The post A pictorial look back over the past twelve years… appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

“And all in all, I suppose. I’m tolerant of their ways. One has to be, with these two.”

“These two” are Ian Hendry and Patrick Macnee, stars of The Avengers.

Hendry plays Dr. David Keel, the tough but kindly character who uses his medical knowledge to fight crime.

He is aided by the cynical under-cover man John Steed, played by Macnee — a character with a stately home background and a taste for good living.

Keeping the balance between them is Dr. Keel’s glamorous nurse-receptionist Carol Wilson, played by Ingrid.

I asked Ingrid at her London flat what she really thought about her two leading men.

Do they resemble the characters they play?

“The answer is no,” said Ingrid “In real life, in fact, their roles are somewhat reversed.

“Take Ian first. He is intelligent and hard-working—and easily upset when things go wrong.

“But on the surface he’s a great clown, not a bit like Keel. He loves practical jokes — which is not surprising.

“You see he started in show business in a circus — as private secretary and stooge to Coco the clown.

“I don’t think he has ever forgotten Coco’s advice to take up clowning.”

Ingrid recalled Hendry’s antics one day during rehearsals.

“Things were held up for something or other,” she said. “The set was an old furniture shop and the place was cluttered up with great pieces of ancient furniture.

“Suddenly, there was a great rumpus among the props. And there was Ian crashing through a huge picture frame with a ridiculous Victorian fireman’s helmet on his head, and a false moustache.

“Another time, we had a hairdressing salon set and there he was mincing around in a filthy old overall brandishing a pair of scissors and a comb.”

Ingrid added: “Practical jokers, men especially, can be a bit wearing. But really you have to laugh with this character. He’s a harmless soul, bless him.”

She huddled closer to the fire. She had just returned from a visit to Ireland, she explained, and the flat had been unheated for a few days.

“Every time I come back from Ireland I talk with an Irish accent,” said Ingrid.

“This amuses Pat Macnee, since I’m actually half Scots.

“Pat is a more mature person than Ian in many ways. Unlike Steed, Pat has a quiet personality. He is controlled, modest and easy going.

“He adopts an amusing fatherly attitude towards his co-star. In the middle of some crazy interlude he’ll say, ‘Now come along Hendry, that’s enough for one day.

“‘Get your script like a good boy and let’s get a move on. I’m getting hungry’.”

Pat and Ian don’t, as it happens, snipe at each other as they often do in the series.

“I’m grateful for that,” said Ingrid. “I couldn’t bear that.

“Pat is a bit of a dreamer. He’ll tell you this himself. I think he secretly wishes he was a character like Steed.

“At rehearsals if he’s not busy poring over his script or holding incredibly intense conversations with the director, he will be tucked away in a remote comer of the room reading masses of magazines.” Ingrid gazed at the ceiling. “You get to know people pretty well, working with them every day, don’t you?

“My leading men are not without faults. But, to be honest, they’re two of the sweetest men I know.”

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Ten years ago [1967], the economics of one-hour drama series was that the production cost per episode of a series on videotape like The Avengers or Callan, with two weeks in rehearsal followed by two days in the television studios, was £10,000 ‘above the line’ plus another £10,000 for studio costs and overheads. ‘Above-the-line’ means the actual cash expenditure on actors, writers, sets and costumes. In television, artists’ and writers’ fees are based on a single performance in the United Kingdom, with additional payments for repeats and for overseas sales.

A similar script, produced in a film studio at the normal average series rate of five minutes a day, would take two weeks of full studio usage, plus the consequent cost of editing and dubbing music and sound effects. Such film costs averaged £40,000 for a one-hour episode, but this included world rights on actors’ performances and writers’ scripts. The ITV network would pay £20,000 for two transmissions of these films, so the producer would still need to collect another £20,000 from world sales to recover his costs. Earnings on this scale were almost impossible to achieve unless the series was sold to America, either through a network or syndicated to a few hundred individual stations. Only ATV and ABC ever succeeded in breaking into the American networks, although years later the BBC managed to get one or two of its costume play series and documentaries transmitted. Partly because of my contention that a filmed series of The Avengers would bring a year’s work to Elstree studio stages the Board of ABPC finally agreed to let me spend the million pounds on twenty-six one-hour programmes in black-and-white film.

