Big Gay Longcat reviews The Avengers: A Touch of Brimstone

This 1966 episode of The Avengers (the proper Avengers, that is, not Captain America and his friends) is considered a classic of the series for good reason - it is especially memorable for one reason, and that reason is a naughty one at that!

Alongside Patrick Macnee as John Steed and Diana Rigg as Mrs Emma Peel, the baddy-of-the-week is played by Jason King himself, Peter Wyngarde, in the first of his two appearances in The Avengers. Purr.

Steed had better look out, or he might not be the most handsome manny in his own show any more. But then Wyngarde should know, if anyone does, that if you come at the King, you best not miss.

It starts with us watching Peter Wyngarde watching television. He is enjoying some expensive luxury noms as the programme he's watching shows a cigar exploding in the face of a Russian manny, and he seems amused by it. Wyngarde does, I mean, not the Russian manny. This prototype version of Game For A Laugh still needs some fine tuning if you ask me. We don't know who Wyngarde is playing yet, or what he wants, which establishes an air of mystery to draw in and intrigue viewers early on. As if the mere presence of Wyngarde isn't enough to do that already!

Steed tells Mrs Peel there have been other pranks played on diplomats and politicians recently, so now they are on the case. Steed already suspects a manny called "the Honorable John Cleverly Cartney," presumably on the grounds that if he is played by Peter Wyngarde he must be the baddy, so he sends Mrs Peel to investigate him.

"I've come here to appeal to you, Mr Cartney."

"You certainly do that."

Smoove. He invites her to come with him to Paris, like he is already playing Jason King. Mrs Peel is just leaving when Lord Darcy enters. With it being another 30 years before Colin Firth would become synonymous with that name, there's a different Colin playing him - Colin "Inspector Lestrade" Jeavons. Once Mrs Peel has left, Carney and Darcy discuss another prank they are planning.

Mrs Peel describes Cartney to Steed as "handsome, and dynamic, very compelling, quite fascinating." That describes Peter Wyngarde alright. Purr. (Although it also describes me. Maybe Mrs Peel has met me?) They dash off to where the next clue has led them but, because Brian Clemens wrote this episode, they are too late and a manny has been killed just before they get there.

"Well it's no joke anymore."

says Steed.

Cartney is busy having kiffs with Sara Bradley, who is played by Carol Cleveland, later to become much more famous from her appearances in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Naughty Cartney! He's too busy to meet with Darcy, but then a little later on he isn't too busy to meet Mrs Peel. Very naughty Cartney!

It is therefore Steed who meets with Darcy, and gets him drunk enough to tell him the plot. Darcy had to help with Cartney's prank because of the rules of their club, called "the Hellfire club," but he didn't mean to kill anybody so now he feels guilty about it.

A soon as Steed finds out about the club we cut to it, where lots of mannys are having noms and kiffs and getting up to who knows what naughtiness just out of shot, doubtless all too naughty to show on TV. Who knows, maybe even some manly handshakes? Scandalous! Cartney, Sara and Mrs Peel come in and Cartney joins in the fun, while Mrs Peel looks on unimpressed.

Darcy bursts in and demands to speak to Cartney, who responds by giving him a patented Wyngarde stare. Then he agrees to have a meeting with Darcy, but only after him and his henchmannys have had time to put on their scary masks and hoods.

This is all just an excuse to get Darcy to stand in a spot where they can drop him down a trapdoor. Frequent Health & Safety violations are another way in which the club behaves naughtily.

Mrs Peel introduces Steed to Cartney and gets him an invitation to the next meeting of the naughty Hellfire club. One of the henchmannys tells Steed

"We believe in the power of evil, Mr Steed. We believe in the ultimate sins. Have you ever committed an ultimate sin, Mr Steed?"

They give Steed a couple of tests before he is allowed to join their club. The first one is to drink a big cup of what we may infer (it is not stated, presumably so as not to be a bad influence on the viewers at home) is incredibly strong alcohol. Steed enjoys this so much he asks for more - this is Steed we're talking about, after all.

