The Avengers

In these days of Marvel's The Avengers appropriating the name more and more, it's always a good idea to remind of the other Avengers, the slightly more dashing, and very much more british Avengers.

In these days of Bond hype I recently found myself rewatching one of my favorites in the 007 catalogue, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, starring none other than the wonderfully enigmatic Diana Rigg, aka Mrs Emma Peel of the Avengers.

So I feel it's well overdue to return to some golden age (that is the Peel Years, to me at least) of The Avengers. But before I start digging out the crate of temporarily stored away DVD sets in the wardrobe a quick trawl on Youtube turned up the first episode of Diana Rigg's tenure in the series, containing a fantastic scene of Mr Steed and Mrs Peel having tea on a train. I must say I enjoy the Peel character a lot more than the Contessa in OHMSS. (By the way, John Steed, Patrick McNee, would also later turn up in a bond movie, as Bond collaborator Sir Godfrey Tibbett in A View To A Kill.)

Danger Man

Apparently Patrick McGoohan was Ian Fleming's first choice to play 007 in the movies, but McGoohan turned the part down due to the promiscuity of the character. He was then offered the part of Simon Templar in The Saint and refused for much the same reason. In a sense he trumped both Connery and Moore and was the quintessential agent on tv in the early sixties. What either of those two series would have turned into with him as the lead is anybody's guess, but him turning them down did lead to an extended tenure as John Drake in Danger Man and eventually to the almost-sequel The Prisoner. In any case Danger Man remains one of the best tv series coming out of the ITC stable and one of the high points of sixties tv. Slightly more gritty than The Saint, The Baron and the rest of them, and slightly more believable (mostly). McGoohan barks his way through the series with an intensity that would put Daniel Craig to shame. The following clip is just a brief snippet of an episode, but go get the excellent box set from Network DVD if you want more. Start with the 1 hour episode and then go back to the first series of half hour episodes later.