'The Avengers' was a tale of three magnificent women and one lucky guy. When Cathy Gale enters the show explodes. Not a very big budget then and it was performed like a play with every scene being shot from start to finish in one take which makes Cathy Gale's fight scenes even more impressive because she did not have a stunt double. Cathy Gale was TV's first butt kicking woman.While Cathy Gale's relationship with Steed could be tense his relationship with Mrs. Peel was flirty and agreeable. ABC had pumped a lot a money into the show and they could actually afford better locales, stunt people, editing, costumes and Sci-fi villains. In the B & W year Mrs. Peel's costumes were amazing, very daring for the time. In the colour year it was just her famous cat suit. Her departure was painful and her missing husband turned out to be a clone of Steed, dapper and proper (Patrick Macnee's suits were famous). For being a splendid example of girl power they could at least paid Diana Rigg. Then came Tara King, wide hips, blue-blue eyes and really young. When people have their faces that close together and aren't kissing or head butting each other there's a confront level there and Mother became a player in the show, Familiar faces popped up: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and young Charlotte Rampling among others. 'The Avngers' had snappy dialogue, quick British wit even more brutal than American TV, '...I haven't killed anyone all week, You can ask Mrs. Peel.' The Bowler and the Tantalising Three (they had interesting episode titles) was a fun show and had great music by John Dankworth and Laurie Johnson.

In spite of how "The Avengers" series is best known, the opening season was a completely different kettle of fish.The season from 1961 - mainly missing sadly - was more of a conventional police thriller. None of the programme's quirky humour was displayed, there was no female leading character and John Steed was technically the second lead behind Ian Hendry as Dr. David Keel. The general synopsis was usually as follows: Keel would be approached by Steed who would seek the good Drs help in the fight against the latest villains of the show. Dr. Keel was most reticent about becoming involved in Steeds assignments but invariably was.Only 3 episodes from 1961 exist and including the first 15 minutes of the opening episode.Judging by the existing 3, the more gritty and realistic style works very well. Ian Hendry and the only John Steed - Patrick Macnee - compliment each other. After Ian Hendry decided to focus on a film career, Patrick Macnee was made the show's leasing character. In addition, he would be the actor who would appear in more episodes than anyone else. The series seemed to struggle in finding it's form/style. The characters of Dr. Martin King and that of the pop star Venus Smith, aren't all that interesting but one or two episodes they are in are quite good.When Honor Blackman joined the series in 1962 for its second season, everything changed for the better. The series became ground-breaking in having a regular female character who was just as tough, brave, resilient and intelligent as John Steed.The second and third seasons feature some marvellous episodes - too many to list them here. The series was firmly established as a huge success with Britain and the two leading actors became very popular with the viewers.With Honor Blackman leaving in 1964 to appear in "Goldfinger" opposite Sean Connery, major changes were about to occur for "The Avengers" series.Having been shot on video and in whole takes as though filmed live, now the show would be filmed on film and eventually in colour. In particular though, the most popular female character of them all would help tremendously in pushing the series to its peak of popularity - Diana Rigg as Emma Peel.The on-screen chemistry between the characters of John Steed and Emma Peel was both natural and highly effective. The episodes were better than ever - several masterpieces are included and eventually, America became interested in securing the rights in broadcasting "The Avengers."It came as a bit of a shock when Diana Rigg announced she was leaving the series. She had made the Emma Peel character her own.For my money, the series declined in overall quality. The rather eccentric humour from the Emma Peel era worked for those episodes. Now with Linda Thorson was cast as Tara King, the stories became a bit too silly and I find many of the last season's episodes rather irksome.The other problem I find with the last episodes, is that Linda Thorson has neither the acting ability nor the kind of personality that Diana Rigg brought to "The Avengers." 1969 was the right time to bring the series to a close. It had lasted over 180 episodes since 1961 and has earnt its place in British television history.

