The Avengers - The Black and White years.

The Gun Moll page used to be hosted on Xoom before NBCi took over and ruined it. During that era there were several articles on the classic UK TV series 'The Avengers'. For those of you who are new to this page here is a reminder of some of the content of those articles. This particular article focuses on the very early days of this TV classic when colour television was still a far off dream.

b_hono2.jpg (60216 bytes)'The Avengers' started off as a fairly standard TV detective series. It was not until the main character John Steed (Patrick McNee) was established that the show began to take on it's own individual character. The female lead character tended to alternate between Venus Smith (Julie Stevens) and Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman). It soon became evident that the Steed/Gale partnership was the one the viewers wanted to see and the Venus character was soon relegated to history. Here is an episode featuring Venus who has been captured by a fleeing traitor and his wife.

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Cathy Gale soon became one of the very first female TV characters who could hold her own against any man. She was often called to perform action scenes (which were filmed live incidently) and the show's producers gave her an increasing number of leather outfits to withstand the rough and tumble in these scenes. And so a TV legend was born. In the episode 'The Medicine Men' a  female secretary also undertakes criminal activities for her employer which apparently includes kidnap and murder - a leather clad and eye patched Cathy Gale being the unlikely victim in this scene.

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b_hono1.jpg (46100 bytes)Another typical episode of this time is 'Intercrime' in which John and Cathy are pitted against an international crime outfit who have just recruited a female German assassin (Hilda Stern) into their ranks. She is arrested entering the country but after escaping from custody Hilda Stern (Julia Arnall) seeks out Intercrime where Cathy Gale is impersonating her. Here is Hilda Stern taking on the Cathy in the climatic scenes of the episode.

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'The Avengers' featured criminal nuns a couple of times in the Black and White era. One of these was 'The Little Wonders' which has Lois Maxwell (the old Miss Moneypenny in the 007 films) as a machine gun wielding nun and the other is 'Dead on Course'. In this episode a criminal gang is using the sanctuary of a nunnery to crash aircraft and to seize the valuable cargo. Here is one of the ringleaders, another machine gun wielding nun played by Peggy Marshall.

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You'll probably realise that many of these captures aren't as sharp as usual. That's because of the age and quality of the original Avengers material from where they originated but I thought you'd like to see them anyway. The next issue will have a feature on Honor Blackman's successor - Diana Rigg as Emma Peel.

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