Steed and Cathy bond over chess…

Exciting news for all fans of The Avengers – possibly the most British of British television shows. It was way back in 2001 that the Contender Entertainment Group started releasing the series on DVD; box sets I studiously collected and watched and rewatched. It was thrilling to have the episodes (well, from the third series on, at any rate) on this shiny new format, but they have not aged well. Compared to modern releases the picture quality is murky and the sound pretty awful, especially on the complete series 3 release. A handful of episodes are almost unwatchable in part. Add to this the fact that these releases came pretty much at the dawn of DVD and now I have a shelf full of malfunctioning discs with more glitches and stutters than bowler hats and glasses of champagne. You can understand my excitement then at the news that Optimum Home Entertainment is preparing a gloriously remastered box set of the previously unreleased (in the UK) second series.

This was the series which really began the public fascination with The Avengers – previous star Ian Hendry had left for a film career he would never quite achieve, leaving Patrick Macnee’s John Steed to take centre stage. Joining him were a rotating trio of companions or helpers; medical man Doctor Martin King (Jon Rollason, in a barely disguised rewrite of Hendry’s Dr. Keel, to use up some leftover first series scripts), nightclub singer Venus Smith (Julie Stevens, as a sort of airheaded, devoted precursor to Tara King and Adam Adamant Lives! Georgina Jones) and finally Honor Blackman, as Cathy Gale. Cathy began to mould the series into what would make it such a huge success – she was a strong, independent woman before strong, independent women were completely fashionable. She could hold her own in a fight, outthink the villains (and more often than not Steed) and had a dry, cutting wit. At a time when women were still secretaries and housewives, and wore pointy bras, she was unlike anything else on British television (Doctor Who hadn’t even started yet and for its first few series the Doctor’s companions were his innocent granddaughter and a middle aged schoolteacher).

Many fans of The Avengers count the Cathy Gale years as the best – I don’t, in all honesty, having a sentimental attachment to Diana Rigg’s first series. But there is no doubt that the show hit a height of scripting and performance that went largely unmatched by other shows during Honor Blackman’s tenure. I can’t wait for this release, the first chance for me to see several episodes. The show was possibly never more distinguished – scripts by the likes of John Lucarotti, Peter Ling, Roger Marshall and Malcolm Hulke, direction by Don Leaver, Peter Hammond and Kim Mills, and guest stars like Gerald Sim, Peter Arne, Patrick Magee, Alfred Burke and Philip Madoc. These names might not mean a lot to the average viewer, but to a fan of archive television they represent some of the most talented people working in television at that time.

Honor Blackman in series 3 episode ‘Concerto’

All the better, then, that the series is finally to get the loving restoration it has always deserved. Optimum is overseeing a high definition cleanup, the kind done for Blu-ray releases, though the series will be released only on DVD at first (with further series’ released if sales are good). This might seem pointless, but by all accounts this will still see a significant improvement in picture and sound quality. Perhaps more exciting than this is the wealth of extra features currently being put together; all surviving footage from the first series with Ian Hendry (comprising two full episodes and the opening twenty minutes of the very first episode), the sole surviving episode of Police Surgeon, commentaries with Julie Stevens, Roger Marshall and producer Leonard White and an exclusive interview with Honor Blackman, not to mention script PDFs, image galleries and telesnaps – with the promise of more to be confirmed! More details are available over here.

In all honesty, I have come to this news a little late – it’s been floating around the web for a month or more now. Catching up on all the chat about the series, three things have come up time and again; complaints about the lack of VidFIRE on the new release, complaints about the steep price and complaints that this has come several years too late. Firstly VidFIRE – this website will explain it better than I ever could – is a restoration process for the truly nerdy, reproducing a videotaped look onto archive material that survives only on film. I have seen the results on some of the latest Doctor Who DVD releases, and in all honesty I can barely tell the difference; nor can the vast majority of consumers. As for the RRP, quite apart from the fact that VidFIRE would have jacked the price up even further, a proposed retail price of around £80 (with probable internet deals at about £60) doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. Considering the cost of restoration and the effort that has gone into this release, not to mention the fact that it consists of 26 fifty minute episodes, before extras, it seems a pretty fair deal. And since these episodes haven’t been available on DVD in this country until now, it’s a deal any fan would surely snap up. I saw an interesting comparison on an archive tv forum, which pointed out that the new, Russell T. Davies helmed Doctor Who box sets (13 forty-five minute episodes and a Christmas special) have a retail price approaching £70. In light of that, this Avengers set seems like a real bargain.

