From Television Stars 1966, published by Purnell

Like many young men of school-leaving age, John did not have the slightest idea what he wanted to do for a living. Then one day, this son of a lorry-driver took a job as a porter at a fruit-market on the suggestion of a friend.

“For three months,” he said, “I slogged away between four in the morning and two in the afternoon doing jobs like piling sacks of potatoes one on top of another.”

After getting rather bored and tired doing this sort of thing, he decided to become a baker’s apprentice. He stayed at this job for two months before making up his mind that he would like to become an actor.

Having an intense and keen interest in dramatics, he was encouraged by the elocution teachers with whom he was studying to further his drama work at a local youth club in Burnage, Manchester.

The next giant step he took was the trip to London and to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He confesses that his first term there was somewhat of a disaster in that he found it difficult to grasp the things that were being taught. He says he flopped in the end of term exams, and went home to Burnage feeling very unhappy. But the next term at RADA was more successful. He went on to give a prize-winning repertory season at Liverpool between July, 1960, and January, 1961.

The next step was television, when he was invited to appear in a season of Granada’s “Younger Generation” series, and in an exciting role in the TV version of “Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance”. From then on the acting career of John Thaw was never in doubt. One role followed another. He appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in “The Fire Raisers”, in the film The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which starred Tom Courtenay, a former flat mate of his, at the Arts Theatre in “Women, Beware Women”, and so on.

He was chosen to understudy Sir Laurence Olivier in the West End production of “Semi-Detached”. He also played the part. Working alongside Olivier, proved an invaluable experience for him.

After this came four appearances in “Z Cars”, which was then followed by three months repertory work in Dundee, and by roles in TV plays, including one in “The Avengers”.

“It was through that role in ‘The Avengers’ — the former series, with Cathy Gale, who was involved in a plot to put her on the throne of Britain — that I was noticed by ABC, who were looking for an actor to play Sergeant Mann in ‘Redcap’.”

Just before he started work on the series John, who had married actress Sally Alexander, spent a one-week honeymoon in Corsica. After this he got down to the part which has made him popular throughout the country.

He says his greatest weakness is that he worries about everything. But one thing he need have no worries about — is his future in television.

The post John Thaw appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

We know, though, that we have to avoid slumping into a rut by merely continuing our existing programmes. The challenge is to find new ideas and programmes that will eventually replace even the most successful of our current productions. As you will know well enough from your own experience, a successful programme is rarely a flash in the pan, but generally the result of painful and painstaking work over months and sometimes years. So the task is to maintain and improve our present productions and yet simultaneously create new programmes.

The new Network Programming plan continues the situation whereby the four major companies provide the bulk of the national programmes. The change is that ABC will contribute a higher percentage of the weekend programmes and will strengthen its position on the network.

First of all we shall make more ARMCHAIR THEATRES. Instead of alternating the Sunday plays fortnightly with ATV we shall produce two out of three.

THE AVENGERS will be “rested” until the end of the year: (It is physically impossible to produce a first-class programme every week and many preparatory months have to be spent on scripts and putting a good number of shows “in the bag”). Yet we have THE AVENGERS slot to fill on the network and that means one or perhaps two new one-hour programme series to get into shape. We piloted SCANDAL, then decided not to proceed with it. Now we are launching a new series called THE PROTECTORS. Intensive work is taking place on other subjects and probably we shall be making pilots of new series ideas at Didsbury.

ABC was already well established as a force in Drama, as we were in Religion. Our latest breakthrough has been on Light Entertainment, and it is heartening to see BRIAN TESLER’s work reaping its rewards. THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS has climbed over JUKE BOX JURY to the very top and everyone will have been pleased to see this show chosen as Britain’s ITV entry for the Montreux Festival.

Then BIG NIGHT OUT has continued to improve and it was a proud night for PHILIP JONES when “B.N.O.” swarmed over the weekend barriers and became a London weekday Top Ten show. Then this summer we shall have another ABC variety show on the network, replacing the Palladium show on Sunday nights. This will be BLACKPOOL NIGHT OUT, our biggest effort yet in Light Entertainment.

TEMPO has also come up well and on page 43 of its official handbook “ITV 1964” the Authority describes this as “the major constant feature dealing specifically with the Arts.”

Our Religious programmes have brought us high prestige and we have made a good start in Adult Education.

In colour, too, ABC has pioneered the French SECAM system, and throughout Europe ABC is regarded as the leader of colour television in ITV.

