The Avengers Series 2

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 1 – Mr Teddy Bear

Ian Hendry has left, Patrick Macnee has been bumped up to star and Honor Blackman has been drafted in as a sidekick who’s not just a pretty face. But there’s more than just those cosmetic differences – if they are … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 2 – Propellant 23

Set mostly in the airport at Marseille (a studio just to the north of London, apparently), this tight and fast episode gets underway with a passenger on a plane arriving from Tripoli getting very distraught and claiming he’s about to … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 3 – The Decapod

Just when you thought it was Steed and Gale, Macnee and Blackman, along pops Julie Stevens (later in the decade a regular on the children’s TV show Playaway) as a sidekick in the third episode of series two. What’s afoot? … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 4 – Bullseye

Like one of those arcane “tontine plots”, the fourth episode of series two offers us a scenario where a string of people die so somebody in the same eco-system can ultimately benefit. Julie Stevens womanfully did sidekick duty in the … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 5 – Mission to Montreal

Mixing it up yet again, episode five of series two – Mission to Montreal – introduces yet another sidekick in a story set on board a cruise liner heading for Canada. Jon Rollason plays Dr Martin King and brings the … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 6 – The Removal Men

Heady Europeanism, alcohol, jazz music and sexual licence are the watchwords of The Removal Men, number six in the second series. And Julie Stevens, appropriately, returns as Steed’s helpmeet in an episode set on the French Riviera, where a Bardot-like … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 7 – The Mauritius Penny

An episode about a missing postage stamp? Thou shittest. Indeed not. That is exactly what The Avengers are up to in the seventh episode of series two, a bizarre story that starts off in the genteel world of philately and … Read more

The butler and Steed discuss bowler hats

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 8 – Death of a Great Dane

We’re now eight episodes into the second series of The Avengers and change is afoot. Even before Death of a Great Dane gets underway, something clearly sets this episode apart from the ones that came before. John Dankworth’s theme music … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 9 – The Sell-Out

Just as the keel of the series had started to lift, floating at last in its own water, episode nine of series two plonks it back on the sea floor. The Sell-Out is a throwback to series one, which itself … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 10 – Death on the Rocks

The tone is light and bantery, a set of the features that would become permanent eventually, but in other respects this tenth episode of series two is one of the weaker entrants so far in the Avengers canon. Nothing wrong … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 11 – Traitor in Zebra

In its heyday – Emma Peel era, shot on film, in colour, with the Laurie Johnson theme music – The Avengers became famous, notorious even, for its plots taking place in a nearly depopulated world. All very necessary, the better to maintain … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 12 – The Big Thinker

Things go technological in the 12th episode of series two – The Big Thinker – a tale of a big brain computer called Plato and the scientists who minister to it like Delphic virgins in white lab coats. Hanging on like … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 13 – Death Dispatch

John Steed and Cathy Gale’s party trick, a duet working variations on the theme of the invincibility of the British upper class, really comes into its own in Death Dispatch, the 13th broadcast episode of series two. We’re off in … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 14 – Dead on Course

The Avengers might just as easily have been called The Amateurs, since that was the original premise of the show – a bunch of freelance helpmeets called in to assist gangmaster John Steed in the solving of various cases too tricky … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 15 – Intercrime

Twelve high level robberies in the last few weeks “and not one of them the work of an Englishman,” Steed says in the opening minutes of Intercrime, both the title of this episode and the name of a criminal outfit, … Read more

Steed is briefed by One-Ten in a steam room

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 16 – Immortal Clay

By a gigantic stroke of luck, it seems, while Mrs Gale is being given a guided tour of a ceramics atelier, she stumbles across a dead body in the room where the raw clay is kept. Doubly handily, it seems … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 17 – Box of Tricks

A thin, confusingly plotted and frankly rather dull episode is only emphasised by the terrible picture and sound quality (on the old box set I’m watching this series on, anyway). And it’s a Venus Smith episode, which means a song … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 18 – Warlock

Woo hoo, the suggestion of nudity and all sorts of pagan goings-on are all over the screen in the opening sequence of Warlock, as groovy hipsters gyrate themselves into a frenzy around a photo of… a middle aged man. All … Read more

The Avengers: Series 2, Episode 19 – The Golden Eggs

Because The Avengers were not broadcast in production order*, you do get the odd anomaly. Fore example, the getting-to-know-you dialogue between Steed and Mrs Gale in Warlock, the 18th (broadcast order) episode of series 2, makes more sense when you … Read more