airdate: 7 January 1961
[I include the Amazon links mainly for informational reasons; you can often find the sets more cheaply elsewhere, for example on eBay. It is to be hoped that A&E will eventually bring the series back into print.
This is my blog about The Avengers. If you want my blog about Danger Man / The Prisoner, click here.]
In the early 1960s most British tv shows were shot on videotape rather than film (even as the American market had largely gone over to film, especially for dramatic series aired in prime time). Video had its disadvantages – it didn’t look as good, and it was (at that time) much more difficult to edit, meaning that shows essentially had to be shot in continuous sequence, almost as though they were live broadcasts (though in a medium that still relied heavily on actually live broadcasts, and where most of the actors came from a theatrical background, this constraint was largely taken in stride). But video also had the important advantage of being significantly less expensive than film – hence its popularity in a Britain still recovering from the postwar austerity of the 50s.
Unfortunately, one of the reasons that videotape was less expensive was that, unlike film, it could be reused. In a culture of live performance, and in the absence of a home video market (or of technology enabling same), it became standard practice to show an episode once and then tape over it. As a result, thousands of episodes from this period are lost forever. (The devastation thereby inflicted on the Hartnell and Troughton eras of Doctor Who is especially well-known.)
The first season of The Avengers was one of the victims of this practice. A few episodes were actually broadcast live and so never recorded, while most were recorded but then later taped over or otherwise destroyed. Thus out of 26 episodes, only two (together with the first 15 minutes of a third) survive. For some reason, these surviving episodes are available (in North America at least) only on the Emma Peel Bonus Disc, despite having absolutely nothing to do with Emma Peel.
Indeed these early episodes are about as far from the familiar Emma Peel era as one can get. To begin with, the main character is a Dr. David Keel, while Steed gets second billing and no ass-kicking female partner is in sight at all. (Ian Hendry, the actor playing Keel, had played a somewhat similar character in the earlier show Police Surgeon – another victim of reused videotape, as only one episode from that series survives.) The production values are noticeably lower (the Emma Peel era, filmed rather than taped, would owe its bigger budget and consequently slicker look to the American market), and the shows are more realistic, with none of the surrealism and self-referencing that would later come to characterise the show.
In those later years, the show would develop a highly stylised format, and all elements that might remind the viewers (i.e. white middle-class viewers, presumably) too much of gritty reality were officially prohibited to the scriptwriters. The list of prohibitions would famously range from the repugnant (no black characters) to the baffling (no uniformed policemen). (The fact that two of Steed’s first partners would be an actress named Blackman and a character named Dr. Martin King – both white of course – is a strange irony.) Two of the chief elements of this first episode – drug use, and female murder victims – would likewise be excluded, the first implicitly and the second explicitly. (If the title “Hot Snow” had shown up during the Emma Peel era, it would almost certainly have been a reference to a diabolical weather-control plot, not a drug reference.)
“Hot Snow” begins with what looks eerily like a scene from the opening sequence of The Prisoner, with an ominous black car pulling up beside a building in a London street. A man emerges and breaks into the building, which turns out to house the office of two doctors – our Dr. Keel and his senior partner, Dr. Tredding – and an assistant, Peggy Stephens, who works for both and is engaged to Keel. (It was unclear to me whether Stephens was simply a receptionist or also a nurse. Katherine Woodville, the actress who played Stephens, would later make the mistake of marrying Macnee.) The burglar is after a shipment of drugs that was accidentally delivered to this address; unable to retrieve it, but learning that Stephens remembers the man who delivered it, he reports back to his gang and they decide to kill Stephens so that she’ll be unable to identify the deliverer once the package is identified as drugs. (The gang is an interesting set of characters – a thug, a nervous wimp, and a dandy who frequents jewelry shops, all reporting by telephone to a criminal mastermind of whom we see only the hands, holding and petting a dog. This is often supposed to be a Blofeld reference, but that is chronologically impossible; “Hot Snow” came first.) Keel and Stephens meet to pick out an engagement ring, a drive-by shooter picks Stephens off , and she collapses in Keel’s arms, dead.
And there it ends, for “Hot Snow” is the episode I mentioned of which only the first fifteen minutes survive. Fifteen Steed-less minutes, I should add; Patrick Macnee’s first scene as Steed has been lost.
We do know roughly what happens next. In the course of investigating his fiancée’s death, Keel runs across Steed, who is investigating the same gang in his capacity as government agent. Steed inveigles Keel into a plot to infiltrate the drug gangs. By the end of the second episode (entirely lost), the murderers have been brought to justice, Peggy’s murder has been avenged (hence the name of the show, which makes sense for the first two episodes but never again), and Steed and Keel have agreed to work together from time to time in the future.
(Keel – like Cathy Gale after him, and Emma Peel after her – would not be working for Steed or his (never named) organisation; Steed’s partners were all, in the words of the later American intro, “talented amateurs,” i.e. unpaid freelancers. And although we would occasionally meet Steed’s code-named superior, until the Tara King years Steed would often appear to be working entirely on his own authority.)
Given that The Avengers would later be famous for its indomitable heroines, it’s notable that the show’s first female character, though evidently intelligent and assertive (indeed the gang members comment that she’s no fool), is an utterly passive victim killed off in the first act – in effect, a “woman in the fridge,” that is, a female character who exists only to be killed as a plot device to motivate the hero. Things would get better.
It’s frustrating that we can’t see the beginnings of Macnee’s characterisation of Steed. Macnee has frequently commented on the singularly uninformative direction the script gave him for his first appearance – “Steed stands there” – and how it gave him the freedom to shape the character as he liked. Hendry’s insistence that he and Macnee should attempt to add more dimensionality to their episodes than was explicit in the scripts was something that Macnee would continue with his subsequent co-stars.
Although the suave and urbane wit which would characterise the show at its height is not much on display in “Hot Snow,” the lost portion of the episode did apparently contain the following exchange:
KEEL: How did you get in?
STEED: Through the window. My apologies.
KEEL: Please don’t mention it.
(Reported in Patrick Macnee, The Avengers and Me, p. 20.)
Until next time, keep the champagne cold and your bowler on!
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