The second test is to blow a pea out of the way of a henchmanny with an axe. Steed also manages this one easily, much to the surprise of the baddys. I wouldn't have managed it, but then I'm a cat made from socks. The henchmannys are all impressed by Steed, except for Cartney who is annoyed at Steed stealing the scene.

Steed pretends to leave, but really stays behind to secretly listen to their plotting, and so finds out that their big "coup" is to take place the next night.

The next night, Steed and Mrs Peel get dressed up to go back to the club. The henchmannys get up to their naughtiness again, but Cartney is missing so Mrs Peel goes to look for him and to find out what they need a load of fireworks for. She sees that the fireworks are really "T.N.T. High Explosives." Cartney appears and gets his "ladies-in-waiting" to take Mrs Peel away for a costume change.

Sara tells Steed that Cartney's plan is to "topple the government and then take over" by using tunnels under the house that lead all the way to Chequers "Culverston House" where "there's a cabinet meeting there tonight."

"Not for long. One big bang and they'll all be gone..."

As poorly thought out as this plan appears to be (Step 1: Blow up the government. Step 2: Take over the government), Steed rushes off to try to foil it. He doesn't get far before Cartney returns and announces

"I give you the queen of sin - Mrs Peel."

Mrs Peel is dressed very differently from before, and even has a snake! I think there's some naughty subtext on display here, but I can't quite see it for all the naughty text in the way.

Steed is so surprised that he forgets he's supposed to be saving the government and stays around to enjoy the next scene. He gets in a swordfight with a henchmanny called "Willy" (lol) who is supposed to be the best in the club at fighting, while Cartney goes after Mrs Peel with a whip - for a different sort of fight, I suppose, mew.

The swordfight is a properly dramatic scene, with lots of moves that wouldn't be out of place in a classic historical swashbuckling film. Mrs Peel gets in a fight with a henchmanny that is more in the usual tongue-in-cheek tradition of The Avengers, with her mimicking his moves after she has handled him easily (I mean beaten him. I mean defeated him), but then Cartney arrives for a more serious fight using his whip.

This being the room with the trapdoor in it, he is eventually hoist with his own petard when he whips the lever to open the trapdoor, just as he happens to be standing on it. I guess it just goes to show... if you come at the queen of sin, you'd best not miss then either. Mew.

Well with that, it's all over bar the unfunny pre-end-credits skit - which for this episode is particularly unfunny even by the standards of this show, barely even qualifying as a skit. We don't need to stay to see the rest of the henchmannys defeated - with Wyngarde out of the picture, everyone involved and viewers at home alike have all rapidly lost interest in continuing with proceedings. And who can blame them?

Fall Out At Fifty

It is 50 years ago today since Fall Out, the final episode of The Prisoner, was first broadcast on TV.

Love it or hate it, I doubt The Prisoner would be as memorable if it had not ended the way it did in Fall Out. Tying everything up by revealing the identity of Number One and the allegiance of the Village (the way Script Editor George Markstein had originally intended to) might have been neater in its way, but the almost infuriating intangibility of Fall Out's ending forces you to think about and interpret the series for yourself in a way that getting a neat sense of closure would not.

Fall Out is remarkable in other ways too, seeing, as it does, our hero Number Six resort to violent revolution in order to eventually overthrow and escape from the Village. And we know as we watch him that he is right to do so, having seen along with him in the preceding weeks how every other method of resistance has not been enough. We have seen the eventual fate of individuals like Number Six, such as Dutton from Dance of the Dead, and Number Six got a taste of what lies in store for him in Living in Harmony when he was shot by the Judge/Number Two. The Village cannot be reformed from within since, as we saw in Free For All, it only pretends to democratic elections and a free press. And Many Happy Returns showed that Number Six can never truly escape its reach so long as it exists. The only remaining response is to fight back, "'til death do us part" as Number Two so aptly put it in Once Upon A Time.

What is it that puts him over the edge here? It looks like the tipping point comes when his speech is drowned out by the shouting of the Village Assembly members. After that moment Number Six says nothing at all for the rest of the episode, his only dialogue coming from a playback of the line

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered."

from all the way back in Arrival. It seems he has decided that, if he cannot make himself heard, then actions speak louder than mews.