This sounds a complacent piece but it is not intended to be written in such a vein. This is an assessment of where we have reached, and a reminder of how hard we shall have to work to continue the progress of the past year, our biggest year ever.

At ABC, we have the resources, the people, the ideas, the experience, the initiative — on to the 7-day week!

The post Three year diary appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

Police Surgeon, a new half-hour TV series starting Saturday, starring Ian Hendry as Dr Geoffrey Brent, will lift the curtain.

Julian Bond, who wrote several of the Probation Officer scripts, is writing most of the episodes for the new series, in collaboration with J. J. Bernard, the pseudonym of a London police surgeon who suggested that the work would be an ideal theme for a TV series.

The young, idealistic Dr Brent cannot resist taking a personal interest in the cases to which he is called, for at heart he is a philosopher.

First of the 13 stories, many based on fact, is titled “Easy Money.” In it Dr Brent deals with a young thief, played by 18-year-old Michael Crawford. The second episode, “Under the Influence,” deals with a motorist, played by Bernard Archard, accused of drunken driving.

Other early episodes star Harry H. Corbett as a man who beats up a club hostess in “Lag on the Run” and Jean Anderson in “Sunday Morning Story,” which deals with a refugee girl’s suicide.

Appearing in several episodes with Ian Hendry is John Warwick, playing Inspector Landon, of the Bayswater area police station, to which Dr Brent is attached. Another artist who will be seen in several episodes is Ingrid Hafner, the surgeon’s receptionist.

The theme music has the appropriate title ‘The Big Knife.” The first four episodes of Police Surgeon are being produced by Julian Bond and the rest by Leonard White. Bond, 29 years old, has been writing for TV since 1957. Before that he was writing and directing documentary films. He is married and has three children.

Ian Hendry is the same age as Bond. He made his TV debut some years ago stooging for the famous clown Coco. The clown tried to persuade Ian to use his talent for knockabout comedy in the circus, but his gift for acting led him to the stage.

Bond chose Ian to star in his new series after watching his progress for three years following an impressive performance in Anouilh’s Dinner with the Family, which brought him to London with the Oxford Playhouse company.

At school at Culford, Suffolk, Ian’s main interest was sport. During National Service with the 32nd Medium Regiment, RA, he paced Chris Chataway and organised his own motor-cycle stunt team.

Ian went from the Central School of Speech and Drama into repertory. About the same time he was cast in Emergency — Ward 10, and established a following as Chris Stone, a polio patient. Film parts followed in Room at the Top, Sink the Bismarck and In the Nick.

Last spring he was back in TV as the young pilot whose error caused the death of a friend in Inside Story, and since then he has had further TV successes in Probation Officer, Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon and Flight from Treason.

To celebrate this series Ian and his wife Jo, who teaches film and television make-up, have moved to a new home aboard a converted naval pinnace on the Thames at Chiswick.

The post Dr Brent – Police Surgeon 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.”

The post Avengers? They’re the sweetest men I know appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

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.

The post Dramas of one kind or another appeared first on THIS IS ABC WEEKEND from Transdiffusion.

During his time in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, he worked first with ABC before moving across to the BBC in 1962, holding the role of Head of Drama with both organisations. During this phase of his career, he was responsible for initiating two hugely popular television programmes, the spy-fi series The Avengers and the science-fiction series Doctor Who, as well as overseeing the production of groundbreaking social realist drama series such as Armchair Theatre and The Wednesday Play.

The Museum of Broadcast Communications describes Newman as “the most significant agent in the development of British television drama.” His obituary in The Guardian declared that “For ten brief but glorious years, Sydney Newman … was the most important impresario in Britain … His death marks not just the end of an era but the laying to rest of a whole philosophy of popular art.”

Early life

Born in Toronto, Newman was the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant father who ran a shoe shop. After studying at Ogden Public School, which he left at the age of thirteen, he later enrolled in the Central Technical School, studying art and design subjects. He initially attempted to follow a career as a stills photographer and an artist, specialising in drawing film posters. However, he found it so difficult to earn enough money to make a living from this profession that instead, he switched to working in the film industry itself. In 1938, he travelled to Hollywood, where he was offered a role with the Walt Disney Company on the strength of his graphic design work. However, he was unable to take the job due to a failure to secure a work permit. Returning to his native country, in 1941, he gained a job as a film editor at the National Film Board of Canada. He was eventually to work on over 350 films while an editor for the NFB.