When I was 16 this series meant a lot to me.Like other American fans, I became aware of it when it burst onto American TV in summer 1966. What a revelation it was to someone who'd grown up watching American TV! It was unpredictable: it mixed mystery, adventure, science fiction, and satire in always changing proportions. The mysteries were truly intriguing, the adventures truly exciting, the eerie situations truly frightening, the fantastic explanations truly ingenious, and the jokes truly funny. In later seasons the show formularized its conflicting elements, like every other show. But in the beginning you couldn't guess what might come next.And of course there was the sex and violence. It seems impossible now that there was once a time when there was too little sex or violence on TV, but what there was was dull and stodgy. The American network had omitted the most suggestive episodes, but left in a few lines of dialogue that startled at the time. The climactic fight scenes were much more exciting than those on American shows: dynamically staged and photographed, and with a satirical edge, which was lost in later seasons.The writing was very good too. To us in the States it seemed even better than it was because we hadn't then seen a lot of British TV. The scripts were solidly constructed, tightly packed, and full of clever dialogue. Patrick Macnee has claimed in interviews that "there was no clever dialogue" except what he and Diana Rigg rewrote, but the lines of the supporting characters belie that.The atmosphere of the show was new to me: a dark, bright, sharp, woozy, ordered, but unpredictable world where reality could be rolled like a die, figures of speech could become facts (a killing rain, an underground club), and you couldn't be sure that anybody was what he seemed. If I'd seen Alfred Hitchcock's early films at the time, I would have recognized this as an exaggeration of their milieu, to the verge of parody: those flower sellers and organ grinders seemingly hanging out on street corners but really doing spy business. The world of The Avengers extended beyond them to encompass killer robots and plants from outer space--but only a certain distance beyond. (The failure to observe that distance spoiled many of the later shows.)That atmosphere stayed with me for years. It carried me through dreary jobs by enabling me to imbue mundane surroundings in schools and industrial parks with fantastic and sinister possibilities. Other shows tried to imitate it, but never successfully. How could they, when The Avengers itself had lost it and never recaptured it again?The primary technical device for bringing about this atmosphere was the teaser. The Avengers made an art out of it. A man in a field is rained on, tries to escape, is rained into the ground. Superimpose title: "A Surfeit of H2O." The title is the punchline. A man breaks into a house and opens a door; a lion jumps out at him. Title: "The House That Jack Built." And so on.The puzzle posed by the opener often suggested philosophical or metaphysical possibilities, but they were never followed up on. The solution generally turned out to be slightly science-fictional, and the climax, rather than expanding on the potential implications of the story's premise, was just a comic fight. But it was remarkable in itself that the series could progress from one to the other with such deftness, beginning with a cosmic inversion and steadily narrowing it down to a trivial joke. The heroes were invincible (otherwise the stories would have been too horrifying), inexplicable (those of us who didn't know the show's origins had no idea why they were called Avengers), androgynous (Steed was the fancy dresser, Mrs. Peel did the manhandling), paradoxical (Mrs. Peel was widowed, yet somehow virginal), and timeless. (In subsequent seasons, they were turned into pop icons, but divested of most of the twists that had made them interesting.)What was considered by common consent the best episode of all, "The House That Jack Built," I didn't see originally (it was a choice between that and a screening of "The Music Box" with Laurel and Hardy). When I finally got to see it in syndication, five years later, it was like being taken back in time and watching the series for the first time. I was just as fascinated, just as mystified, just as amazed.I set aside my Wednesday nights especially to watch the series. Apparently not many other people did. But that was always how it was with everything that developed a cult. At the time I seemed to be almost the only one who took an interest in it. Only years afterward would people write about it as if it had been a universally shared generational experience.The following year the news came out that The Avengers would return. And so it did--sort of. But despite assiduous effort I gradually had to accede to an awareness that it was no longer very good. It had been dumbed down for Americans. It wasn't the same. It was gone. And now, looking back on it forty years later, I wonder (and can never know for certain): was it really so good as it seemed to me, in that one happy season of my youth? And can anything ever seem that good again?

This rating is specifically for the shows that were made with Diana Riggs. She and only she was the only reason I watched this show. I was about 10 years old, when I first saw The Avengers and I never looked back. Until there was no more Diana Riggs. I was never able to watch the others because she was The Avengers in my opinion. The theme song or music was so powerful and unique. (I hope I don't break any rules here, but if you want to watch start and finish of this show you can watch it on YouTube.)If there was to be a remake I think that Megan Follows or Lauren Graham would do her justice. Even though they are not English.