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Post by killercrab on Aug 5, 2011 19:01:20 GMT
That's the thing with The Avengers , you can never predict what episodes someone might like - FOG being a calculated guess knowing your general fog lit interests. Then again it's satire on Ripperologists so maybe not so much fun? In some ways it's the same as Clemens writing a *horror* for Hammer and coming up with SISTER HYDE with all it's attendant cliche.
I hesitate now to suggest TOO MANY XMAS TREES to you ( which has the creepiest Santa this side of the maniac Santa in All Through the House in Amicus' TALES FROM THE CRYPT) or the indestructible Christopher Lee in the Avengers NEVER , NEVER SAY DIE or BIZARRE where people are dying to get into Happy Meadows.
Then there is season one of THE NEW AVENGERS ...
KC
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Post by dem bones on Aug 5, 2011 20:12:55 GMT
it's not that i disliked it, just that it didn't live up to the Fog that was playing out in my mind and, to be honest, there was little chance of that unless Ralph Bates, Martine Beswick & the bride turned up in a puff of smoke outside the pub. will give Bizarre and (i love evil santa's) Too Many Christmas Trees a go if i can hunt 'em down. As to: Then again it's satire on Ripperologists so maybe not so much fun? KC Hell, no, completely the opposite! i've no liking for that game at all. Whitechapel's Edward Buchan (brilliantly played by Steve Pemberton i thought) is my hero for giving the tour guides and obsessives a long overdue seeing to, though on reflection, he's maybe too sympathetic a character who takes responsibility for something that wasn't his fault at the end of series one. Come series two, and he's reinvented himself as a 'The Kray Twins' East London' tour guide which, in my experience of the local Ripperati, is exactly what Edward would do. Writers Ben Court and Caroline Ip certainly put in their research!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 5, 2011 20:15:46 GMT
Then there is season one of THE NEW AVENGERS ... Some of my very first scary memories! Gnaws with the giant rat, and ?The Midas Touch with that bloke with every disease in the world, not to mention Last of the Cybernauts with hideously scarred Robert Lang in his motorised wheelchair!
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Post by andydecker on Aug 6, 2011 8:43:00 GMT
it's not that i disliked it, just that it didn't live up to the Fog that was playing out in my mind Frankly I could never embrace Tara much, but I think the biggest problem with the later series was that they knew they were hip and all and tried to create the wonderful things in the lab which beforehand had grown in the garden. The FOG is one of the Tara eps I actually can remember, the only other memorable bits and pieces mostly revolve about the antics of Mother and his adorable mute bodyguard. This stuff was inspired and always to be right out of a Michael Moorcock novel, but the rest was too artifical to be really great. FOG seems to firmly belong in that category, it seems to come with a in-build checklist. I am not saying that the Peel years had not their implosions, there are some truly dull eps. But in their shining moments they could really convey a sense of fun and the Bizarro World, which at the time must have been a tremendous antidote to all the gloom and doom of the agents who came in from the cold or the shadow of the bomb. The series was a big hit on german tv at the time - even if our well-meaning tv-execs were as always rather patricular which ep was deemed suitable for our viewing and which not ; a couple were first dubbed and shown 20 years later - and after the Cybernauts ep I can remember a stern warning of our school teacher that karate-chops on the school-yard would be seriously frowned upon. Ah, simpler times.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 2, 2012 19:51:59 GMT
One for Killercrab ... Patrick Macnee & Peter Leslie - Deadline (Hodder, 1965) Amazing how all this stuff is interlinked. Hodder & Stoughton published two Patrick MacNee Avengers novels in 1965, the second being Dead Duck, both ghosted by his friend, the prolific pulpster Peter Leslie. From Steve Holland's mid-nineties interview with the author, reprinted in Paperback Fanatic #11, we learn that "I was contracted to do three books, and they paid me for the third which I'd already written". Steve Holland - "The one that became The Fakers?" Peter Leslie - "Yes, that's right. I changed it. Instead of Steed, the hero was Barry Vine, the insurance man. That's one of the first books I did for NEL."