During the Second World War the head of the NFB, John Grierson, promoted Newman to film producer, working on documentaries and propaganda films, including Fighting Norway, which he directed. In 1944 he was made executive producer of Canada Carries On, a long-running series of such films. In 1949 Grierson again assisted Newman’s career, entering him into television, then a new industry, on a one-year attachment to NBC in New York City. His assignment there was to compile reports for the Canadian government on American television techniques, focusing on dramas, documentaries and outside broadcasts.

The CBC

One of Newman’s reports on outside broadcasting was seen and admired by executives at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and in 1952 he joined the Corporation as their Supervising Director of Features, Documentaries and Outside Broadcasts. There he was involved in producing not only some of the earliest television editions of Hockey Night in Canada, but also the first Canadian Football League game to be shown on television. After his experience of seeing the production of television plays in New York, he was eager to work in drama despite, by his own admission, “knowing nothing about drama.” He was nonetheless able to persuade his superiors at CBC to make him Supervisor of Drama Production in 1954. In this position he encouraged a new wave of young writers and directors, including Ted Kotcheff and Arthur Hailey, and oversaw shows such as the popular General Motors Theatre.

Writing in 1990, the journalist Paul Rutherford felt that during his time at the CBC in the 1950s, Newman had been a “great champion of both realistic and Canadian drama.” He felt that Newman “came to fulfil the role of the drama impresario with the vision to push people to develop a high-quality and popular style of drama.”

Several of the General Motors Theatre plays, including Hailey’s Flight into Danger, were purchased for screening by the BBC in the United Kingdom. The productions impressed Howard Thomas, who was the managing director of ABC, the franchise holder for the rival ITV network in the English Midlands and the North at weekends. Thomas offered Newman a job with ABC as a producer of his own Saturday night thriller series, which Newman accepted, moving to Britain in 1958. In 1975 the Head of Drama at the CBC, John Hirsch, noted that the tendency of so many writers and directors having followed Newman to the UK in the 1950s and never having returned to work in Canada had a detrimental impact on the standard of subsequent Canadian television drama.

ABC

Soon after Newman arrived in the UK, ABC’s Head of Drama Dennis Vance was moved into a more senior position with the company, and Thomas offered Newman his position, which the Canadian quickly accepted. He was, however, somewhat disparaging of the state in which he found British television drama. “At that time, I found this country to be somewhat class-ridden,” he reminisced to interviewers in 1988. “The only legitimate theatre was of the ‘anyone for tennis’ variety, which on the whole gave a condescending view of working-class people. Television dramas were usually adaptations of stage plays and invariably about the upper classes. I said, ‘Damn the upper classes: they don’t even own televisions!'”

Newman’s principal tool for shaking up this established order was a programme which had been initiated before he had arrived at ABC, Armchair Theatre. This anthology series was networked nationally across the ITV regions on Sunday evenings, and in 1959 was in the top ten of the ratings for 32 out of the 37 weeks it was broadcast, with audiences of over 12 million viewers. Newman used the strand to present plays by writers such as Alun Owen, Harold Pinter and Clive Exton, also bringing over associates from Canada such as Charles Jarrott and Ted Kotcheff. Writing in 2000, the television historian John Caughie stated that “Newman’s insistence that the series would use only original material written for television made Armchair Theatre a decisive moment in the history of British television drama.”

In 1960 Newman devised a thriller series for ABC called Police Surgeon, starring Ian Hendry. Although Police Surgeon was not a success and was cancelled after only a short run, Newman took Hendry as the star, and some of the ethos of the programme, to create a new series (not a direct sequel as is sometimes claimed) called The Avengers. Debuting in January 1961, The Avengers became an international success, although in later years its premise differed somewhat from Newman’s initial set-up, veering into more humorous territory rather than remaining a gritty thriller.

Newman’s great success at ABC had been noted by the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose executives were keen to revive their own drama department’s fortunes in the face of fierce competition from ITV. In 1961 the BBC’s Director of Television, Kenneth Adam, met with Newman and offered him the position of Head of Drama at the BBC. He accepted the position, eager for a new challenge, although he was forced by ABC to remain with them until the expiration of his contract in December 1962, after which he immediately began work with the BBC.