Julian Wintle was a feature film producer with a reputation for producing consistent films of quality on a commercial basis, and we had already gone through a trial run in making The Human Jungle, a series he brought to ABC. Wintle’s particular skill was in the editing of film and his post-production touches could provide the gloss and glamour The Avengers demanded. I put all the elements of a successful television series at his disposal; producers, directors, script editors, writers, designers, and cast, and to all this he added his own skills, aided by his production supervisor Albert Fennell.

Honor Blackman seemed almost irreplaceable until we came across another actress who was both beautiful and accomplished. Having lost our Cathy Gale to James Bond the script editors invented a new character, Emma Peel. The name was coined by a press officer on the ABC series, Marie Donaldson, based on: ‘Man appeal – m. appeal – Emma Peel! See?’

Wintle and I scrutinised all the rushes and the rough cuts of the first three episodes. They were depressing. The actress was not right for the part. The three episodes were not good enough. I had to make a bitter decision. At a cost of the £120,000 already spent, I had to halt production and find a replacement.

Everyone connected with The Avengers and Drama Department came up with suggestions for a new ‘Emma Peel’ and we made screen tests of a dozen young actresses. Many were promising, yet not sufficiently outstanding. Then Dodo Watts, our casting director, asked me to look at an actress she had cast for an Armchair Theatre comedy. The play had just been recorded but not transmitted, and we played it back on closed circuit. The actress was a member of Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company and she was attractive, intelligent, combative and had a fine sense of comedy. She came to Elstree studios for a film test and (for this was vital) to play a scene opposite Pat Macnee. The chemistry worked – they were perfectly partnered. Diana Rigg was signed up on a long-term contract to play the part.

Our overseas sales were then being handled by Bob Norris, a Californian who, as a consequence of marrying an English girl, settled in Britain. Although interest had been aroused in the States, in spite of the rather fuzzy telerecordings of earlier videotaped episodes, there was no sign of a sale to any of the three major US networks. With half the filmed series completed, and half a million pounds spent, the situation began to look desperate. Norris and I flew to New York to tackle the network bosses.

It was the worst week of my television life. Every day we would set forth from the Gotham Hotel with our cans of film, our charts and statistics, and plod around Manhattan, talking to executives and screening episodes to potential buyers. Every evening we would slump back into our chairs in the hotel and hope for the telephone to ring.

Both NBC and CBS continued to show interest but we encountered the inbuilt antipathy to British accents and lack of pace which the British film industry has rarely been able to overcome. Again, we discovered, the programme buyers in top jobs at the network were cautious and unadventurous, because their livelihood depends upon successful decisions and they were judged by results at the end of every season. The “mortality-rate’ of such American network executives has always been alarming.

Then I had a stroke of good fortune. I had known for many years the president of the ABC network, Leonard Goldenson, who had come into television from the film world of Paramount and on several occasions he had visited our company, ABPC, in London. An anglophile, he appreciated the quality of British production in films, theatre and television, and he was most helpful and encouraging. However, sometimes nothing can be more fatal than a boost from the boss, and a recommendation or even an instruction from the front office can be the kiss of death to a hopeful performer or producer. Luckily, Tom Moore, the ABC programme executive, had screened several episodes of The Avengers with increasing interest, and this confirmation of his own judgment proved to be timely.

By Friday morning, our last day in New York, Norris and I found ourselves with two final hurdles to overcome. The films were in black-and-white and the networks were insisting that all series should now be filmed in colour. We talked our way out of this on the thin excuse that The Avengers would have the distinction of being the last TV series sold to America in monochrome. One remaining hope had been to get the series into the network schedule during the summer months, when the regular programme series were off the air. Otherwise the only chance was that our series could be a replacement for one of the other new series which collapsed in the early months of a new season.
ABC said they might be willing to take the first thirteen programmes on this basis in black-and-white. If by some miracle the series succeeded and they wanted more, then we would have to go into colour for the second thirteen. The other difficulty was the ‘unknown’ girl who was starring in the series. Now that a sale was within sight flocks of ABC executives came to screenings of the episodes to inspect the product they might be handling in their respective departments. They all thought her very good, but she was completely unknown. They had never heard of her. She was not even a British star! What the series needed, they were certain, was a bright young American starlet in the part of Emma Peel.

