The Avengers: The TV Show

he Avengers was a replacement for the short-lived TV series Police Surgeon, produced by ABC-TV in the UK, and ran from September to December 1960. It starred Ian Hendry as Dr. Geoffrey Brent, but when it was suddenly cancelled he was asked to pair up with Patrick Macnee. Thus, The Avengers was born with Hendry playing Dr. David Keel and Macnee, John Steed. At this point, Hendry was considered the star of the show with Macnee as his mysterious, sometimes ruthless sidekick.

The first two episodes featured Steed and Keel avenging the shooting death of Keel's fianceé, Peggy, by members of a drug ring. Unfortunately, only the first twenty minutes of this introduction are known to exist (from the episode Hot Snow), along with two other full episodes from this first season: The Frighteners and Girl on a Trapeze.

uring the first season of The Avengers, an actor's strike halted production in 1961 at episode 26, and it did not resume for almost a year. Once production was due to recommence, Ian Hendry had decided to leave the show for a movie career. The producers asked Patrick Macnee to continue which he agreed to do. Macnee, thus, became the lynch pin of the series.

With this decision, actor Jon Rollason temporarily replaced Hendry for three episodes at the beginning of season two, playing Dr. Martin King. However, it was decided that a woman should be Steed's new crime-fighting partner.

Cathy Gale would become the first liberated female character created for television. Honor Blackman won the role (albeit Nyree Dawn Porter was the producers' first choice), and her first filmed episode was Death Dispatch in June, 1962.

Honor Blackman completed 43 episodes during her tenure. By 1964, for reasons which are still unclear, she had decided to leave and accept the role of Pussy Galore in the upcoming James Bond extravaganza, Goldfinger. This left The Avengers without a female lead, but after several months the production team started to look in earnest for a replacement.

Eventually, an actress was found and she would take the series to new levels and the television world by storm...

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nitially, Elizabeth Shepherd was chosen for the role of Mrs. Emma Peel in 1965. However, this decision backfired when, after completing the episode The Town of No Return and half of The Murder Market, the producers released her, stating that she was not right for the part.

Consequently, additional searches had to be undertaken and one focused on an actress who had recently appeared in an ITV play, The Hothouse. Diana Rigg only auditioned "for a giggle" and felt that she would never be seriously considered for the role of Mrs. Peel. But, as TV history recalls, she not only won the part but was also about to take the television world by storm!

The Avengers had arrived. This period of the show's history was to feature a lighter comic touch in contrast to the much more hard-edged tone evident in the Blackman episodes. Steed and Peel's humor-laden conversations became a mainstay of the programme as they visibly enjoyed trying to top each other's witticisms.

This less serious style lent itself ideally to episodes that were now characterized by an overt science fiction tone, with dastardly masterminds creating havoc each week. Peel and Steed had to deal with giant carnivorous plants, being shrunk to miniature, killer robots, mind-transferring machines and invisible enemies. The series also parodied its American contemporaries with episodes such as The Girl From Auntie and Mission...Highly Improbable, for example.

In addition to the humor, there was also an underlying fetishism aspect in many of the episodes - particularly one controversial episode for the time called A Touch of Brimstone. Mrs Peel, dressed in a dominatrix outfit (designed by Diana Rigg ), had the American censors in uproar and Rigg's Queen of Sin was not seen in the US when the series first aired there. Tight-fitting leather fashion for Mrs. Gale, and to some extent, Mrs. Peel was one of the classic features of the show, although Rigg only wore leather on a few occasions, preferring instead her more flexible Emmapeelers in later episodes.

Diana Rigg's arrival coincided with the programme's sale to US television. This resulted in making it the first British series to be aired on prime-time American television and a change was made to the opening credits of the first Emma Peel season. A brief prologue was added, referred to as the "chessboard sequence", explaining the concept of the series and introducing the characters to the American audience.

Global sales and fame followed...