Article source: Wikipedia | Contributors | CC-BY-SA 3.0

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So that our drama producers would not forget the North and Midlands audience at our base, I provided their offices with Lowry prints. When we first opened ABC in Manchester I had commissioned a ‘local’ artist to paint a typical Manchester scene for us every year, and my choice was L.S. Lowry whose price then was between £150 and £200 a picture. One day he came to see his Salford painting hanging in my London office in Hanover Square. I told him that all I missed was the television aerials on the houses. At once, he took a brush from his inside pocket and painted an ITV aerial on one of the houses! It was exhibited in the Lowry exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1976.

Brian Tesler had been able to attract into ABC a new school of entertainment producers and directors, and to produce variety shows and situation comedies to match anything the BBC or ATV could offer. That rarest of all the species, writers of comedy, had also been drawn into ABC and we had more of them under contract than anyone except the BBC. With Brian Tesler’s personal reputation and his constellation of directors and writers, it became less difficult to entice the cream of that most nervous and uncertain group of all, the comedians. To move to other spheres of entertainment they needed to have exceptional confidence in the programme makers and their immediate bosses. With ABC programmes now offering a vigorous challenge to ATV’s domination of entertainment we began to bill such stars as Benny Hill, Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Max Bygraves, Bob Monkhouse, Mike and Bernie Winters, and Sid James.

At last ABC Television had accumulated the strength to reject and replace ATV programmes which did not reach up to our requirements. The day came when Val Parnell and Lew Grade once again threatened to withhold the London Palladium show and I called their bluff by refreshing the Sunday night peak hour with our own variety shows from the Blackpool Hippodrome. We retained the television audience, pleased the critics, and started a new relationship, based on equality, with ATV. Nevertheless, there were times when the inter-company battles grew bitter. The heaviest blow inflicted on ABC was when ATV deliberately undermined the success of Armchair Theatre by demanding alternation on Sunday nights with a play series from their own drama department, which was already contributing plays to the weekday network. As a London contractor ATV had the power not to transmit Armchair Theatre in London, a severe hardship for us, because we could never hold on to our distinguished writers and directors if their work was to be limited to the provinces and not displayed in the great shop window which is London. Also, ABC had now created an original new drama series, in advance of its time, which ATV again refused to network to London, objecting to our incursion into the field of the drama series. For a long time The Avengers remained unnetworked but its reputation and its ratings became so compulsive that ATV was eventually forced to give in.

I criticise the weakness of the Independent Television Authority at that time for their failure to intervene, and to insist that ATV give a fair showing to network programmes of national quality. On weekdays, Granada’s deal with Rediffusion had guaranteed them a London showing for most of their programmes, though even then it took a long time to promote Coronation Street (a local programme) from Granadaland to London and the national network. I have always supported Sir Robert Fraser as the true architect of ITV and the man most responsible for its eventual success, but there were moments of weakness when he faced the London contractors. Perhaps he was too susceptible to the strong-arm tactics of Val Parnell and the beguiling persuasion of Lew Grade. He should not have permitted them to sabotage the most respected play series in Britain, Armchair Theatre, and thus reduce the power and prestige of ITV’s Sunday night.

Possibly Bob Fraser was susceptible to a change because some of the more provocative Armchair Theatre plays aroused protests in the press, at the Authority and indeed in my own boardroom. At that time the favourite derogatory phrase about Armchair Theatre was ‘kitchen sink drama’. Many of the plays I personally found unsatisfactory, irritating or unjustifiable but I have always tried to give producers the freedom they wanted. I had an arrangement with Sydney Newman that one out of every four plays should be experimental – which in effect probably meant losing audiences in the process. Often Sir Philip Warter would telephone me at home to complain about the themes and attitudes of Armchair Theatre plays, but I was usually able to claim that his opinions were directly opposite to those of the public; for the plays he liked earned poor ratings and the ones he condemned were generally our best successes.

Many times I clashed with the Authority in defence of some of the plays before they were broadcast, because we had to submit a synopsis of every play and, if required, let the Authority’s representative read a synopsis and attend rehearsals of a play. Whenever I read the script of a controversial play, I insisted on knowing the name of the director for I was well aware that if, for instance, it included a lesbian scene Director A would treat it delicately whilst Director B would emphasise the sexual overtones.

It was not surprising that some of the way-out plays did not measure up to the West End box office standards of the ATV management. Val Parnell was tolerant and made few critical strictures but Lew Grade, who watched every play, would ring me up afterwards with his own forthright comments. His expletives about bad language were usually colourful. In return, I spared no blushes about the triteness and repetitiveness of the Palladium shows. Our disputes were short-lived and when we met on the following day the rows were forgotten and we resumed our normal cheerful relationship, interrupted only by the endless arguments about how much ABC paid ATV.