I refused. The essence of The Avengers was its Englishness. That was the quality which basically appealed to them and I insisted it would also be a reason for winning a new audience; something totally unlike any American series. We held on, and Diana Rigg stayed in, to become a television star in the United States as well as throughout the world. Long after, Diana was besieged by all three American networks to appear in a series of her own, built around her, at her own price. Ultimately the vehicle designed for her followed a typical American pattern and could indeed have been played by an American actress, but it failed to be a series of which Diana Rigg could be proud.

Back we came to London, with thirteen episodes sold, to try to convert the remaining episodes to colour, even though we would have to go above budget. Weeks of waiting went by, until the first Nielsen Research audience ratings were telephoned to us. Then came the cable when ABC took up the options for the second thirteen and, with the series already leaping into popularity, an option for another twenty-six in colour. The Avengers developed into a cult in the United States and even today when I go to New York repeats are still running in the small hours.

A happy moment was when the contracts were signed and we announced the sale to the United States, forecasting how many millions of dollars the series was going to bring to Britain. The Evening Standard headlined this as the biggest television deal ever made with the United States. Within an hour of publication a furious Lew Grade was on the telephone to me yelling that it wasn’t the biggest deal. His were always the biggest deals! In fact The Avengers ultimately earned ten million dollars overseas and revenue is still coming in.

The most pleasing aspect to me was that we had produced the series to British standards and not to American requirements. This has always been the difference in attitudes towards overseas sales between Lew Grade and myself. He has always preferred to run two business operations: his ATV franchise in the Midlands, and then his other output of programmes designed specifically for the American market. Sometimes I have jokingly reminded him that he should be concentrating on Birmingham, England, rather than Birmingham, Alabama. My policy for the two companies I started was, first, to satisfy the British audience. If in accomplishing that we could achieve international standards of quality we should be able to sell such programmes overseas. This seems to be the BBC policy, as well, and I think that our moderate success in the United States with programmes of quality has done much to maintain the high reputation of British drama and documentaries in America. Our policy has certainly been justified in the important market of Australia where British television programmes, primarily BBC and our own, have overtaken American products.

The American networks remain a difficult target and at the time of writing Sir Lew appears to have given them up, too, and instead has turned to producing feature films for the cinemas. The gamble of making television film series for the American market has become enormous. The production cost of The Avengers (and I presume The Saint too) rose from £40,000 to £60,000 per episode. Today [1977] it would cost more than £80,000 to produce an Avengers of comparative quality. To make the required minimum series of twenty-six would cost two million pounds, a venture few would contemplate with optimism. Series like The World at War were not accepted by the American networks, mainly because there is no room in their schedules for series of twenty-six one-hour documentaries; but by slogging away around the United States, city by city, our distributors sold this series to 64 individual stations in the principal cities and earned $1,500,000. The remaining outlet is the Public Broadcasting System, to which sponsors donate programmes. Payments are low but prestige is high, and it is here that American viewers have seen and acclaimed British drama series like Upstairs, Downstairs, and Thames’ Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill.

The post ‘M’ appeal appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Brian Tesler was appointed Programme Controller of ABC in October, 1962. Before the year was out Sydney Newman had resigned and joined the BBC as their head of Drama, the first ITV executive to be given such a key job in the Corporation. I was satisfied that Brian Tesler possessed executive qualities beyond his existing job, and his skilful interpretation of programme research had qualified him thoroughly for the arguments ahead with the other programme controllers in ITV’s battle against the BBC. Hugh Carleton Greene, as Director-General of the BBC, was now fighting back, determined to regain a half-share of the viewing audience. Greene’s emissary to make the approach to Newman was Kenneth Adam, who had returned to the BBC from Picture Post to succeed Cecil McGivern as Controller of Programmes. Sydney Newman told the press that the Director-General’s brief was to bring the Armchair Theatre playwrights like Alun Owen, Bill Naughton, Clive Exton and Harold Pinter into the BBC fold. Blunt as ever, Newman told the newspapermen that the BBC Drama Department was too big: ‘I want to see how we can bring it down into much tighter groups.’ With him he took some of our staff, including his script editors; others who joined him included Verity Lambert. Her first BBC assignment for Newman was to produce Dr Who; but such is the small world of television that the day came when she returned to Thames (which incorporated ABC), taking over Sydney Newman’s old job and becoming Controller of Drama.

