Episode 32: Cathy Gale Era
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Production completed: 4 August 1962
UK Premiere (London, Season 2): 29 September 1962
US Premiere (A&E cable): ca. 27 January 1991
An infamous assassin is
flushed out as Cathy pays to have Steed murdered. Steed is quite the daredevil
professional agent as he takes great pleasure in pursuing Mr Teddy Bear. But just before
Steed can reach the target, he is taken off the case, and it's all up to Cathy.
IMHO |
A crackling script and imaginative direction make this episode
a standout (and a good choice to start the series, as it was the first to
air in the UK). Mr Teddy Bear's creative style and
supremely devious nature place him in the category of diabolical mastermind, which also
lifts this episode out of the straightforward sleuthing genre typified by most of the
Cathy Gale series and into the fantastic realm of the Emma Peel era.
Trivia |
"It may surprise you," Honor Blackman says, "but I don't remember [this] episode. When I started the program, it was just another job. Everybody looks back and says, 'What a wonderful show,' ...but I didn't know how wonderful it was going to be when I first started work." (Honor speaking to Steven Eramo of Starlog Magazine)
This episode has long been a favorite of "Steedophiles" owing to his "striptease"—a scene in which he gets all the way down to his "tightie whities."
*This unofficial subtitle is by Yours Truly.
Behind the Scenes |
Screenwriter Martin Woodhouse writes:
[This episode] seems to have generated quite a bit of interest one way and another. both at the time it was shown and now. As it happens, some of this interest is appropriate — and please, I am writing from long-term memory here!
For one thing, as has been pointed out elsewhere, there seem to be some kind of "introductory sequences" for Honor which look a bit puzzling, given that, although it was the first episode to be aired in the "second season," it was about the seventh actually to have been made. I think this is because I myself as a writer [it] was pretty "introductory" — by which I mean it was the first thing I'd ever written for such a series (although... I'd done Supercar with my brother Hugh, and a couple of other things.)
Also, and this bit really is rather interesting, it was at just about the time that The Avengers got a new Story Editor. This was Richard Bates, whose dad was H.E. Bates and who, therefore, was pretty high-powered in terms of genetic literary credentials. The Story Editor up to this point had been John Bryce, whom I already knew, but John was moving up to be one of the producers, while Richard was being set up as editor.
All of this meant that there was something of a state of flux in the production department, in which I got embroiled (which again was great fun, my own criterion for doing a writing job.) Lots of you have observed that this was almost the first time that the characters in a plain old crime-adventure series had been given some interesting depth — this, again, was of course down to John Bryce but still more to Richard Bates. And, I suppose in a minor way, to myself.
So as I recall, I also stuck my oar in (we had several meetings about "what way the series should go") and suggested that if we were going to make the protagonists themselves and the way they reacted with each other "interesting", how about making the villain(s) a bit interesting too, instead of just the ordinary smash-bang-wallop bunch of baddies? (Of course, you have to be a bit careful here — your baddies do have have to get hammered in the end so they do have actually to be bad.) But that's how come Mr Teddy Bear came to have a bit of a not exactly sympathetic but at least not plain old flat boring edge to him.
And it's also how The Avengers as a whole came to be, as a series, maybe a bit more interesting than such series had been in the past. Although, as someone has also commented here, it did actually take a bit of time before both Pat and Honor got used to the idea that the "heroine" needn't just be "the little woman" and bossed about by the male protagonist.
(You can see that Honor herself wasn't by nature "the little woman" and that both she and Patrick had great fun once they'd settled in to the notion that we'd got genuine equality of the sexes going here, but I believe they still had a little difficulty jettisoning the firmly established television conventions...)
I'll get on to "picking names" [at another time].