Lastly, the wait. It’s true; it has been a long wait for this release, a long wait for any committed release of The Avengers. But that wait also means all those infuriating glitches will have been ironed out, whilst the episodes themselves will look better than they ever have before – better than they could have looked several years ago, regardless of money spent on restoration. Advances in digital technology mean this set should look and sound fantastic, which is worth the price of admission alone.

I can’t be entirely certain when I got my first autograph; it seems like a lifetime ago now. I can trace my love of films and vintage television back to my father’s influence on me in my formative years, but he was also responsible for my obsession with the actors, writers and directors who made those things possible. When I was around ten I started receiving letters in the post - most ten year-olds don’t get a lot of mail, so it was nice to see a few envelopes every month with my name on. Invariably my name was written in my dad’s own scrawl, though every letter or photograph was from someone different; actors generally, who we might recently have seen in an old episode of Doctor Who or The Avengers, minor 60s film stars and some unfamiliar faces, the voices behind Captain Scarlet or Tom Baker’s robot pal K9. As far as I know my Dad was never an autograph hunter, and why he started acquiring them for me I don’t know, but it had a lasting influence.

It was a peculiar sort of thrill, waiting for the postman and hoping he might have brought me another signed photograph; one of the Doctor’s companions perhaps, or some other cult TV regular. I still remember the sheer elation I felt when a letter arrived one day postmarked California - two autographed pictures fell out, along with a slip of paper that said "With compliments - Patrick Macnee". One of those photos still hangs on my wall, above Honor Blackman, below Alfred Burke and across from Kenneth Cope. After a few years, as my tastes broadened and my heroes became more obscure, I started writing to celebrities myself. I don’t think I ever had quite the same success rate as my father, though I was generally going after actors who were harder to get hold of, and in some cases hadn’t performed in several years. I learnt several things about the mystery that is Celebrity from this process; writers don’t write back (this is a generalisation of course, but I can’t think of a single author or scriptwriter who returned a letter of mine), whilst directors go the extra mile (every single director of film or television I wrote to in that time sent me a long, detailed letter with their photos). Perhaps the biggest eye-opener to me was the revelation that the more famous an actor, the easier it is to get their autograph. Received wisdom about haughty stars and difficult divas suggests that eliciting a response wouldn’t be unlike the whole blood/stone thing. Actually, these actors get so much fanmail that their agents generally have a stack of signed pictures ready to slap in your S.A.E and send back. Of course, for the very famous there is no guarantee that what you’re getting is genuine – there is a risk that your autograph may have been "autopenned", signed by a secretary or simply rubber stamped. I was crushed to receive two very shabby fakes from Christopher Lee and Mark Hamill, but this is the risk you run with a "major" celebrity.

The more obscure the actor, the harder it is to track down an address. You could probably find an agent’s address for Michael Caine on the internet in under five minutes, but it took me weeks of hanging around forums and doing research to track down a contact for Gay Hamilton (further hampered by the existence of an apparently better know actress called Lisa Gay Hamilton). But I found it, and I wrote to her, and I got a letter back. I was always more excited to have a success with the Gay Hamiltons of the acting world than with the Michael Caines (no offence, Michael).

Franklyn comes face to face with John Steed

Another thing I learnt was that you can’t make assumptions about who will and won’t reply. Oscar winning actor Paul Scofield was happy to write to me and answer all my overexcited questions about The Train (one of the finest war films ever made), where many others presumably binned my letter and went back to work. Mike Hodges gladly answered my questions too, and sent me some photographs, but when I wrote to him a second time his answer was curt and impatient - as though he feared I might be a stalker in the making. I wrote several times to William Franklyn, still one of my favourite actors, and every time received a generous and appreciative reply. I was genuinely upset when he died, back in 2006 - I doubt he would have known me from Adam, but it had meant a lot to my teenage self that one of my idols took the time to reply. It’s a shame I can’t say the same about Diana Rigg - she was sadly dismissive of my letter and refused to include a picture (she is famously reticent about her time on The Avengers, and looking back I fear I may have offended her with my eagerness for the show). Terence Alexander also refused to send a photo, though for much more self deprecating reasons - he considered himself too old to be photographed.