The sight of Number Six wielding a machine gun is pretty shocking (with All You Need is Love playing over it for an extra level of irony) considering how rarely he has used a gun in the series until this point (and, if you're one of those who believes Number Six is John Drake, even longer when counting the Danger Man series on top), but let's remember that he was driven to it in Living in Harmony as well. "Each man has his breaking point," said Number Two in Hammer Into Anvil. Now Number Six joins Roj Blake and Luke Skywalker as a heroic rebel.

The machine gun is only part of it - Number Six also fires the Village's rocket, although precisely how it being launched helps him and the others escape, and how much damage it does to the Village and to Rover (the Village's ultimate form of defence against escape... that we've seen) is one of the most unclear elements of this most opaque finale. One interpretation is that the launch, which causes a mass evacuation, destroys the Village entirely, and the rebels themselves escape in their truck only in the nick of time.

Rockets would have been on the minds of many viewers in 1968, as that was still in the middle of the space race between the USA and the USSR, with the Americans achieving the first mannyd orbit of the moon by the end of the year.

Fall Out was prescient regarding other events of 1968, with mass demonstrations and riots in American and European cities making the governments fear that revolution could have been imminent, even forcing the President of France to call an election to halt the violence. And the Soviet Union ruthlessly crushed attempts at democratic reform in Czechoslovakia using troops and tanks - the so-called "Brezhnev Doctrine."

The mere existence of Fall Out reminds us that morally justified violent revolution is a possibility, if our own societies ever fall into the sort of despotism seen in the Village... or the Soviet Union. If the powers-that-be are prepared to be violent against those they are ruling over, then they would be very happy if they thought those they were oppressing had ruled out the option of rising against them.

The democracies of the UK and USA have taken their knocks in recent years, with electoral systems (such as the UK's "first past the post") producing questionably legitimate governments, to say nothing of polarising referendums, but I would not advocate taking up arms in order to bring them down yet. Not when they seem to be in the middle of doing such a good job of that themselves, lol. And, of course, the USSR was not brought down by violent revolution in the end. Merely the threat, the possibility of an uprising turned out to be enough to force changes.

The British media, meanwhile, more and more comes to resemble the Village's Tally Ho - with newspapers that openly smear politicians they don't agree with and call judges "Enemies of the People" when they make a decision they don't like. Attempts to reform them are resisted under the cry of "freedom of the press" despite the fact that they exist to push the agendas of their shadowy billionaire owners - who resemble, if anything, the robed and masked members of the Assembly who seem to control the Village from behind the scenes and to whom even Number Two is answerable. They have the loudest voices, and when they shout they can prevent anyone else from being heard.

When put like that, what is it that we poor, lone cats can do versus those who wield such power? Maybe not much, but we can start by asking pertinent questions, and who knows where it will go from there?

Try not to break too many saucers along the way.

Number 18 on the menu

The Prisoner Challenge: Fall Out

How can I review Fall Out, my favourite piece of television ever?

I mean, The Prisoner isn't my favourite series of all time - I have only watched it all in the last five-or-so years and there are a number of series that have been with me for so long (e.g Doctor Who, Blackadder) that I don't think they can ever be overtaken.

Ah well, I'll take a deep breath, and here goes...

It's the music, I think, that makes it. I've seen plenty of films and TV programmes that are weird and wonderful - Aeon Flux, Sapphire and Steel, to name but two - but the music in Fall Out adds so much to the experience of watching it that even when it threatens to be a string of nonsense robbing a magnificent series of a coherent ending, the music is there saying "this is it." I love the music.

Once Upon A Time is a tough episode to follow. The performances by McGoohan and Leo McKern were sublime, and it culminates in Number 2 dying and Number 6 has passed the Village's "ultimate test." If that had been the end we might have been left satisfied that Number 6 had finally won out over the Village, and in as near-to-perfect an Ultimate Showdown as one could wish for.

But that wasn't quite the end. It finished with the Supervisor standing at the door. "Congratulations," he says. "What do you desire?"

"Number 1."