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Post by killercrab on Aug 2, 2012 21:47:47 GMT
I've got the reissue of DEADLINE. I happened to be working in the newspaper biz at the time so enjoyed this book. The first THE AVENGERS book I'd read actually. Hodder and Stoughton ( Tv Books) also republished DEAD DUCK which was even better.
KC
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Post by pulphack on Aug 3, 2012 5:50:56 GMT
Both the Leslie's are wnderful, as I've probably said elsewhere. Dead Duck is the better story, but I also like Deadline because of the newspaper setting (which is why Moorcock's The Russian Intelligence is great, as it's his satire on his Fleetway days). Mr Leslie would have known this well, being a PR man - which is of course how he got into books, his first being the very odd Acker Bilk exploitation tome which is full of historical parodies and the bearded one in a variety of silly costumes. They had sensible pop stars then (inthe sense that they knew how daft it all was) - I can't see Cris Martin doing the equivalent of The Book Of Bilk...
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Post by ripper on Feb 25, 2013 18:58:11 GMT
I have a soft spot for the Return of the Cybernauts episode. It was the only one that I can remember seeing when it was first transmitted. I was only 6 or 7 years old at the time and the part when a cybernaut stalks Charles Tingwell outside his home and prevents Tingwell from driving away in his car scared me silly at the time. Channel 4 showed the colour episodes very late on saturday nights when the station first began transmissions. They had very few advertisers then and the advert breaks would be filled with intermission music.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 2, 2013 8:11:24 GMT
Channel 4 saturdays were an eduation when it first started - The Avengers and The Prisoner, which were just mythical beasts to me from ancient paperbacks in ose pre-VHS days... and The Golden Turkey season... I have mixed feelings about the Medveds as much of what they ridiculed is great fun in a non-ironic sense, and doesn't deserve their sneering; at the same time, I wonder if I would have got to hear of or even see many of those movies without the books or the C4 season? Richard Gordon despised them for their attitude, but I hnad to point out that I wouldn't have got into those B's without the Turkey season in 1983, and I soon made up my mind - as did many others - about whether or ot the Medveds were right. The only downside to those saturdays was missing the Prisoner to go and see The Membranes, or The Nightingales, or any other of those cracking indie bands.Ah, nostalgia...
Incidentally, while I'm here, Ripper - sorry not to have answered your question about MJ Trow and his Lestrade books a while back, but it's been so long I can't find the thread! So I'll do it here - Holmes and Watson never turn up in the few I read, but he does reference them in passing, more in the sense of someone who learned from Holmes, but was a bit sick of being in his shadow.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 2, 2013 8:12:53 GMT
I'll tell what else - the font size in the reply box and my typing means I really need to wear my glasses. Lord, those typos...
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Post by pulphack on Mar 2, 2013 8:14:43 GMT
And that bastard reply button...
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Post by ripper on Mar 2, 2013 15:13:02 GMT
Hi Pulphack. Many thanks for the information on the Lestrade books. There are a few available at my local library so I am going to try them out :-).
I remember seeing episodes of The Prisoner in the ATV region around 1977-1978, but I don't know if it was transmitted only in the ATV region at that time. There were some really good series and one-off films shown by Channel 4 in those early days. They screened the complete runs of Irwin Allen's Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the bottom of the Sea and (I think) Time Tunnel on sunday afternoons, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed while eating my dinner :-). There was also The Comic Strip Presents..., and one-offs like Those Glory, Glory Days and Walter (the harrowing one about the man with learning difficulties who is put into a home after his mother's death).
I bought the books by the Medveds...50 Worst Movies of All Time and Golden Turkey Awards...though I can't remember if I saw the C4 series first. They were very scathing about those films, but, yes, if not for C4 showing them, I doubt if I would have had the opportunity to view them until many years later. I think they used to put little arrows and captions on the screen while the film was playing, pointing out various facts and errors, which I did find rather annoying at times. Actually, when watching many of them, they didn't seem to me to be bad enough to deserve the derision that was heaped upon them. Most were from the 1950s/1960s, made by people with extremely limited resources and on very tight shooting schedules, where they often couldn't spare the time or money for re-shoots. I don't know if the series was ever shown again after its initial broadcast.
