I really ought to write a detailed post about my longtime relationship with The Avengers (no, not that movie) – the 1960’s era British television show. I’ve been fortunate to see several of the leading stars of the series (Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman, Joanna Lumley) live onstage.

In the present day, the show continues to have timeless appeal for me as a sort of visual comfort food, meaning that I keep the DVDs close at hand, but don’t always turn them on. But when I do, I can sit back, and enjoy, and even look at the individual episodes with refreshed eyes, since I have been watching some of them semi – regularly for 24 years. The show remains popular thanks to its blend of wit, style and unique storytelling. 

And so tonight I was oddly drawn to the series’ most polarizing episode, with its most ridiculous title: Look – (stop me if you’ve heard this one) but there were these two fellers.

This story is one of the early episodes of the series’ final season, filmed in 1968, and finds John Steed and Tara King on the trail of a series of bizarre murders of businessmen across London. Various clues point towards culprits in the comedy industry, and the two agents are hot on their trail to see where it all connects. Along the way, they meet a handful of British comedy stars known and unknown at the time, including a pre-Monty Python John Cleese, and Bernard Cribbins.

The villains’ actions are accompanied by a distinctive piece of music that I recall often imitating when i first saw the episode as an impressionable six year old during the series’ rebroadcast on A&E in 1990. In a dramatic sense, the musical accompaniment of the episode doesn’t seem to register until close to the end, when composer Laurie Johnson chooses to insert music originally seen in an earlier season episode into this particular story. (Prior to that, there’s much repetition of a somber, grey theme broken up by the jaunty villain music.)

I could write for quite a while on the art of periodically revisiting these TV episodes. I think it’s interesting that the “lesser known” (to the popular opinion) stories are more appealing to me as time goes on – as in preferring the Linda Thorson season to the Diana Rigg episodes. And, with a more refined artistic sensibility, i notice various acting and story choices that I would not have caught at all in my younger years.

For instance, this episode is bogged down with a lengthy sequence about two-thirds of the way through the story. Tara King is assigned to protect a businessman in danger, and long story short, she doesn’t succeed. Their banter is awkwardly protracted and the story seems to forget about the more interesting villain characters. The Tara King character is also at her most naive here, while later episodes in this long season, which was filmed over a 15 month period between late 1967 and early 1969, show Tara as more confident and experienced.

For The Avengers at its most endearingly self – referential, see here: