The Avengers are back on audio with Big Finish’s release of The Avengers: The Comic Book Adaptations: Steed and Mrs Peel Volume 4. Stepping into the director’s chair this time around is Samuel Clemens, son of The Avengers’ supremo, Brian Clemens. On the day the box set was released, Clemens chatted with Paul Simpson about returning to the world that his father so memorably created…

 

 

How did you get caught up with directing for Big Finish? You’ve appeared in various acting roles for them but how did you get out of the booth and into the director’s chair?

Sam: I got fed up waiting for the acting work, continuously auditioning or waiting for jobs to come in.

I started directing when I was at the RSC. I don’t know if they have it now but they used to have camera equipment and they would advocate for the actors to go and make short films during their time in Stratford upon Avon. I think you had to pitch them and then you’d go off and make them, and at the end of the season there they’d screen them in the local cinema. Your films would star people like Judi Dench because they were all there and not doing anything.

I just couldn’t believe that someone could pick up a camera and just make a film. It was a real revelation to me. Films are so expensive and I just had no idea that that was possible. So that sowed a seed, the idea of making my own things or directing or something. I started making films with my brother and we still work together today – we set up a production company during the middle of all this. Great timing!

I think that started back in 2005 or 2006 and so I’d been making shorts since then and been really pushing a film career as a director, or writer/director. I’ve appeared in my films, not really out of vanity but more to save on budget. I know I’ll be there!

I was cutting my teeth directing in that world for a while and some of the films did quite well on the circuit, got a little bit of notoriety. From that, I think some of the producers and people that I worked with who were employing me as an actor started seeing that I could handle material and actors.

I was working for a theatre company, that is no longer around, called Talking Scarlet and the guy that ran it offered me the chance to direct one of my dad’s plays, Strictly Murder. (I’m writing it into a feature at the moment but it would be a great audio drama as well.) I took that on tour for about nine months and I asked people to come and see it. That was my first professional piece of theatre directing. Nigel Fairs, who’s a friend of mine who I’d acted with a lot, came to see it and he loved it. He said, “Look, I’ve got this series and I want you to direct it for me. It’s an audio drama series for Big Finish.”

I had no idea that he was doing that. I didn’t really know that he did lots of Big Finish; he’s not really mentioned it. We were always chatting as actors and I knew he wrote lots of murder mysteries that he does all over the country, and he’s been doing during lockdown – The Pogley Wood Murders which are hilarious, like Carry on Agatha Christie.

Nigel said, “I really would like you to direct Shilling & Sixpence Investigate”. I said I would clearly love to but I’d not done audio before. I think he was going to direct it but he really didn’t want to. He just wanted to appear in it and so he championed the way for me to do it.

I watched other directors directing who I worked with on the other side, like Ken Bentley I’d worked with many times and Nick Briggs, countless times on stage and in the booth. They were really nice and honest about the reality of doing it, the speed and the turnaround – the things you need to be good at and the things you should look at –so that’s how I came to it.

The first people I was directing were Celia Imrie and David Warner, which is quite daunting. But it was so lovely. It’s very intense because as it’s a Big Finish Original, the budgets are a bit smaller. I remember recording some scenes literally five times for every actor that could appear when they could, so once with Celia Imrie, once with David Warner, once with Louise Jameson then another time with the other actors that could be there. It was a real baptism of fire. I’ve never had to do anything quite so complex, in terms of scheduling, just keeping track of everything.

It was a real case of, “Good luck – and if you can direct this, probably you might be alright with anything else.”

And you’ve since done the Doctor Who Mags trilogy with Sylvester McCoy and Jessica Martin…

After that, David Richardson said “How would you like to do a Doctor Who?” I said, “Absolutely, obviously I’d love to”. It’s weird because I’m of that generation where I don’t really have a Doctor, it was off television when I was growing up. That’s what I was worried about with Doctor Who: I don’t know the world, and it is so frighteningly large, where do you start?

I decided not to try and delve into it that much and go, “I’m going to look at it purely from character perspective, and purely from a narrative and just try and tell each story for what they are. They’re all individual and they all need a beginning, middle and an end.”

I’ve learned on the job as it were, which is great and I’ve developed a great affection for Doctor Who from doing it. I’ve directed Sylvester, I’ve done a Peter Davison one as well, which is nice. I’ve been in a Colin Baker, and I’ve been in a Tom Baker, so I’ve done four Doctors now.

I feel like I’m getting the hang of it a bit more. But also you question it – “Well, what’s this about? I have no idea what that means”, which forces everyone to then go, “OK, well what does that mean?” and then we boil it down. I think it makes the actors then take ownership of what they’re doing more, because they’re slightly more in control.