Going back to The Avengers, I think at least some B&W episodes were shown in the mid-1990s or thereabout, again quite late at night, but I didn't get to see more than a handful.
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Post by valdemar on Mar 2, 2013 22:37:08 GMT
I have had to take the day off work as I've caught this bastard 'flu bug that's doing the rounds. I spent my time constructively, however, and watched 'A Touch Of Brimstone', for the nth time. I just want to say something that struck me during the latter part of the episode - doesn't Diana Rigg [or at least parts of her] jiggle very nicely whilst she's in that pagga with Wyngarde's goons? There. I've said it, so you don't have to. You've all thought the same thing.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 3, 2013 6:57:39 GMT
You lucky bugger, mr V - I've been down with that bug but still had to struggle to work as a deadline and a phone bill are looming at the same time (who needs supernatural horrors when you have those?). Your use of time - purely in the interests of research, of course - has been well used. And yes, she does...
The Avengers is an odd show in so many ways. It is the best of writing and imagination in 60's Brit TV (apart from, arguably, The Prisoner), but does tend to cover so many bases that it can seem erratic if you watch a lot of episodes together. I like the Tara season because of Mother and some of the odder conceits (Ronnie Barker's turn as a purring cat fanatic and Bizarre, for insance), but I do have to agree with Andy that they KNEW how hip they were by then, and the Rigg seasons - particularly the colour ones - are less self-conscious. The black and white Rigg ones a in some ways odder in terms of stories, and certainly harder edged. I like the Blackman episodes I've seen, but when you view them after the Rigg episodes you realsie how little budget they had in the beginning, and how that did affect a lot of what they could do. If the Blackman years had the budget even of the early Rigg, they would have seemed less clunky now.
Moving sideways to what Ripper said aboutthe Golden Turkey series - thinking about it, I don't remember repeats of that, either. The problem was that although the boks were funny in a snide way, with some decent jokes and writing, when you saw the films those little arrows, etc were bloody annoying, and if you had a heart you ended up thinking exactly what you say, Rip - these are films on nickels, dimes and no time that at least have heart and are entertaining. (thank you Allan Bryce for that nickels line, which he used for an interview with Lindsay Shonteff years ago in Shock Express and which is a great description of low-budget movie making - where did he nick it from?)
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Post by andydecker on Mar 3, 2013 13:06:39 GMT
I agree, pulphack. My favorite is by far the b/w Rigg. The Tara King seasons are meh, the only redeeming things about it is the Mother stuff, which I truly like, but the plots are so limp and it is much too self-concious. I only watched the whole series, i.e. Riggs onward, decades after there first run, and I still marvel of its weirdness. Of course by then everything had changed so much - must have been the 90s or mod-80s - so that seeing Mrs. Peel running around in that ridiculous yellow jumpsuit like some redneck pimp out of the gymn made it hard to take things seriously. No wonder I prefer the leather But the colour episodes had a lot of misfires because they were just trying too hard. The b/w seemed just more, I don't know, authentic? Wrong word, I know, still the sheer surreal inventiveness gave way to eps which seemed done on the drawing boards. I guess you can do tales like the fake african jungle in Shropeshire or wherever - and even as a foreigner I still have to giggle when I see the old colonel muttering "The natives are restless tonight", guess many british folks didn't thought this so amusing - just once, and every repeat just is less successful. There were so many jokes in the early eps which became iconic - or at least I never forgot them. Gordon Jackson in a kilt praising scottish breakfast, the maze in The House Jack built - which imho never has been done better -, the bizarre Dickens christmas ep, the wonderful A-bomb in the department store and Riggs selling Daleks, the famous Hellfire club ep. And the honey in the harem, one of my favorites. Professional roleplaying 30 years before there was roleplaying. I am not saying that the last Riggs eps didn't had those moments, but they were less often. And in the Tara King eps they were hollow and routine. And mostly boring. And not because Linda Thorsen was no Diana Rigg. The well was just dry.
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