VISION ON SOUND EPISODE 81 - TX APRIL 24 2022 - THE AVENGERS

First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on April 24th 2022

A little over sixty years ago, a television series began that would, in many ways, come to encapsulate a particular view of nineteen sixties Britain that never really went away. It was so popular in certain countries that this particular image of Britain and the British seems to have stuck in their minds and shaped their perception of us ever since.

Or perhaps one version of it has, anyway, because THE AVENGERS, the series PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI, is joining me to talk about today, went through several incarnations – and lapel carnations – as it progressed through most of the 1960s from its grey, grimy, and gritty origins in 1961, to its colourful, almost pop-art, last hurrah in 1969, and, in many ways, could be said to almost reflect that transformational decade on screen like almost no other television series of its time.

Featuring PATRICK MACNEE as John Steed, a charmingly eloquent, and dapper, spy, who wears a bowler hat sometimes cast in stainless steel, and who carries a rolled umbrella which sometimes conceals a sword, who spends his professional career dealing with diabolical master minds intent upon some fiendish, eccentric, and freedom-threatening plot, usually with the assistance of a strong, plucky woman who seems far more adept at handling the rough stuff than he could ever hope to be.

CATHY GALE, EMMA PEEL, and TARA KING were those fabulous, ground-breaking, and astonishingly independent women, and were played by three actors destined to become almost as iconic as the series itself: HONOR BLACKMAN, DIANA RIGG, and LINDA THORSEN.

Although those other, grittier incarnations, also featured JULIA STEVENS as VENUS SMITH, JON ROLLASON as DR MARTIN KING, and the sublime and ridiculously talented IAN HENDRY who, as DR DAVID KEEL, was there right at the start, might be the person we have to thank for the series even existing at all, but who then chose to leave to pursue other career options, leaving JOHN STEED to step into the breech, and become the calm centre around which the series would carry on though such astonishing changes, not only in the lead actors, but from the technical point of view of switching from live studio videotape, to black and white, and later colour film, and a very successful penetration into the American market.

In fact, if any show could be said to demonstrate the evolution of British television in the 1960s, I think THE AVENGERS may be the one that shows it off best, so much so that anyone who watched the 1961 version would barely recognise it as the same show if they tuned in again in 1969, with MOTHER and RHONNDA adding to the cast of eccentric regulars to battle each week with the very cream of 1960s acting talent.

This other brainchild of Canadian Television supremo SYDNEY NEWMAN might not be your idea of what the Britain of the 1960s was really like, but it certainly is an image that has persisted since it first aired back in 1961 as a replacement for another series featuring its main star as a police surgeon, right through to its final episode in 1969, and the series was so internationally successful that it even got a fairly successful two year reimagining in the mid-1970s featuring PURDEY and GAMBIT as played by JOANNA LUMLEY and GARETH HUNT.

PAUL is unashamedly a fan of the final year featuring TARA KING, so our conversation does inevitably spend a lot of time covering that era, but we do our best to give you a broader overview on our way there.

PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.