I’ve done quite a lot since then: I’ve got another two Sylvesters, one with the Flying Dutchman and the other’s called Displaced. That was great fun. It was nice to have something to do during lockdown. I listened to all The Avengers during this which is great; it’s really nice to have something to sit and listen to, and go through and work through.

The problem with any of these things is just time. You don’t have much time to record and you only really have the luxury of three takes, four maybe if you’re lucky, if there’s a problem. So you’ve got to nail it quickly otherwise you don’t’ get it done.

The Avengers: obviously you’d heard of it before!

What is this crazy show? (laughs)

Did you watch it growing up? You’d have been around when they were re-running some of them on Channel 4.

I was born in 1980 so Dad [Brian Clemens] had finished The New Avengers and had moved on to The Professionals, which was in full swing when I was born. Growing up we had access to videos of The Avengers, which he’d recorded off TV – that was the only way he had copies of them. There was no sort of structure to them: we’d watch a Cathy Gale then a New Avengers. My grandad on my Mum’s side was always asking, “But who are they working for?” He was so obsessed with it, he just found it mental (laughs). When I was watching it, it didn’t really worry me too much but I understood the sort of lunacy of it.

I grew up with the people who made it, more than the show. One of my Dad’s very good friends was Ray Austin, who was one of the directors and stunt performer in a lot of those. I heard a lot of the stories of making it behind the scenes and we had people like Richard Harris over for dinner. Patrick Macnee I met a couple of times, but he lived in Palm Springs so it was more of a phone conversation. Gareth Hunt we were quite friendly with until he passed away, very young. Jo Lumley occasionally. I kind of grew up knowing about it and more than anything, so many people coming to interview Dad about it.

Did you ask to direct The Avengers: Steed and Mrs Peel or were you asked to do it by Big Finish?

I was asked. I wasn’t sure if they were doing any more. I appeared in one of The Lost Episodes back with Anthony Howell and Julian Wadham. That was great: it was one of Dad’s episodes I was in, One for the Mortuary and another one, but I hadn’t had any involvement with them at all since then.

I think just because I’d directed quite a lot – I stepped in and helped when people couldn’t do certain things, like when a director was ill or something – David said they were doing another box set and would I be interested in doing it? And obviously I’d love to – no shoes to fill (laughs)!

It was a very simple yes. The way I work, if something frightens me. I feel like I’ve got to do it because it’s a challenge and I’ll learn something about myself or about the process. It was nerve wracking to say yes and it will be a little nerve wracking when it comes out, but it wasn’t that experience doing it at all. It was just so much fun and it felt quite familiar. It sort of felt like home, a lot.

My parents’ house is like a set of The Avengers. You walk in and you think, “OK, clearly the person who wrote for The Avengers lives here because it’s like an antiques emporium.” Weird and wonderful bizarre bits – there’s bits from films and TV series here and there – but it’s just so eclectic and mad. It’s like one of the maniacal masterminds’ homes that they would have to go into and navigate.

Actually our home was in one of the episodes, one of the Tara King ones, Noon-Doomsday where Steed has got his leg in a cast. Steed was hanging out my bedroom window! The interior was obviously on set but everything is there, all from the family home. Dad was like, “That was a mistake, never again”.

So it felt quite normal coming back to it. I’d obviously worked with Julian previously, as an actor, but not Olivia [Poulet as Mrs Peel]. Olivia was new to work with.

Did you go back and watch any of the Patrick and Diana episodes or listen to what Ken’s done with these, because these comic strip ones have an even more heightened reality than the series?

Yes. Actually, I think the comic strips are more like the Tara King episodes. I think they’re way closer to that. When [Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell] were fired and then brought back on to salvage the Tara King series, I think Dad felt there was humour lacking and so that’s why he created [Steed and Tara’s boss] Mother so you could have the release of humour.

Reading them, they felt a lot more like the Tara King episodes and a lot more comic book-like in that way. Obviously there are rules that Dad set out with the writing for the TV series but the comic strip writers had no idea what they are, so they are different for that very reason. There’s just very small things: you would never have crowd scenes if you were doing it for the TV series because that makes Steed and Peel stand out and they might look silly. You would never have any extras, but in the audio dramas that’s broken quite substantially, with them going into London and all those kinds of things. It’s a different beast but it works on audio because it’s audio.

There are smaller differences: I don’t think they had many northern accents. They really wanted to keep it as a southern weird version of England, particularly how Americans would see England. It is very different in that sense but I think the tone is there and I’m really impressed with the writers.

I did watch some of the episodes: I’d go back and see my mum and we’d watch some of the 50th anniversary DVDs. I probably watched three or four episodes – I’d seen a lot of them before – just to reacquaint myself with the tone of it and see if I could bring any of that in.