It was with some sadness that I read Terence’s obituary in May. Unfortunately it’s inevitable that I will see more of my favourite actors die, including those I wrote to and whose letters I cherished so much. Earlier this week I saw a small news item about the death of Harry Towb. The piece declared "Eastenders actor dies" - according to the imdb he was in two episodes back in December. Two whole episodes; to thus reduce an almost 60 year career to "Eastenders actor" seems really quite crass. It was this that started me thinking about my letter-writing years; I wrote to Towb back in 2004, waxed lyrical about his appearances in The Avengers (a particularly good guest role in "Killer", opposite William Franklyn coinicidentally), The Champions and as ill-fated Osgood in classic Doctor Who serial "The Seeds of Death". When I read about his death it set me to thinking just how many fan letters he’d received in his lifetime. I’m not for a moment suggesting that mine was the only one - of course, in a career that long, he may have received hundreds, thousands maybe, of letters. But my point is, Brad Pitt probably receives the same amount in a single year, probably much much more. With that much praise such letters probably become almost meaningless. I thought about Harry Towb and for the first time I hoped that maybe I wasn’t the only one getting something out of these letters; for all I know he may have been besieged with letters, but somehow I doubt it, and certainly I can only wonder how many praised his performance in a single episode of a generic spy series filmed more than forty years before.

Towb in ‘The Seeds of Death’

But then that’s partly what this blog is supposed to be about. In my first post I said I was doing this for myself as much as for anyone, and for my Dad too. That’s still true, but it’s also for all those men and women, the actors, directors, writers, producers, cameramen, stunt artists, composers and every single other person who worked on these shows and films. Perhaps 5% of them were, or became, household names. The rest are unjustly forgotten, and whilst I can’t exactly reverse that, if I can give them just a little recognition, then all the better.

I haven’t written a letter in about two years. I’m going to start again, but perhaps now I won’t ask for anything in return. No autograph or picture. Just a thank you for keeping me entertained.

Rest in peace, Harry.

Raiders of the Lost Archive, which starts this Tuesday on ITV1, is not just a television event, it’s a fully-fledged initiative set up by ITV and incorporating the BFI, BBC and Kaleidoscope. Now those first three acronyms will be familiar enough to any fan of British TV and film, but Kaleidoscope may well not be, and that’s a real shame. Over the last 20 years, this voluntary organisation has tirelessly worked to promote, recover and preserve television shows thought missing or destroyed. By these powers combined, then, the ‘Raiders…’ have turned up a wealth of vintage footage, some thought lost forever.

The ‘Raiders…’ established itself in 2006, and ITV produced a series of programmes on the subject to air in early 2007. This is where the confusion begins. Several blogs that celebrated news of the series two years ago, including this one here and this one too, refer to a four part series. It seems one episode was actually shown back then, and Kaleidoscope’s newspage refers to ‘the two previously untransmitted editions’, which would make a total of three shows – this is supported by the Radio Times listings, which mention three shows (though this is the only source to suggest the previously aired episode will be shown as well). To complicate things further, Shiver Productions (who actually made this programme) mention only two episodes on their news section – though they may only be referring to those previously unseen.

The upshot is that over the next two or three weeks ITV will be showing two or three programmes about the ‘Raiders…’ and what their search has turned up. The only questions that remain are about the content of these shows. In a perfect world we’d be presented with a serious overview of what has been found and what remains lost, with updates on classic ITV shows like The Avengers (24 episodes are believed lost), or Public Eye (36 episodes unaccounted for). I fear, though, that the next few Tuesdays will be rather more lightweight. Perhaps it’s unfair of me, but when I read that amiable comedian Paddy McGuinness would be hosting I began to fear that Raiders of the Lost Archive might not be quite what I had been expecting. Further (scant) details, which suggest Mr. McGuinness will be confronting beloved stars like Rolf Harris and Bill Oddie with their earliest performances only strengthened my fears of a strange Before They Were Famous type show. Nevertheless, I’ll reserve my judgement until the first (or is it second?) episode goes out on Tuesday. Who knows, I may even be pleasantly surprised.

Raiders of the Lost Archive, Tuesday 21^st July 2009, 10.35pm, ITV1.