Reviewed by Guy Clapperton
Stars Patrick Macnee, Honor Blackman, John Thaw, John Laurie | Written by Various
UK certification 12 | UK RRP £59.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime Flaming endless | Directed by Various
This is a hard review to write because I so wanted to enjoy these episodes. And I did – in their way. But they're very old by now – and TV has changed so much.
This is the third series of the Avengers, and a lot of people will be surprised at its content. There's no cod sci-fi or fantasy, no silly humour and no twee relationship between the main cast. Instead we have Patrick Macnee's soon-to-become urbane Steed being a little sinister if anything, and Honor Blackman's strait-laced Cathy Gale not quite trusting him.
It's an interesting mix and makes for some good scripts. In Brief for Murder you actually wonder whether Steed is the traitor – that's not something that could have been imagined in later episodes. In the series opener, with a lovely turn by Warren Mitchell, Steed actually barters with Mrs. Gale's freedom and he means it. Again, this wouldn't have happened later.
The problem isn't with the scripts, then. Or the performances. No, the problem with this show is that to really enjoy it you have either to remember it through a nostalgic haze or to put aside the fact that it's live TV from the early 1960s. So no, you don't get much on film, you get a claustrophobic studio-bound feel to the whole enterprise. And no, not all of the actors are up to a live performance, and indeed some of them don't always stand underneath the right microphone. The pace, as with all early sixties live TV, is vastly slower than we're used to now.
No-one would have noticed this at the time and it's probably not fair to nitpick that it's all a bit dated now. The thing is, within months of this series finishing they did Series 4 (you might have guessed that). On film. And with Diana Rigg, but more importantly loads more retakes, saturation incidental music, a blistering new theme tune (which the radio quite wrongly played as a tribute to John Dankworth when he died, he wrote the original theme). The Avengers would explode as if into a completely new medium.
It's wrong to use this as a stick with which to beat the earlier programmes from which it grew. But I can't help it – I can appreciate Mrs. Gale was a radical character, I can appreciate the skills with which these shows were made for their time – but if you were only going to buy one Avengers box set you might want to make it series 4 when it comes out.
The extras are many as you can see below: the best is the "Avenging the Avengers" documentary on Disk 7, in which various producers and cast members are unusually candid about their feelings on the direction the series was about to take and the inadequacies of certain future cast members.
EXTRAS **** Disc 1: Audio commentary by Brian Clemens on Brief for Murder; Series 3 promotional brochure; Stills gallery for featured episodes; PDF material (4 x scripts, 3 x TV Times features and "Meet the Avengers" book). Disc 2: Audio commentary by Don Leaver on Man With Two Shadows; Stills gallery for featured episodes; PDF material (4 x scripts); Filmed introduction to Don’t Look Behind You. Disc 3: Stills gallery for featured episodes; Behind the scenes shots from The Undertakers ;PDF material (5 x scripts, including 2 x versions of Death of a Batman); Filmed introductions to The Undertakers, Death of a Batman and November Five. Disc 4: Stills gallery for featured episodes; PDF material (4 x scripts and Psychology Magazine); Episode Reconstruction – Double Danger; Filmed introductions to the Second Sight, The Gilded Cage and Medicine Man. Disc 5: Stills gallery for featured episodes; PDF material (4 x scripts); Episode Reconstruction – A Change of Bait; Filmed introductions to The Wringer and The Little Wonders. Disc 6: Audio commentary by Roger Marshall for Mandrake; Audio commentary by Jonathan Alwyn for The Outside-In Man; Armchair Theatre – The Importance of Being Earnest – starring Patrick Macnee – Act 3 only (only surviving footage) 18 mins; Stills gallery for featured episodes; PDF material (4 x scripts). Disc 7: Avenging the Avengers (main programme – 25:03); Avenging the Avengers – Extended Interviews: (Macnee/Blackman/Thorson (09:43) – on Avenging the Avengers VHS release; Newsreel footage (Honor Blackman’s Judo book); Gale Force part 2 (Honor Blackman interview); Filmed introductions to The Charmers and Esprit de Corps; Stills gallery for featured episodes;PDF material (4 x scripts).