I could also give Olivia and Julian a little bit of insight into how Dad saw Peel and Steed, letting them roll with that. My thought was, “This whole world’s created already so what can I add to it?” The only thing I could really add was some level of authenticity of where it came from and what my experience of that is. That’s obviously filtered through me; it’s not from the horse’s mouth itself, but through the lens of me.

It was great, they responded really well and I brought a couple of old scripts along to the recording days that they could have a look through. I brought along a clapperboard – I just thought it would be fun, that it would bring a little bit of nostalgia.

A couple of actors that I cast I’ve worked with before as an actor. One of them, Stephen Wight, who’s in The Clown with Two Faces, we trained together at drama school and he knew my Dad pretty well. I thought it would be good to have someone that knew him.

I think once that happened, I felt like “oh, we’re off”, and it was fine. It was nice having someone that knew him and understood the world.

What was the biggest challenge for you as a director, on it?

Each stage of it, all the different production phases, has slightly different challenges. The scheduling of this was pretty simple and this was quite nice actually because sometimes with the Doctor Whos you might only get Sylvester for a certain period of time or you’ve only got this particular actor for half a day! But for this everyday we’d have all the actors together and we could basically do it chronologically.

We ended up laughing a lot. Some of the actors were worried; they were going, “Is this too much?” And I was like, “Absolutely not, this world is mental; if you watch some of the Tara King ones, they are otherworldly and sort of comic book, almost cartoon-esque.”

I had to just go, “If it makes me laugh that’s not bad.” I was sort of a litmus paper – “Don’t worry about this being too serious, this is not The Lost Episodes.” It’s not Keel and Steed, which was much more like a regular kind of cop show. This is very different, more surreal. So the challenge was gaining trust from the actors, so they feel larger than life when we want them to be. We had a lot of fun.

Then also, putting the edits together, trying to find the right tone, because obviously things are slightly different [from the TV show] in the fact that there’s more interaction with the outside world. I was trying to minimise that: if we’re in London I don’t want to hear a really massive busy street because it sounds weird when you hear too much. Let’s take it outside and let’s have some cars but not make it too big.

Also musically: Jamie Robertson’s wonderful but it is very different because it’s not Laurie [Johnson]’s music. He’s doing his own thing. It’s a different beast and everyone that works on it is talented and they’ve got to be able to bring their voice to it to make it slightly different but within the spirit of what was there. I made a decision with him, that I think he was doing before, to really make sure that every piece of instrumentation we’re using is not synthetic whatsoever. Everything has to be analogue, has to be instruments that we all know and are real. I mean, obviously he’s using samples but all the samples are real instrumentation, so there’s nothing synthetic. There’s nothing synthy about The Avengers, it has to be analogue, it just has to be.

It was finessing things like that, things that seem very small but if you listened to it and there was something remotely synthy sounding it would jump out immediately.

For Doctor Who, depending on the episode you can go wherever it wants to go. When we did The Psychic Circus we could do an 80s synth mayhem and just go for it, because we could. Whereas with The Avengers, you have to be more sensitive because it is its own thing.

I think that’s why it’s struggled to be revived in any other form because it’s so of its own time. It’s like a time capsule and I don’t think you can recreate that. I think the closest thing to it that we’ve had is probably The Kingsman. I know there’s been talks to do other things with it over the years and we don’t own the rights to it so it doesn’t make any difference to us!

Also a challenge was allowing the actors to do what comes naturally to them and not force them into something. We’ve cast them for a reason. I was explaining to Olivia and Julian what Dad’s relationship idea for Peel and Steed was which they didn’t know. So it was nice to give them a little piece of direction from the horse’s mouth. Not tell them what to do or anything, just see how that affected what they did from then on. It was great, just giving them that and letting them go with it, and I think they felt like it was a different experience doing this one. Coming from Dad who’s created it, they said it felt very different and it felt more personal doing it, which is very nice to hear. Julian and Olivia interviewed me in the extras which was fun.

I think I gave them context of how Dad wrote it, how he gave a lot of writers a leg up and wouldn’t take any credit for certain things, and how he basically rewrote 95% of every script that came through. What I’ve realised is that The Avengers, that world, was his brainchild, his vision of the world, so it needed just a little bit of finessing to bring scripts into that. He wouldn’t take any credit for those things and if there were any young writers, he was giving someone a shot and wouldn’t get in their way but would help steer it more in the right tone. It has to have a consistency.

 

Steed and Mrs Peel volume 4 is out now from Big Finish

Click here to read our review of Listen Hear, the first story, and here for The Clown with Two Faces

 

Thanks to Steve Berry for assistance in arranging this interview.