A New Book for Fans of The Avengers
By Greg Bakun
Over the last few years, a revolution in
publishing has come to light. People who have important things they want to
write about have taken it on their own to publish their own work. What this
gives us, the reader, is an opportunity to get exposure to concepts and topics
that may have been too niche for a mainstream publisher to touch but perfect
for people who want to publish their own work who knows there is an audience to
read it.
A great example of this is a new book
written by Richard McGinlay, Alan Hayes and Alys Hayes titled The Strange Case of the Missing Episodes:
The Lost Stories of The Avengers Series 1. It is hard to imagine that
anything connected with The Avengers
would have information that is hard to come by but that is exactly what
happened with Series 1. I know for myself, when I first saw and got into The Avengers, I had only seen the Emma
Peel episodes and hardly imagined that the series had been going on so long
before the episodes I had seen. In fact, The
Avengers I had seen was very different to how the series started. The
premise of the series began with Dr. Keel whose fiancée is killed outside his
practice in connection with a package of heroin delivered to his practice by
mistake. It is after this horrible event that Keel is contacted by a stranger
named Steed who wants Keel to work with him to track down this drug gang. It is
a gritty and very real type of series. This all sounds very good but most of
this first series is missing and that is where this book comes in nicely to
fill the gaps.
For Series 1 of The Avengers, there is either a fair amount of information about
the plots of the episodes or very little to none. The work that Richard, Alan
and Alys have done for this book was doing the research to bring us detailed
synopses of all the Series 1 episodes. This book is a labor of love by these
three fans of The Avengers. It is
published by Hidden Tiger and I have another book they offer, The Tales of the Moonstone Inn, written
in the 1920s and 30s, which is quite good. Series 1 of The Avengers has always
been an enigma to me. This is a book I cannot wait to sink my teeth into as I
see this as essential reading if you are a fan of The Avengers.
Below is an interview with authors to
get a better idea of what went into making The
Strange Case of the Missing Episodes: The Lost Stories of The Avengers Series 1:
ALYS
HAYES: It all dates back to
2009, when Alan and I were asked to become involved in the planning and
production of special features for Optimum Releasing's new Avengers DVD range. Alan was approached as he runs The Avengers Declassified website, and
he asked me if I'd like to be involved too. I've been a fan of the series for
over thirty years, so it was great to be able to give something back, and repay
The Avengers for all the enjoyment
that it has given me.
ALAN
HAYES: We started in a small
way, suggesting archive extras, such as the surviving Police Surgeon episode
and Diana Rigg's Armchair Theatre play, The
Hothouse. We also produced a brief reconstruction of the missing second and
third acts of the opening episode, Hot Snow, to follow on from the recovered
first part. Jaz Wiseman, the co-ordinator of the special features project, soon
told us that the original Avengers
producer, Leonard White, had come forward with a scrapbook full of off-screen 'Tele-Snaps'
from fourteen Series 1 episodes. Excited at this momentous find, we agreed
between the three of us that short reconstructions of the missing stories would
be made. Over the next year, we produced fourteen of these programmes, using
these Tele-Snaps and, where they existed, production photographs taken during
rehearsals.
ALYS
HAYES: With no soundtracks to
synchronise with the stills, we wrote narrations for these programmes, based
initially on scripts that had been preserved. These were made available to us
from several sources, including from the archive of Dave Rogers, who I knew
from the early days of Avengers
fandom. Later, we had to be a great deal more creative!
ALAN
HAYES: Indeed we did, and it
was Alys who wrote the narrations for the episodes that were most awkward to
research. We didn't have access to scripts for eight of the episodes to be
reconstructed, just Dave Rogers' synopses in books like The Complete Avengers.
Marrying these up to the newly-found Tele-Snaps was quite a task, but Alys did
a sterling job. Of course, as we were writing these scripts, I took the
opportunity to add them to The Avengers Declassified
as in-depth story breakdowns. I'm not one to waste good content!
RICHARD
McGINLAY: And this is where I
came in. For me, it all came about because of the reconstructions that Alan and
Alys put together. I enjoyed watching them, but that still left ten missing
episodes that could not be reconstructed due to a lack of images. I wanted to
know about them too! One of the ten (The Radioactive Man) was summarised on
Alan's Avengers Declassified site,
but all the other summaries on there were based upon the reconstructed
episodes. I knew that some Series 1 scripts existed, having read as such on the
credits for the reconstructions themselves and on Declassified. However, apart
from a handful of scripts on the Series 1 DVD, I couldn't see that they had
been made available anywhere. I contacted Alan via his website, and before I
knew it, I was writing for Declassified! I was so enthused by reading the scripts
that I offered to write up summaries of them to fill in the gaps on the
website. Around the time that this was completed, Alan suggested going back
over his and Alys' summaries to see if I had anything to add, with a view to
bringing the whole lot together in book form.
