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Spies and Surrealism
Mar. 26th, 2019 03:19 pm I watched an episode from the second season of The Avengers ("Immortal Clay") last night. I've watched all of the Emma Peel episodes, more than once, and a few of Honor Blackman's later episodes as Cathy Gale, but this is my first go-round with the earliest surviving episodes of the series.
And it occurred to me that's there's a clear trajectory here from fairly mundane stories to the downright bizarre and surreal. "Immortal Clay" is a a spy story involving industrial espionage and a fairly realistic MacGuffin--an unbreakable ceramic. The motives of the players are fairly recognisable too--greed, lust and politics. The whole thing is played fairly straight. By the time we reach the fifth series of The Avengers, the plots are not only bordering on science fiction (for example a plot to take over the country with brainwashed moggies in "The Hidden Tiger" and Robot doppelgangers in "Never, Never Say Die") but the whole thing is stylized to the point of camp.
There must have been something in the air (all the drugs?) in the sixties, but I noticed something similar happened over the course of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which went from THRUSH tunneling under a military base in "The Iowa Scuba Affair" to trying to take over the world with invisible bees in "The Birds and the Bees Affair".
And it occurred to me that's there's a clear trajectory here from fairly mundane stories to the downright bizarre and surreal. "Immortal Clay" is a a spy story involving industrial espionage and a fairly realistic MacGuffin--an unbreakable ceramic. The motives of the players are fairly recognisable too--greed, lust and politics. The whole thing is played fairly straight. By the time we reach the fifth series of The Avengers, the plots are not only bordering on science fiction (for example a plot to take over the country with brainwashed moggies in "The Hidden Tiger" and Robot doppelgangers in "Never, Never Say Die") but the whole thing is stylized to the point of camp.
There must have been something in the air (all the drugs?) in the sixties, but I noticed something similar happened over the course of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which went from THRUSH tunneling under a military base in "The Iowa Scuba Affair" to trying to take over the world with invisible bees in "The Birds and the Bees Affair".