"I'll take you."

We are promised the answer to the question "Who is Number 1?" that Number 6 has been asking every episode since the series began. And if that question is to be answered, why not the others? Where is the Village and whose side is it on? Maybe even: who is Number 6 and why did he resign?

Fall Out picks up events from exactly where Once Upon A Time left off. Number 6, the Supervisor and the Butler leave the Embryo Room and go down in a lift to a room where Number 6 is given a suit of clothes like those he arrived in the Village wearing.

"We thought you would feel... happier... as yourself."

Doors open to reveal McGoohan. He is dressed as his old self again, but his face is still suspicious.

All You Need is Love (by The Beatles) plays. They walk down a corridor past a selection of jukeboxes - this isn't incidental music; it's playing where they are. And given where they are, this couldn't be more incongruous. But this is just the beginning...

They enter an underground chamber full of soldiers and men in masks and robes - the assembled delegates who are, or so it seems, the secret masters of the Village.

The Supervisor joins them at 'Identification.'

There is a man dressed as a judge, he is the 'President' of this assembly and is played by Kenneth Griffith, who was Number 2 in The Girl Who Was Death, so perhaps he has a similar role here?

Number 6 is presented to the President, who says "he must no longer be referred to as Number 6 or a number of any kind." So with that I shall no longer refer to McGoohan's character as "Number 6" as, from this point on, neither do they.

The President calls McGoohan "sir" and invites him to sit in the "chair of honour." McGoohan appears puzzled by what they are doing but goes along with it, perhaps still suspecting this is yet another Village plot.

Number 48 (played by Alexis Kanner, and one has to presume this is not the same character he played in Living in Harmony) is presented to the assembled delegates, and McGoohan, as an example of rebellious youth. He is found guilty of a number of crimes relating to this and is held prisoner.

Then the late Number 2 of Once Upon A Time (Leo McKern) is resuscitated. This is a neat trick if he really was dead, but it is unclear if this was the case. McKern steps up to the President's podium and addresses the assembly. It appears he doesn't know how his seeming death was accomplished by the Village, but the President says "there have to be some security secrets that are kept from a late Number 2."

McGoohan interrupts their exchange to ask of McKern: "Did you ever meet Number 1?"

"Face to face?"

"Yes."

"Not him," is the ambiguous answer, and then he looks at the rocket that dominates this chamber. It is marked with a big, red '1.'

He stares into its green 'eye' and then spits. For this he is seized and put with the captive Number 48; no longer Number 2 but a prisoner.

The President deplores the forms of rebellion exhibited by Number 48 and the former Number 2. "They are to be stamped out," he says.

But then he turns to McGoohan's form of rebellion: "He has revolted, resisted, fought, held fast, maintained, destroyed resistance, overcome coercion." On behalf of the Village the President concedes that he was right, and then offers him a choice: "lead us, or go."

If he chooses to go then they will give him his house back (the key to the door is offered in token of this), £1,000,000 in traveller's cheques, a passport - specified as being "valid for anywhere" - and a bag of "petty cash." All in all a tempting prize, but what's the catch?

Ever suspicious of Village tricks, McGoohan asks the question that destroyed the General: "Why?"

And to every answer the President gives him he asks it again, until:

"I'm an individual?"

"You are on your own."

And then, more explicitly, the President says "we concede. We offer, we plead, for you to lead us."

These words echo the last, desperate attempt by McKern's Number 2 in Once Upon A Time to find out why Number 6 resigned. Could it be that the Village has learned from this and is trying a final plan, gambling that this will succeed where all their other attempts have failed?

"Or go?"

"Go if you wish," says the President with sincerity in his voice.

It seems he is persuaded they are genuine, as he rises from the 'chair of honour' with a smile on his face. The masked delegates applaud as he picks up and pockets the items offered from him to take if he chose to leave.

Before he departs, he accepts the President's offer to address the assembly, ascending the podium to do so. But when he speaks the delegates shout over him and drown him out.

Four times they do this, as the President looks on silently. He gives up, and the President says "Sir, on behalf of us all, we thank you." There is a look of utter bemusement on McGoohan's face.

