captain Harlock costume and, while his creators squabble over whether it’s the writer or the artist who is the real genius, their creation stalks the night murdering ruthless businessmen.

“Comic books” like we know them in America didn’t really exist in the UK at the time. Frank Bellamy, who provided the Winged Avenger illustrations, was at the time best known for painting the Thunderbirds strip in TV Century 21, but he’d worked on other large-format anthology “papers” like the Eagle and Look and Learn for more than a decade. There’s a clue in how the script refers to the character as the star of a “picture strip,” which was the typical term in the UK at the time, but the prop comics shown in the episode are American-style, with the Winged Avenger the star of his own 32-page book instead of appearing weekly as a two-page story. Also, the studio setup, with the creators hiring costumed models to pose for the art, is a lot more like what Frank Hampson pioneered for Dan Dare in the Eagle than any shoestring-budget American funnybook company in the sixties.

(For what it’s worth, at this time the actual Batman comic was most commonly seen in the UK by way of hardback annuals that reprinted American issues, while the popular 1960s daily newspaper strip was reformatted and appeared weekly on two pages of Smash! throughout 1967-68.)

And all this silliness ends with a very fun pop art climax that sees Steed walloping the Winged Avenger with great big panel boards that read POW! SPLAT! and BAM! Our son enjoyed this episode, and was repeating the costumed menace’s trademark line “Eee-URP!” whenever possible, but in the same way he somehow didn’t connect Wallace and Gromit’s launch sequence as a parody of Thunderbirds, he took this at face value and didn’t see it as a wink at Batman at all, just a great fight scene on its own accord. It’s so fascinating how he processes these things.

Anyway, here’s Nigel Green with a falcon and a gun. It turns out to not be really relevant to the story, but he looks fantastic with them, doesn’t he? Other familiar faces in the episode include Neil Hallett, Colin Jeavons, and Donald Pickering. Part of the episode was filmed at the absolutely beautiful Stanmore Hall near Birmingham. Some exteriors for “From Venus With Love” were shot here as well. It’s a mammoth, majestic building with incredible stone work, and then the studio interiors are so flimsy that the fake staircase that the actors climb wobbles like it’s made of cardboard!