Steed gets hot under the collar; Emma mourns a Lady

In his recent interview, director Samuel Clemens noted that some of the actors were concerned that they might be going over the top, and I suspect that that was referring to scenes in this story by Gemma Langford – some of the characters threaten to go so far over the top, they threaten to come round the other side! It’s all done very much in keeping with the characters’ arcs, however, and the eccentricity that is a hallmark of the series – beside which Julian Wadham’s Steed and Olivia Poulet’s Emma appear positively straight-laced!

From the brief descriptions given online, it looks as if this is loosely based on the third TV Comic strip, but all mentions of the Avengers’ mysterious superior, the Colonel, have rightly gone and Langford populates her tale with a mad professor, a double agent, a northerners with a chip on their shoulder and some nice one-upmanship between Steed and Peel. There’s also a nice nod to Moonraker (in one of the few sequences from Fleming’s book that turned up in the Roger Moore movie).

Clemens never allows the large performances to bury the story in melodrama, and there’s once again a good mesh of Steve Foxon’s sound design and Jamie Robertson’s score.

Verdict: Very much towards the EPIC end of the Avengers sliding scale of lunacy, this is a fun tale. 8/10

Paul Simpson

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Click here for our interview with Samuel Clemens