The President continues "and now I take it that you are prepared to meet Number 1? Follow me, if you would be so kind sir." Accompanied by the Butler, McGoohan enters the lair of Number 1 and comes face to face with a masked figure with the number '1' on his robes.

This is possibly the most famous - or infamous - scene of The Prisoner. So much so that I'm not even going to go into any more detail than that. If elements of Once Upon A Time were open to individual interpretation, how much more so the rest of this episode?

Who is Number 1? My present theory is that the answer we are given - on screen, before our very eyes - isn't the answer, because none of the questions asked by The Prisoner are answered - we don't find out who Number 6 is or why he resigned. We don't find out which side the Village was on. And the closest we get to finding out where the Village is - well, that's ambiguous to say the least, not to mention contradicted by other episodes. So we get an ending in Fall Out, but no answers.

Not convinced? Alright, how about this one then: McGoohan sees himself because they have just made him their leader. It seems very likely that Number 6 believed that Number 1 was a fixed person - like Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Number 1 of SPECTRE in the James Bond films - and viewers had been led to believe this as well. Now it seems that Number 1 can be replaced. But how? If Number 1 has the power to replace Number 2, who has the power to replace Number 1? No individual, it would seem, but a committee...

No? Like the film Clue, I have a third possibility for you. If they can bring back McKern from the dead, why not Curtis - the lookalike from The Schizoid Man? He's not Number 1 though; there is no Number 1. The delegates assembled outside rule the Village by committee, with Number 2 (who may or may not be the same person as the President) as their representative in the Village. In this scenario, Curtis is playing Number 1 as part of their plan to break Number 6, and based on McGoohan's reaction, it almost succeeds...

There are endless other possibilities, up to and including that the whole thing happens in the mind of McGoohan (Patrick McGoohan, the actor and star of Danger Man) while driving his car to his resignation. It's ambiguous; there is no definitely right answer. And there never will be.

The episode continues: McGoohan and the Butler release McKern and Number 48, then the four of them overpower guards to take possession of their machine guns. McGoohan then activates the rocket.

As the rocket counts down the four make their escape in a running gun battle with the soldiers as All You Need is Love plays over the scene.

It had to come to this in the end - he can't just leave the Village, it has to be destroyed or the threat it poses will always be there. And that would mean he'll never really be free as long as it exists. Just like McKern said in Once Upon A Time: "'til death do us part."

The Village is evacuated by helicopter, but the four make their escape using the detachable vehicle - a truck - from the Embryo Room. The Butler drives it down a long tunnel, smashing through the gates at the end, to freedom.

The rocket takes off, and Rover is seemingly destroyed in the blast.

Where was the Village? Well wherever it was, we next see the truck on the A20 road, 27 miles from London. They drop off the young man who was Number 48 and he begins hitch-hiking.

I believe they're free - the music, celebrating, triumphant, joyful, suggests this. I find myself humming this to myself for days, sometimes weeks, after every time I watch Fall Out.

They continue into London and then abandon the truck. The former Number 2 leaves them to go on to the Houses of Parliament, while McGoohan and the Butler have an encounter with a policeman. But whatever McGoohan says to him (we don't hear), they don't get arrested.

They get on a bus and are then at McGoohan's house. His Lotus, KAR120C, is parked outside and McGoohan gets inside and drives off, while the Butler goes into the house. The door opens automatically for him, and there is a noise like the opening of a door in the Village.

What does this mean? A final note of ambiguity as the episode, and the series, draws to a close. McGoohan drives his car down the road - the very shot that began The Prisoner is used to end it.

The Story of Three Little Pigs

The I Claudius Challenge: 12 episodes in 12 weeks - Part Two

Some thoughts at the halfway point

I haven’t bothered to give the individual episodes ratings (out-of-five or otherwise), partly because that’s not my style but mainly because I’d just be giving every episode top marks. They really are that good.

