January 2019 | MovieSteve

The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 5 – Death of a Batman

2023-10-262019-01-29 by Steve

An episode called Death of a Batman in a series called The Avengers does sound like something DC Comics and Marvel might cook up between them. But here the word batman is used in the British Army sense – he’s essentially a butler to one of the officers, the class system as rigid in the armed forces as it was in civvie street. The story gets going with Steed hearing that a man called Wrightson, his old batman in the Second World War, has died. This kindly man of modest means was also somehow in possession of a huge amount of money, or so it turns out when his will is read. He … Read more

The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 4 – The Nutshell

2023-10-262019-01-27 by Steve

Roughly five months after it was made in May 1963, on 19 October, the day that the 14th Earl of Home – who had not been elected to any office at all – was announced as the new prime minister of the country, the United Kingdom sat down to watch The Nutshell, the fourth episode out of the traps in the third series of The Avengers. It’s doubtful that the aristocratic PM with the stiffest of upper lips was much interested in the doings of a bowler-hatted spy, even though both were Eton-educated and probably had the same Savile Row tailor. But if Sir Alec (as he later became, when in tail-wagging-dog style he’d been … Read more

The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 3 – Man with Two Shadows

2023-10-262019-01-15 by Steve

Shown the same day that RA (“Rab”) Butler made his big pitch to be the new leader of the Conservative party after Macmillan’s shock resignation (Butler’s big speech was a total fail), Man with Two Shadows also plays with the idea of the wrong man – the double being so fruitful a concept that The Avengers would return to it often, as did a lot of 1960s TV. Perhaps the widely prevalent notion of “false consciousness” – there is a right way of seeing things and a wrong way – has something to do with it. Another well worn path is that of someone being killed before the opening credits have rolled. In … Read more

The Avengers: Series 3, Episode 2 – The Undertakers

2023-03-012019-01-05 by Steve

On Saturday 5 October 1963, a day after the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had updated their plan to invade Cuba the following July (President Kennedy’s assassination would intervene), and while JFK’s wife Jackie was enjoying the company of shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in Greece (she would later marry him), TV audiences in the UK got their own kicks by sitting down to watch the second episode of series three of The Avengers, altogether a camper, more knockabout affair than series two. And there was nothing camper in the 1960s than death, there being a positive Joe Orton-esque quality to the superb opener to The Undertakers – one member of a coffin-carrying team … Read more