How
difficult was it to research information for a series that in the main does not
exist?
ALAN: It was never going to be an easy task, but
circumstances with the ABC archive, which has changed hands many times over the
years, made it exceptionally difficult in some cases. The problem is that it's
not just the episodes that are missing. With Doctor Who, the most famous television series with holes in its
archive, the episodes are gone, but there are soundtracks, photos, scripts for
every episode, and a wealth of production information. With The Avengers, there is minimal production
documentation at Pinewood, and we have had to rely on private collectors coming
forward with materials. We were very fortunate as our appeal met with a very helpful
response, and we are most grateful to our benefactors.
RICHARD: There are some episodes, like Toy Trap, where there's
a script, a set of Tele-Snaps and a generous collection of production stills.
You can build up a fairly complete picture of such stories. At the other
extreme, there are episodes such as Nightmare and Crescent Moon, for which
there are no surviving scripts and no photographs, just some rather brief
synopses.
ALYS: For some others, the only things that remain are
images, for episodes such as The Far Distant Dead and Dragonsfield, and,
somehow, these had to be reconstructed for the DVDs. In instances such as these
and the ones Richard mentions, we've have had to don our deerstalkers to shed
some light on narratives that have become lost in time.
We've
all seen the reconstructions on DVD, so what does the book offer us that the
reconstructions don't?
ALAN: I must be honest, the reconstructions were, out of
necessity, a little rushed. We had a very limited time in which to research a
demanding subject, and there are some which we've now realised could have been
more accurate to what took place on screen. That's a shame, of course, but with
deadlines looming, some things got overlooked with the reconstructions, and we're
pleased to say that the episodes which were reconstructed have now been looked
at in far greater detail than before.
RICHARD: Also, there are the ten episodes for which no
visual reconstructions have ever been made. All of these have been addressed in
the book, with many of them having been dealt with in great detail as their
scripts exist today.
How
much has The Strange Case of the Missing
Episodes benefitted from being co-written by three authors?
RICHARD: I think it would have driven a single author around
the bend! It's a mentally exhausting process, either distilling the essence of
a 50- to 80-page script or extrapolating from more scant sources when there is
no script. After the mad rush to complete the reconstructions, Alan and Alys
needed a well-earned rest from the missing episodes. Then I came along to help
finish the jigsaw they had started! It needed all of us really. We also looked
closely at each other's work, which helped with getting the details right.
Sometimes one of us would notice something that the others had not. Any
theories that we came up with to fill logical gaps had to convince all three of
us. We acted as checks and balances for each other, questioning and revising
our detective work at every stage.
Do
you think that with it being mostly lost, Series 1 of The Avengers fires the
interest in a way it might not if it existed complete?
ALAN: I think that there's a certain buzz that surrounds
the missing episodes of any series. There's the thought that we're missing
something classic that should never have been destroyed, when in reality the
actual episodes were maybe pedestrian. However, I think we're all agreed that
while it may at times not have been The
Avengers fully formed, certainly not as we have come to know and love it,
it nonetheless appears to have had something special about it. The scripts are
engaging and varied, and from the surviving episodes, Ian Hendry and Patrick
Macnee made a fine team, even if their characters didn't always see eye to eye,
presaging the often spiky relationship between Steed and Mrs Gale. Would Series
1 inspire as much interest if the episodes survived? That's a difficult one,
but I'd like to see some more episodes turn up so we could find out!
RICHARD: It definitely fires my interest, but then I suppose
I have something of an obsession about missing episodes! I'd been a casual fan
of The Avengers since Channel 4
repeated the Emma Peel and Tara King episodes back in the 1980s. When I heard
about the Optimum / StudioCanal DVDs, I made tentative plans to buy them some
day... but when I heard that there would be Tele-Snaps and reconstructions in
there, the need to own them became much more urgent! I was the same with Dark Shadows – far more intrigued by it
when I learned that there was a missing episode! I've probably spent more time
poring over what can be ascertained about the missing episodes of Doctor Who and The Avengers than I have spent watching many of the surviving ones!