They’re not flawless productions - if I wanted to nit-pick I could say that they’re not first-rate production values, with the studio-bound sets shot on videotape, or that the aging make-up isn’t always perfect on, for instance, Tiberius, Livia, and especially Claudius himself. But it is so easy to forget about these things when watching the episodes because the acting is utterly brilliant from pretty much everyone. It’s a play performed by some of the finest actors of that era - as such, the sets and make-up are adequate to the task of letting the actors do their job.

If I Claudius were made today, it would be like Rome. Almost exactly like Rome, in fact, given that Rome’s second season leaves off in almost the perfect place for the events of I Claudius to start. Rome’s a bit like the Star Wars prequel films in that respect - also it has all the modern production values that one would expect of a present-day TV series that they could only dream of in the ‘70s, but the script and the performances aren’t up to the standard of the original. Though, that said, I do like Rome in its own way.

Sun 15 Nov: 7. Reign of Terror

This is the story of the downfall of Sejanus. At the moment of his triumph, thinking he is to be named Tiberius’s successor, he is undone.

First he is shown still rising towards his ambition in scenes that illustrate how ruthless he is - torturing confessions out of senators and arranging to marry Livilla’s daughter when Tiberius refuses him permission to marry Livilla herself.

The downfall itself - organised by Tiberius and Caligula with help from John Rhys-Davies’s Macro, Sejanus’s ambitious second-in-command (and therefore his replacement) - is equally ruthless; it’s not just Sejanus that dies, there’s a purge in Rome and the episode ends with the streets full of bodies, including Sejanus himself. I like the way Sejanus’s murder is shown from his point-of-view, with Macro and two guards advancing towards him - the camera - with swords out.

His death scene is followed by Livilla’s, locked in a room and starved to death by her own mother, who had uncovered her poisoning of her husband and attempted poisoning of her daughter.

Claudius again plays a small but significant role in the plot - he is the one that brings the news of Sejanus’s treachery to Tiberius since, in spite of the fact that Sejanus controls access to the Emperor, he doesn’t consider that Claudius could be a threat. It’s a nice touch that keeps the title character from being merely an observer of events.

Mon 23 Nov: 8. Zeus, by Jove!

This is my favourite episode. For all the brilliance of BRIAN BLESSED, Sian Phillips, and the other actors in previous episodes, at this point John Hurt totally steals the show.

Caligula becomes Emperor. He started mad, and gets madder; thinking he is a living god. His madness, and the episode, builds up to the stunning final scene.

“Don’t go in there. Don’t go in there.”

Mon 30 Nov: 9. Hail Who?

“You set the standard of sanity for the whole world.”

Caligula, backed by German guards loyal to him alone, is all-powerful, and reaches new heights (depths?)* of insanity:

- Claudius saves two senators from death by quoting Homer to amuse Caligula.

- Caligula thinks the Jew’s prophecy about the coming Messiah refers to him.

- Thinking he is the god Jove, Caligula makes war on Neptune and his armies take seashells as plunder.

- After a campaign against the Germans (and Neptune), Caligula orders no Triumphs upon his return, and then rages at the lack of them awarded to him.

- He also reprimands the Romans for celebrating the victory of the battle of Actium, when his ancestor Mark Antony was defeated, but later admits he would have done so if they hadn’t - because Augustus, who won, was also his ancestor.

- And then there’s the most utterly crazy and unforgettably insane scene of the series - the dance. If you’ve seen the episode, you’ll know the bit I mean. If not, words cannot describe. As evidenced by the following exchange between Caligula and Claudius:

“Did you like it?”

“It was… indescribable.” 

- Caligula forces the beautiful Messalina to marry old, crippled Claudius as a joke, though it backfires somewhat as they are happy together… for a time, but more on that in episodes to come.

- “The noble senator Incitatus.”

Eventually a conspiracy gets underway to kill him, and finally, he’s dead.

Then the Praetorian Guard force Claudius - virtually on pain of death - to be the next Emperor so they can keep their cushy jobs guarding him. The final shot of the episode is Claudius wearing a golden laurel wreath - less than gracefully.

With Caligula, and the fabulous John Hurt, gone, the series will never be the same again. But that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to the remaining three episodes. Far from it.

* Yes, I know I’ve used this before, for episode 6, but the point remains.