When Val Parnell retired from ATV, in his seventies, there was some speculation about his successor, but Lew Grade was elected managing director with the full backing of the theatre interests and of the Mirror group. There was a further decline in Norman Collins’ influence and his role became little more than that of a highly placed public relations director. It seemed a waste of a brilliant executive who could have established a much-needed reputation for ATV in current affairs programmes, but instead the company concentrated all the more on sheer entertainment.

One course Norman Collins and I did pursue together was the steering of ITV into adult education. Already ITV had led the way in schools television, with Rediffusion’s Managing Director Paul Adorian pioneering this new development in the use of television. The week-end contracts eliminated ABC from schools television but Norman Collins and I waged a tireless campaign to introduce adult education on Sunday mornings, when church services provided the only broadcasts. It took us many years until, with the aid of Lord Eccles, and with the support of the WEA, we won through and were granted government permission to have extra hours on Sunday mornings. I invited Asa Briggs to be ABCs advisor on adult education, but before long the Authority asked if he could take over a similar role for them on a national basis.

When we began the broadcasts, in January 1963, our first two ABC series were very basic: how to speak good English and how to write a letter, with popular titles such as You Don’t Say, and Pen to Paper. ATV’s efforts in this field took the form of elementary lessons in French. ABC went on to Clear Thinking, explaining logic, and eventually First Steps in Physics, for which we produced not only a text book but an introductory science kit. Over the years we covered many subjects and co-operated with different publishers in the issue of paperback books related to our subjects. These grew broader in their range, varying from The Law is Yours and A Plain Man’s Guide to his Money to Psychology for Everyman and Anatomy of First Aid. Some of these became bestsellers, especially Philip Harben’s The Grammar of Cookery, published by Penguin, which sold 250,000 copies.

Article source: With an Independent Air by Howard Thomas (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1977)

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Archive source: theavengers.org.uk

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Even though it had originally been planned that Hendry’s Police Surgeon character should continue into The Avengers, there appears to have been a general undertaking that he should step back from his direct association with the authorities. To facilitate this, Brent would fall back on his ‘day job’ as a general practitioner, ceasing his work with the Metropolitan Police. It was felt that the central character’s close working relationship with the police had shackled Police Surgeon to the mundane, and the intention was to make The Avengers much more dynamic and far less predictable.

Once it had been decided not to retain the link to Police Surgeon, Hendry’s character was renamed Dr David Dent, and it is this name that appears in the earliest draft script of ‘Hot Snow’. This was, however, changed at the insistence of Ian Hendry, who felt that audiences would confuse the new character with Dr Brent, the old. The name that was finally settled on was Dr David Keel. By this time, it had also been determined that Keel would experience a cathartic event early in the first episode: he would witness the brutal murder of his fiancée, Peggy. This tragedy would prove to be the catalyst for him becoming involved in crime-fighting.

Character outlines written prior to the series’ first transmission appear not to have survived, but one issued by Leonard White on 31st October 1961 as a reminder to writers reveals the following about Dr David Keel:

Keel, being a doctor, is the ‘amateur’. This does not mean that he is less good at the ‘job’, but simply that his motives for concerning himself with a mission are quite different from Steed’s. Without being at all ‘goody-goody’, he will, usually, be fired by a sense of public service, kindled by his humanitarian instincts. He is an excellent doctor and this proficiency is a specific help in the joint missions.

Women find him very attractive. Usually, however, he will keep them at a distance. His sincerity does not allow him to flirt and he still has deep feelings for the fiancée he lost.

Despite the obvious parallels existing between doctors Brent and Keel, Ian Hendry was very positive about the role when he spoke about it in December 1960: “Keel is a most attractive character,” he said. “He combines just the right amount of toughness and compassion. Keel will be a kind of extended version of the police surgeon, because he will be more directly involved with fighting crime. And as he tangles with the villains himself, he will have more action. Frankly, I thought twice when I was asked to start out on another series as a doctor, but as I know that the accent in the scripts is on authenticity, I think it will do me a lot of good. And I know it will be a lot of fun.” (TV Times No. 270, 30th December 1960)

Leonard White’s character description for Keel echoes the themes of toughness, action and humour:

He is tough, but not hard. Can be very gentle: loves children. Likes sport (would be a keen rugby player if he had the time). Product of a ‘red-brick’ university. A wry sense of humour. Quite serious normally, but when he smiles – it’s wonderful. Being a doctor, he is well trained to think out a problem and resolve it by positive action.