That probably sounds a bit sad, but it's an intriguing puzzle for me. I suppose
it's part of the human desire to want what you cannot have, to see what's just
out of view.
Over
the years, some production team members have dismissed Series 1 as "rubbish".
Would you agree with their opinion?
RICHARD: Perhaps it was a misguided attempt to make people
feel better about the lost episodes, in a "don't worry, you're not missing
much" kind of way, but actually it does Series 1 a great disservice. I
think there is a fairly commonly held belief that Series 1 isn't "proper"
Avengers, because it's Steed and this
other bloke, Dr Keel, rather than Steed flirting with a female partner, and
that it's not as light-hearted as in later years. That's like dismissing the
William Hartnell era of Doctor Who
because many of his stories didn't have monsters in them, or saying that early
episodes of Blake's 7 don't count
because they don't feature Servalan or Orac. The Avengers was a very different beast by the time that it
switched from videotape to film with the Emma Peel era, but Series 1 is not far
removed from the earliest Cathy Gale episodes. The show was adapting and
evolving all through its time on air, in terms of storytelling and production
technique – and that evolution starts right here! There are some quite gritty
storylines to begin with, involving drug dealing and prostitution for example,
and even some subjects that might on the surface seem mundane, such as
counterfeiting and insurance fraud, but there is always a sense of wit and
there is usually some sex appeal too. Actually, I was surprised by the amount
of humour I found in the scripts, and that's something we have tried to bring
out in the book. By the end of Series 1, the show is definitely on course for
its future, with characteristically eccentric settings like a zoo, a
taxidermist's shop and a funfair, and science fiction elements also come to the
fore, especially with the hi-tech laboratories and mad scientists of The Deadly
Air, Dragonsfield and Dead of Winter.
What
were the high and low points you faced whilst writing this book?
RICHARD: It was hard at times getting our heads around the
plots to those episodes for which no scripts survive but lots of images do – in
particular Tunnel of Fear, The Far Distant Dead and Dragonsfield. We would end
up staring at photographs of various characters doing various things,
wondering: what is going on in this scene? Who is this Caron character in The
Far Distant Dead? What's happening to Steed in the isolation chamber in
Dragonsfield? Those were the low points. The high points were working those
difficult bits out to our mutual satisfaction – oh, and finishing the book!
ALAN: I'm not one to dwell on low points, not that I can
really recall any from the time we worked on this book. Thinking about it, the
big disappointment is that, for all the time we spent sifting through information
and sources regarding the episodes, we knew that this was probably as close to
the episodes as we would ever get. They're not going to turn up, displayed in
the window of a local charity shop or be found in a Mormon chapel in Clapham,
and that's sad. As for the high point, well for me it was the collaborative
process. It was a pleasure to work with Richard and Alys, both tireless,
dedicated, inspired and supportive.
Do
you plan to write any further Avengers
books, to follow on from The Strange Case of the Missing Episodes?
ALAN: Definitely, though they will be very different
animals to this one. There is, after all, no great call for a book detailing
the storylines in depth of subsequent series as they can all be watched on DVD,
so we'll be changing tack. But we haven't finished with Series 1 just yet.
There's another book to come on that subject, but that's something we'll be
able to reveal more about in the coming months. We can tell you, however, that
it'll be called Ashes of Roses.
Without
giving too much away, what can we look out for in subsequent volumes?
RICHARD: Lots of production information! For Series 1, we
were originally going to put the story summaries into the same book as detailed
behind-the-scenes episode guides, covering casting, studio recording, location
filming, trivia, all that kind of thing. However, it quickly became clear that
we had far too much material to fit into one book. So the next book will also
be about Series 1, but the production side rather than plot summaries. Then we
will move on Series 2 and beyond with further behind-the-scenes episode guides.
Finally,
what do you hope to achieve with the publication of this book?
ALYS: Well, to begin with, we hope that it raises
awareness of Series 1, and helps fans of The
Avengers to understand in greater depth the content of those early stories.
Obviously, it would be nice to think that it might inspire people to take an
interest in the hunt for missing material, not just of The Avengers, and return items to the appropriate bodies. Our
television past has been decimated and we like to think that while this book
cannot replace those Avengers
episodes that are missing, it brings their narratives back to life after more
than fifty years.
The
Strange Case of the Missing Episodes - The Lost Stories of The Avengers Series
1 is available in
hardcover and paperback from Hidden Tiger. Please click here to order it.
Labels: Doctor Who, The Avengers
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home