During Sydney Newman’s four and a half years with ABC, Armchair Theatre reached the heights of British television drama although sometimes it also touched the depths of depression. The Daily Mail headlined his move with ‘BBC Signs TV “Dustbin” Man’. This was unfairly sensational but undoubtedly a play series which mirrored life at the end of the nineteen-fifties provided Sydney’s dramatists with plenty of depressing subjects.

As the percentage of realistic and gloomy plays increased I suggested to Newman that our drama schedules needed balancing with something more light-hearted and sophisticated. I reminded him of the days when MGM produced sparkling comedies tailored for their contract stars like Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy and Norma Shearer, elegantly dressed and in fashionable settings. Why couldn’t we make a series based, for instance, on The Thin Man, with characters like those made famous by William Powell and Myrna Loy? This suggestion appealed to the ever-receptive Sydney and he came back quickly with a proposal. Seeking popular new series he had coined a title, Police Surgeon, which seemed to have the elements of box office appeal. In spite of the performance of a compelling young actor, Ian Hendry, the first episodes had made little impact. We looked at a newly completed episode in which Ian Hendry acted with Patrick Macnee, an actor who had recently returned to Britain after a few years in Hollywood. In the episode Macnee’s girl friend had been murdered and the two men vowed to avenge her death.

Sydney Newman’s proposal was that we should team the two actors, Hendry again as a doctor and Macnee as a man-about-town agent. A girl was needed to match them and as we could not decide upon the most suitable of two actresses we alternated Julie Stevens, a young contract actress ABC had found in Manchester, with a former Rank starlet who had matured into an accomplished actress, Honor Blackman.

The first series of The Avengers began in January 1961. ATV’s refusal to network it gave the programme an unexpected opportunity for what could be called a provincial try-out, the method by which Charles B. Cochran used to polish his revues in Manchester before bringing them to London to confront West End critics and audiences. The first year’s run was interrupted by a long Equity strike and it was not until May 1962 that we were able to launch the series in what became the familiar format. Ian Hendry had decided that he had no wish to be type-cast in a regular series and he dropped out, although he continued to appear often for ABC in important plays. Honor Blackman’s stylish authority was exactly right for the part of Cathy Gale. Julie Stevens went off in the opposite direction, to become one of the regular presenters in a BBC children’s programme.

The Avengers unit quickly became a dedicated team, with an eager young scot, John Bryce, as producer working closely with Richard Bates as story editor. Patrick Macnee was dandified in Edwardian style, wearing braided suits and embroidered waistcoats, plus a curly bowler hat and an umbrella-swordstick. Macnee did not carry a gun but was always ready to use un-gentlemanly tactics in dealing with rough customers. Michael Whittaker and Frederick Starke designed clothes for Honor Blackman, and her man-tailored suits, high boots, leather jerkins and cat suits started fashion trends which became a trade-mark of the programme. Richard Bates (a son of the author H.E. Bates) had dozens of writers at one time or another working on the series, but the main scripts he selected came from Roger Marshall, Brian Clemens, Eric Paice and Malcolm Hulke.

Produced on videotape at Teddington studios, The Avengers became a national hit once ATV gave in and we were allotted air time in London. Overseas interest was considerable and our film company’s distributors in the United States were optimistic of its chances there. The handicap was that there was no satisfactory electronic method of transferring British 405-line television videotapes to the American standard.

The success of The Avengers was due to its appeal on two levels, first as a fast-moving thriller and, secondly, its tongue-in-cheek impudence and way-out situations which captured the more selective viewers. I tried to stimulate our Elstree film people to make a feature film of The Avengers or, at least, to put Honor Blackman under contract because of her obvious feature film appeal, but without response. Instead Harry Saltzman stepped in and signed up Honor for his James Bond series and she made an instant hit as Pussy Galore.

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Archive source: theavengers.org.uk

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