The Avengers - Jolly Good Show
IT HAS TAKEN
AMERICA six years to discover The Avengers. Since 1961, the show's Mod
mayhem has delighted a sophisticated British audience with its hip and slightly far-out
antics; but after importing the cloak-and-robber series for an abbreviated run last
summer, ABC shelved it to unveil its new fall schedule. Now, with the anemia of that
schedule firmly demonstrated, The Avengers has made a deserved return (in living
color), because it is one of the small handful of consistently inventive, offbeat and
thoroughly entertaining programs on television. The Avengers themselves are a rather
insouciant duo who have a quite undefined but binding mandate to protect the Empire in
times of dire peril. They are sly, indomitable and eccentric - and the show is done
with an audacious flair and flippancy that makes the U.N.C.L.E. crowd look like a bunch of
dull coppers. Patrick Macnee as John Steed is a dapper, derbied courtier - veddy
British - with no visible means of support and a slight propensity for stumbling at
crucial moments. But the star is definitely Diana Rigg, who, as the widowed
"Mrs. Emma Peel" (her husband was a test pilot), exudes more sheer sexuality
than American TV has previously handled. (She has made British viewers all but
forget the show's first female lead, Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman, who defected
to play with the bad guys until James Bond straightened her out in Goldfinger.)
"Mrs. Peel" is an erotic stylization, rather than a character, in pants
suits, miniskirts and an incredibly kinky wardrobe. Her other great attribute is
that she is one of the neatest brawlers anywhere: She karate-chops villains by the
roomful, barely mussing her leather fighting suit. There are no holds barred for
Miss Rigg or for the show's uproarious style. It's all high-wire melodrama,
good-humoured fetishism and flamboyant self-mockery. We hopefully expect it to be
with us for a long while.
from Playboy, USA, March 1967.