Meanwhile, the character of John Steed, Keel’s enigmatic, persuasive and often difficult liaison with the authorities, is described thus in Leonard White’s document of 31st October 1961:

Steed is the professional undercover man. He is suave, debonair, ‘man-about-town’. A sophisticate, but not lacking in virility. His ‘sports’ are probably horse racing, dog racing, beauty competitions, etc. He has an eye for the beautiful and unusual – be it objets d’art or women. He will never be serious with one woman, however. He is very experienced.

The document goes on to detail his proficiency in armed and unarmed combat and notes the fundamental difference between the professional Steed and his amateur and unofficial partner, Dr Keel.

His motives are not necessarily as ‘moral’ as Keel’s. To him, the success of the mission is the only important thing and therefore his means may sometimes be questionable. The success of the mission is, however, a wrong put right, and therefore sometimes necessitates these means being used to this end.

To all intents and purposes, when on a mission, Steed is his own man. He is highly paid to do his job, and is expected to produce results, independently and discreetly. He answers to an organisational contact, such as One-Ten, from whom Steed often receives briefings on missions and pertinent information.

Once on an assignment, however, Steed (and Keel) are essentially relied upon to work out their own salvation.

Keel and Steed are essentially undercover. They are not private or public detectives, and any story which follows the usual ‘private eye’ pattern is not right for us.

When asked about the character of John Steed in December 1960, Patrick Macnee responded: “The undercover man I play is a wolf with the women and revels in trouble. He doesn’t think so much about saving hoodlums as just getting them out of the way. By the same token, he doesn’t follow the Queensberry rules, and although he works indirectly with the police, he is not too popular with them.” (TV Times No. 270, 30th December 1960) Macnee’s description of Steed’s ruthlessness and womanising demonstrate that, although the surviving Series 1 guidelines hail from 31st October 1961, these characteristics had been established at a very early stage.

Even so, Macnee initially struggled to get a proper handle on the character. Early in pre-production on Hot Snow, director Don Leaver presented the actor with a copy of Ian Fleming’s debut James Bond novel Casino Royale, suggesting that Macnee would do well to draw inspiration from Fleming’s secret service agent. However, the novel was not to Macnee’s tastes, and was, he felt, “the opposite of what I was interested in. Bond used women like battering rams and seemed intent on drinking and smoking himself to death.” (The Avengers and Me, Dave Rogers / Titan Books, 1997)

Consequently, Macnee decided to take a different path with the character, as he explained in 1995: “I took the veneer of Bond for Steed, without using the core. What I left out were the words ‘licence to kill’. Steed had no licence to kill. All I really had as Steed was this iron will to bring the enemy to book.” (The Ultimate Avengers, Dave Rogers / Boxtree, 1995)

In ‘Hot Snow’, Steed is depicted with a deliberate ambiguity, the intention being that neither Keel nor the audience would know whether this man could be trusted. There is even the suggestion that he may be working for the Big Man and is manipulating Keel in order to tie up loose ends for the gang leader. “At first, you never quite knew if he was good or evil,” Macnee recalled. “He was a shadowy sort of character who emerged through windows with a pistol and impeccable brolly.” (The Ultimate Avengers, Dave Rogers / Boxtree, 1995)

In ‘Brought to Book’, Steed is somewhat closer to the character with which audiences would become familiar, cracking jokes and flirting with women – but according to Macnee himself, there was still something missing: “I hadn’t actually thought about Steed in any great detail until, after about two or three episodes, Sydney Newman called me into his office and forced me to take stock of my position.” Newman suggested that the part as Macnee was playing it was just not working; Steed lacked personality, and neither the character nor his costume was interesting enough. He asked if the actor could spend some time thinking how the character and his apparel might be revitalised. “I was terribly downtrodden to hear this – I thought that I was doing rather well – and got very angry and stormed out of his office. Depressed, I went home to my flat and thought of how I could improve the character, rationalise it, make it work.” (The Avengers and Me, Dave Rogers / Titan Books, 1997)

“What the devil did he mean?” Macnee wondered. “John Steed was more than a part of me, he was an extension of myself. And that ‘self’ had been shaped by 18th- and 19th-century influences.” The film director Michael Powell had described the actor as “an 18th-century man”, much to Macnee’s delight. “My clothes were elegant but in such a conventional way as to make them thoroughly uninteresting. Steed’s daring conduct had to be complemented by his clothes.” (Blind in One Ear, Patrick Macnee and Marie Cameron / Harrap, 1988)

