The Tara King-era "Avengers" episodes are back on TV - but my heart will always belong to Mrs. Peel

I’m always vexed by any mention of the modern superhero film series entitled The Avengers. How very dare they misappropriate the title of high water-mark of '60s televisual high campery, the actual The Avengers. I was too young for the Ian Hendry/Honor Blackman version of the show – I was vaguely aware of it, but I had no idea what was going on – but I paid full attention when 22-year old Diana Rigg joined the cast as Mrs. Emma Peel in 1965.

I’d like to pretend that this was purely to do with the increasing sophistication of the scripts, the visual style, the science fiction elements fuelling many of the stories, the brilliant theme tune, the great title sequence and the casual Bond-like violence that usually saw six eminent scientists (or politicians or high-ranking defence personnel or leading businessmen) sequentially and bafflingly bumped off within the first five minutes of an episode. In truth, it probably had as much to do with hormones – I was 12 when the frequently leather cat-suited Mrs. Peel first burst upon the scene.

Diana Rigg was wonderful! Sassy, sexy, funny, hard as nails, hyper-intelligent, supremely independent, violent – and yet always extremely feminine. To top it off, she wore great clothes (leather – actually PVC – for her first series, and bold psychedelic patterns for the second) and possessed a marvellous voice: strong, deepish, crisp, and without a trace of affectation despite sounding effortlessly upper-middle class. And she had a terrific, full-throated laugh. She was pure class. (Although she sounds as if she hails from deepest Surrey, Diana Rigg was actually born in Doncaster and her father was a railway engineer who moved the family to India when she was two - Hindi was her second language.)

The fact that Mrs. Peel was married and yet we never heard anything about her husband (there may have been hints that he was missing, probably somewhere exotic) made her safe and respectable, somehow: there was oodles of sexual chemistry between her and John Steed, but there was never a hint of hanky-panky. She wasn’t some unattainable film creature – her glamour was of the approachable sort, and one could imagine her ending up married to a stockbroker in Weybridge (in the days when that was acceptable, before feminists readers start foaming at the mouth). But you just somehow knew she’d be eternally out of your league. Whatever, she was fun. And, despite the fact that the name “Emma Peel” is a play on M (or “Man”) Appeal, she was very much a Strong, Independent Woman. Yes, she got rescued a lot by Steed, but that was mainly because she looked so damned appealing in distress (she did something heart-melting with her eyebrows) – and she often rescued Steed in return. In terms of pure intelligence and prowess at chop-socky, one just knew she was superior to her colleague.

Diana Rigg left the series in 1967, after two all-too-brief years. Her mysterious husband, Peter Peel,  turned up, briefly, at the end of her last-ever episode (filmed in 1968): we only saw him from behind, but he looked suspiciously like Steed, dressed like him, and drove the same kind of vintage open-topped car.

I don’t wish to be rude about her replacement, the Canadian actress Linda Thorson, who took over as Steed’s new partner, Tara King. The plots remained as silly and inventive as they had been, and there was an attempt to keep the spirit alive – but, as viewings of episodes from season 6 (just concluded on the True Entertainment channel) revealed, the new relationship lacked oomph. Partly, it’s because Tara King (a professional agent, rather than a Peelite amateur) is definitely Steed’s junior, partly because he’s looking a bit older (with longer, brilliantined hair), so the hint of a sexual relationship feels ever so slightly seedy. Of course, Linda Thorson is lovely – but a bit too girl-next-door, with annoyingly droopy eyes and (in later episodes) an inflexible – and somehow suburban - bubble-cut. Her RADA-trained posh accent is spot-on (as was Diana Rigg's), but it doesn’t sound genuine (it isn’t – her normal accent is Canadian).

Linda Thorson was slightly more curvy than Diana Rigg (she often wears bum-freezer tops and trousers and is frequently filmed running away from a camera held just above ground level – presumably to emphasis her bottom) and her fight scenes are invariably unconvincing. The show is still fun and perfectly viewable (if you avoid the cringe-makingly unfunny funny endings) – but the strange, heartless, febrile atmosphere of the previous two series has evaporated. (Significantly, the best one I’ve seen so far features Peter Barkworth as a double-agent, Joss Ackland as an army officer who’s gone tonto with a nuclear bomb, and Brian Blessed as a sergeant who, naturally, bellows his tits off – it sound cruel, but its success may partly derive from the fact that Tara King spends the whole episode in the grip of a powerful narcoleptic nerve gas.)

Here's an awful trailer announcing the arrival of pre-bubble cut Tara King (she got better):

As for the final Avengers girl, Joanna Lumley, who appeared in The New Avengers as high-kicking secret agent Purdey, a revival which lasted between 1976 and 1977, she did her best, but was on a hiding to nothing, given just how fucking awful the whole thing was. Steed has moved from his piney Central London mews pad to a country mansion (!), the scripts are dire, the plots lumpy, the direction uninspired, the clothes silly, the cars crappy, the stunt doubles spectacularly unconvincing, and the acting is generally abysmal (yes – welcome to the 1970s!)

Because Patrick Macnee was getting on a bit, the producers drafted in all-action hunk Gareth Hunt to play Mike Gambit. Unfortunately, as Hunt looks like a no-neck, beer-swilling, lower-class rugby league player (imagine John Inverdale with a make-over), the playful suaveness of the original Avengers goes out the window. The whole sorry enterprise is further marred by the ghastly double entendre-laden interplay between Gambit and Purdey: you feel that, in real life, the fabulously posh former model would happily have kneed the leering, smutty oaf in the groin (although, as she once dated “vibrant gravedigger” Rod Stewart, maybe not). There was – I swear – more sexual chemistry between Arthur Mullard and Hylda Baker during their epoch-defining Top of the Pops appearance performing their unforgettable version of “You’re the One that I Want”. Anyway, it was all a horrible, charmless mistake – and not in any way Miss Lumley’s fault.

I had been meaning to write about The Avengers for several weeks, what with Patrick Macnee's death and the re-emergence of the two Tara King series on TV - only to be beaten to the punch by Simon Heffer last weekend in the Telegraph (yes, he’s back). While his article is obviously inferior to my own, it's still entertaining, and can be found here.