Every Avengers fan knows that Diana Rigg was Mrs. Emma Peel. But were you aware that she was not the first actress to be hired to play the role?

Elizabeth Shepherd filmed all of the first aired episode The Town of No Return and part of another episode The Murder Market, but it was soon announced that her services were no longer required.

Why? Well, no-one is certain of the actual reasons, but the consensus seems to be that she simply was not right for the part. This decision to get rid of her appears to be compounded by her penchant for an extravagant wardrobe, along with a tendency to rewrite dialogue on the set.

The producers, therefore, made the risky choice of re-casting the role, but history shows that the selection of Diana Rigg was worth the risk. (All filming was re-recorded with Diana Rigg and it is uncertain whether the Shepherd takes still exist).

Above, you can see what Mrs. Peel may have looked like had Elizabeth Shepherd stuck around.

Great pictures and posters are available at the click of your mouse. If you want an Avengers momento or gift, you cannot go wrong with these examples!

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he Cathy Gale episodes had been shot on videotape, with very little time for editing and almost no use of location footage. If you watch these earlier episodes closely, you can detect bloopers galore, with lines fluffed, cameras hitting props and production personnel appearing briefly in shot. To all intents and purposes the Blackman episodes were shot live in the studio.

The US deal meant that the series could now be shot on film, giving the episodes a much greater flexibility. The first filmed Rigg season was produced in black and white, but by this time the American standard was for shows to be shot in color. US pressure, therefore, brought The Avengers into glorious color in 1967, although British viewers wouldn't benefit from this change for another two years. These color episodes sported a new opening sequence (which you can enjoy elsewhere on this page), involving Steed unwrapping a champagne bottle and Emma shooting the cork away.

The color episodes became ever more stylized. A change to each opening episode title was made together with a mini, comedic vignette to start each story, where Steed locates Emma to announce that: Mrs. Peel - We're Needed!

Missing from this season, however, were the short epilogs that had appeared in the black and white episodes, where Steed and Emma left in the final scene in or on a different mode of transport. These had been replaced by a short scene involving the duo at Steed's flat.

To further please the American network, the show's producers succumbed to other changes. Emma had used Karate in the monochrome stories, but the sensitive Americans had this changed to a more graceful Kung Fu for her fighting sequences in this color season. Fashionwise, the black leather catsuits became instead a set of colorful Emmapeelers. Even the dialogue was modified to suit the American market! Lifts were now elevators and flats became apartments. To Americans, the show appeared to be the epitome of Britishness, but ironically, this was being eroded by the series' biggest investors.

Behind the scenes, Diana Rigg was expressing her displeasure with certain aspects of the show. More changes were afoot, and these would see the departure of Emma Peel and the introduction of a new partner for Steed...

igg was never happy with the way she was treated on the show and she departed in 1967 to star in the Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. However, she agreed to return to film an episode that explains Emma's departure. The Forget-Me-Not ends with the news that Emma's husband, Peter Peel, is in fact alive and she leaves her role with Steed in order to be with him. As Steed looks out the window to the driveway below, Peter resembles Steed exactly.

This episode also introduced Emma's successor, an inexperienced agent named Tara King, played by Canadian actress Linda Thorson. Thorson played the role with more innocence and unlike the previous partnerships, there were hints of romance between Steed and Tara. Tara was a fully fledged agent working for Steed's organisation whereas his previous partners had all been talented amateurs.

Steed was once again taking orders from a government official. The wheelchair-bound "Mother" (Patrick Newell). Mother's headquarters would change from week to week, including one episode in which his office was located on the top level of a double-decker bus!

The series continued to be broadcast in America, but the ABC network which carried the series, chose to air it opposite the number one show in the country at the time, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Steed and Tara couldn't compete, and the The Avengers was ultimately cancelled in the US. Without this commercial backing, production could not continue in Britain either, and the series ended in May 1969.

Linda Thorson Photo
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