Small-screen heroes were a true marvel
The Avengers British spy television series that predated James Bond, starring Diana Rigg and Patrick Mcnee, 1961 to 1969. Childhood rating: (out of 4) Grown-up rating:
In this weekly series, we look back at our first pop-culture loves.
As a child, watching mindless stuff on TV was par for the course. Pretty much everything was awesome. There was the inspired puppetry of the Thunderbirds. Bruce Lee’s flying kick in The Green Hornet. And the wham, bam and splat of Batman.
Of course, no filter exists when you are 7 years old, nor is there any concept of irony. Batman is a sincere, heroic figure fighting evil. It is only later that you realize producers were screwing with your mind. Batman becomes campy. Adam West is fat. It is one big self-mocking cheese fest.
It is not unlike the aching, confused disappointment when you discover the tooth fairy and Santa Claus are actually your parents. And so it was with some trepidation that I started to revisit The Avengers, one of my favourite shows as a child. Would it stand the test of time?
Before Marvel assembled those other “Avengers” on the big screen, The Avengers was a low-budget 1961 British show created by a Canadian, former CBC executive and Torontonian Sydney Newman. Newman would go on to create Doctor Who, but he cut his teeth on what would become one of the most beloved cult TV shows of all time, helping to create a category of thriller referred to as spy-fi.
The show would be hugely influential in pop culture. It predated the movie debut of Ian Fleming’s Dr. No by a year. And it had that cuttingedge use of ironic humour and sly innuendo. It would also beget spinoff series and an unfortunate movie starring Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes.
The show changed over the years, but most people remember the electric combination of the late Patrick Macnee (as John Steed), who wore bowler hats and had an umbrella with concealed weapons. Diana Rigg (as Emma Peel) was brainy, deadly and drove a glamorous Lotus Elan roadster.
Rigg, who currently plays lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones, was also my first onscreen crush.
At the age of 76, she perhaps hasn’t aged quite as well as contemporaries Julie Andrews or Honor Blackman. A lifetime of chain smoking likely didn’t help. But those sparkling eyes and cheekbones remain. Game of Thrones fans see a shrewd old matron. I see my youth.
She once wore black leather catsuits and could do karate! No one was more fabulous or beautiful than Emma Peel. She was also smarter and tougher than most men. Rigg, in her Courrèges-designed miniskirts, was the personification of cool. My mind was blown, as I’m sure was every British schoolboy’s. (Or those in the other 90-plus countries in which the show was aired.)
The Avengers went well with the after-school Twinkie I invariably had while watching the show. But I would eat my snack with a knife and fork. Because Steed would demand it. I would also brandish my mom’s umbrella in the house, wielding it like a weapon.
“Good day, Mrs. Peel,” I would say in a mock British accent. “Tea or tournament?”
Revisiting the show years later isn’t hard. Much of it is up on YouTube. Binge-watching the series, the humour still stands up. It’s remarkable how much sexual innuendo went over my head.
The pacing is slow, the action is remarkably tame by today’s standards, but it still works. Although the dialogue was always too clever for its own good, especially for North American consumption.
When Steed hurts his ankle in “The Joker,” Emma Peel remarks to him, “Your tango is irreparably damaged.” Which sounds a lot better than “You hurt your foot.”
In that episode, Peel gets invited to the home of someone who wants to talk to her about her article on “Better bridge with applied mathematics.”
She descends into a home straight from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. It has a dining room with oversized playing cards standing guard and a villain that predated Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
The remarkable thing about The Avengers is that it delighted in British eccentricity. The surreal, psychedelic ’60s sets, populated by bizarre characters, also added to the won- derful strangeness of the thing.
The crossover influence of the show on later Bond films was inevitable. Honor Blackman would star in the first three seasons of the show before leaving to take the role of Pussy Galore in the Bond franchise. Rigg, the star who replaced her, transforming the show with her onscreen presence, would be Bond’s only screen wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Even star Patrick Macnee would make an appearance in A View to a Kill.
And if you watched a Savile Row-suited Colin Firth wield an umbrella as a weapon in the spy thriller Kingsman, that was pure homage.
As you watch those other omnipresent Avengers on the big screen, you only have to see Scarlett Johansson’s cat-suited Black Widow to understand the cultural references set in play by a low-budget British show created by a Canadian so long ago.
But while Natalia Romanova may be formidable, the indomitable Emma Peel was the trail-blazing, defiant original.