For his inspiration, Macnee looked first towards his father, Daniel, the racehorse trainer: “He was a real dandy. He used to lean over the paddock gate, always with a beautiful carnation in his buttonhole. He’d wear a cravat with a pure pearl in it, and wore a lovely brocade waistcoat… Then I ‘pinched’ a bit from Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, one of the great British heroes. It seemed to me that if Steed was this shadowy person who was helping to rescue other people, he was something like the Pimpernel – somebody extremely well-dressed who gave the impression of being a fop, so nobody felt that he was a threat.” (The Avengers and Me, Dave Rogers / Titan Books, 1997)

Another source of inspiration was the 1939 film Q Planes (released in the United States under the title Clouds Over Europe), and specifically the role played in it by Ralph Richardson, one of the great talents of the era. His character, Major Hammond, a British spymaster seeking to discover the truth about warplanes that had gone missing on test flights, conceals a keen intellect behind the façade of a buffoon, wears a homburg hat and carries a furled umbrella – the parallels with Steed are plain. Macnee has also often credited Bussy Carr, his commanding officer in the Royal Navy, as a further influence on his thinking when defining the characteristics of Steed, someone who was, like Macnee’s father, a dandy, and yet courageous.

The likes of Beau Brummell also sprang to mind. “I thought of the Regency days – the most flamboyant, sartorially, for men – and I imagined Steed in waisted jackets and embroidered waistcoats. Steed I was stuck with as a name, and it stayed. Underneath he was steel. Outwardly he was charming and vain and representative, I suppose, of the kind of Englishman who is more valued abroad. The point about Steed was that he led a fantasy life – a hero dressed like a junior cabinet minister. An Old Etonian whose most lethal weapon was the hallmark of the English gentleman – a furled umbrella.” (The Ultimate Avengers, Dave Rogers / Boxtree, 1995)

Due to the paucity of surviving images from the earliest Avengers episodes, it is impossible to know for sure when Steed’s new look was introduced, though even as early as the third episode, ‘Square Root of Evil’, there is evidence of the agent’s emerging sartorial elegance. The character of Jackie Warren (Vic Wise) mentions Steed’s “clobber”, and says that, “I heard you was something of a dresser.” However, he could be referring to Timothy James Riordan, the forger who Steed is impersonating.

Certainly by the 15th episode, ‘The Frighteners’, the earliest surviving appearance by Macnee as Steed, the agent has started wearing the famous bowler hat and carnation, and is carrying his distinctive whangee-handle umbrella, though these are not regular accoutrements at this point in the series. In fact, judging by the way in which his scene with the Flower Seller (Eleanor Darling) is performed, it is possible that she decorates Steed’s buttonhole for the very first time! It is less likely that this episode marks the first appearance of Steed’s bowler, since his wearing of it passes without comment. Earlier episodes provided the character with arguably more logical reasons for adopting the guise of a city gent – specifically when he poses as an insurance company representative in ‘Ashes of Roses’ and as a cipher clerk in ‘Please Don’t Feed the Animals’. On the other hand, perhaps the production team deliberately allowed the hat to be introduced without explanation in ‘The Frighteners’, simply to be zany. It is worth noting that another character, the villainous Benson (Peter Madden), wears a bowler hat two episodes earlier, in ‘One for the Mortuary’, so it could be that the inspiration came from there.

By June 1961, Macnee was describing Steed to the press as rather more of a fantasy figure than he had been before: “Like Steed, I live by my own rules. I always have. At Eton College I was a gambler, a successful one because I got tips straight from the ‘horse’s mouth’ – my father, then very active in the racing business. I had £200 in the kitty when the authorities caught me. I was nearly expelled. Let’s say Steed is a slightly exaggerated form of myself. Somebody once said to me: ‘you should have lived in the 18th century’. I agree. Like Steed, I’m a great pretender. Anybody who loves the good life, as I do, has to be a pretender.” (TV Times No. 296, 30th June 1961)

Some years later, Ian Hendry summed up his take on the characters that he and Macnee had evolved: “I do think we managed, in those early days, to develop a new style. I was supposed to be phlegmatic, and when I got too boring, Steed was there to send me up and tell me not to be so serious. And when Steed got too outrageous, I was there to say: ‘Oh come on, don’t overdo it.’ ” (TV Times Souvenir Extra – The New Avengers, 1976)

With Umbrella, Scotch and Cigarettes – An Unauthorised Guide to the Avengers Series 1 by Richard McGinlay and Alan Hayes is available from Amazon.co.uk and direct from Lulu – use promo code FWD15 to save 15% on your Lulu order.

The text in this article is © 2014 Richard McGinlay and Alan Hayes and is not included in Transdiffusion’s usual Creative Commons licence.

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The first season started out with two main characters, Patrick MacNee as John Steed and Ian Hendry as Dr David Keel. Johnny Dankworth, who would later write the music for Tomorrow’s World as well as much else, was commissioned to write the theme, and the music he wrote symbolized the more serious nature of the plots of the original few series.

The opening titles were striking – a series of clear black and white cards, sometimes mixed over the stage where the opening scene would take place. Ian Hendry was given top billing in the first season and the series firmly revolved around him ‘avenging’ the murder of his practice nurse girlfriend. Hendry had previously starred in a short series called “Police Surgeon” for ABC in 1959 and was playing a very similar character in the new series. The first two episodes, which served as a pilot, were filmed on videotape, while the next seven were transmitted live. The rest of the season was recorded on videotape.

After 26 episodes had been produced, a strike by British Actors Equity halted production temporarily. Still at the start of his career, Ian Hendry took the opportunity to leave the series to pursue film work. When production restarted, producers hired Honor Blackman to partner Steed in the role of Cathy Gale. This was reflected in the still-serious and stark title sequence.

Cathy Gale didn’t appear in every season 2 episode, with either Venus Smith (Julie Stevens) or Dr. Martin King (Jon Rollason) partnering John Steed to fill the gaps. The opening titles in these circumstances would just credit Macnee. The Dankworth theme music remained in place but the plots slowly started to develop towards the quirkiness that was to set the series apart.

By season three, the bit players had been removed and Cathy was the full-time partner. Importantly for ABC, the show was now being exported worldwide – except to the United States, where 405-line monochrome standard videotape had become unpopular with the networks as they moved to 525-line colour. ABC did export season three, but the US ABC network as buyers demanded in return that the next season was recorded on film, and that the show would become colour. But season four was to see the loss of the second lead actor: Honor Blackman had secured the role of Pussy Galore in the next James Bond film, Goldfinger and departed to begin filming at Pinewood.

ABC began searching for someone to take her place. The character was re-written in anticipation of a new actress, and even Howard Thomas, MD at ABC, was engaged in the casting process. A name was chosen on the basis of what they were looking for in the new character and the new actress: she must have Man Appeal – ‘M’ Appeal – Emma Peel. The ‘M’ appeal was found in actress Diana Rigg, and the show was on its way from being a success to being a classic.

Season four marked a relaunch for the series. The Dankworth theme no longer suited the mood of the stories, which were quirkier than ever before, and Laurie Johnson was commissioned to compose a new theme. The opening titles also changed to a series of still pictures of the two stars, Macnee & Rigg, in typical Avengers-like poses. Whilst season four was in black and white, the next season would see the programme being filmed in colour, despite ABC Weekend and the rest of ITV still being in monochrome themselves.

Season five also saw another change in the opening titles, with a filmed sequence involving the two stars. During the season, the ABC endcap was significantly different. It would start “ABC Production” minus the famous triangle logo and end showing that ABC stood for Associated British Corporation – a name invented by ABPC to fill the letters and avoid confusion with US ABC.

Diana Rigg decided to leave the show at the end of the penultimate season and producers brought in Linda Thorson to play the role of trainee Tara King, a character she created and named herself. But NBC scheduled the popular ‘Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In’ against the new series on ABC-US and the ratings went into freefall.

The production team was replaced and the character of Tara King was toughened up but that didn’t help ABC-US’s ratings and the show was cancelled in 1969.

ABC Weekend had also moved on to become Thames Television, and the show was no longer networked in the UK, ABC’s parent company having chosen to hold on to the rights rather than deed them to the part-owned Thames.

Since coming to an end, the show has received many plays in syndication worldwide including showings in the UK on Channel 4 and Granada Plus. The show can be found playing in its Blackman, Rigg and Thorson variants in all Francophone countries where it has become a popular cult hit. The series has been released several times on sell-through video and is known for being the height of British style and eccentricity throughout the world and in its home country. The Avengers has become a continuing legacy of ABC and all it stood for.

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