Calm Under Pressure: loving The Avengers
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
I’ve been having trouble getting back into blogging this year, and in an attempt to kickstart the habit again, I’m going to try doing a series of posts about things that inspire me. If anyone has a pet topic they’d like to see me write about, I am also taking requests!
Whenever I think about feminist heroes, Mrs Peel is the first person who comes to mind. I love my retro TV, and you all know by now about my deep and abiding love for Doctor Who, but for all my defending of various Doctor Who companions as feminist heroes, none of them quite come close to Emma as far as the strength they are allowed to display by the writers, directors and even performers of the time.
The Avengers started out as a show about men, showcasing a casual partnership between a doctor who had lost his wife through tragic circumstances, and a mysterious possibly-a-secret-agent fellow “from the Ministry” called Steed. The two of them fought crime together, and generally got all British on the arses of various criminal types. While Doctor SadLostLove was played by the most famous actor, and supposed to be the key character, he wandered away quite early, and Steed took over as the centre of the show. It’s a common TV trend for a non-protagonist to prove more awesome than the lead and eventually take over the show, but rare for it to happen quite so quickly - it took Avon two years to take command of the Liberator, after all!
For a while after that, The Avengers paired the debonair Steed with a variety of characters: another everychap doctor, a glamorous club singer called Venus, and the snarky, witty Mrs Cathy Gale, who kept a gun in her suspender belt, was played by Honor Blackman, and was generally awesome. Before long, the show shifted again, with a new focus on the duo of Steed and Gale. She was feisty and shot things; he rapped people over the head with his bowler hat, and offered champagne in between mysteries solved. It was a most excellent combination, and Mrs Gale was most definitely a feminist hero, despite the skirt and suspender belt.
But again, Steed lost his partner, and the replacement made for such startlingly good chemistry that this new pair, of Steed and Mrs Peel (Diana Rigg), would become absolutely iconic as the centre of the show. It helped that it was during this era that the show went to colour and developed far shinier production values, and also that it sold most successfully into America, but… all of these things paled into significance next to the glory that was Mrs Emma Peel.
The cleverness of the show is that Mrs Peel was allowed to be strong, and smart, and that Steed respected that strength and intelligence. He was the professional secret agent, and she was the talented amateur whom he brought in on his cases, because she brought skills and knowledge that he did not have. He was as likely to sit back and watch her fight the bad guy as he was to do it himself - and they both rescued each other on a regular basis.
What made Mrs Peel so important to me as a character and as a feminist hero was that when she was in danger, she would always remain utterly calm and unflappable. Even when tied to a chair, she never allowed herself to look or feel like a victim. She didn’t have to be armed (after all, she had her lovely choppy hand fake-martial arts and a whole team of burly stuntmen flinging themselves around if she so much as tapped them) to have complete control of the situation. Even while being rescued, she would exude an aura of ‘well obviously I could have done that myself if you hadn’t turned up.’
What made Steed such a sexy, interesting male character, was that he was entirely unthreatened by Mrs Peel’s awesomeness. He enjoyed the fact that her brilliance made him look good, because he was the one clever enough to apply her to any given situation. He basked in her successes. In a time when a lot of TV was about the traditional male hero, he modelled a very different kind of masculinity - often choosing to use his brain before employing violence, and rarely using a gun. Like Tom Baker’s Doctor was to do, ten years later, Steed’s most common way of foiling a villain was with a humorous application of a clothing accessory: his hat, his umbrella, or a suddenly thrown coat.
Thinking about the way that both characters transcended gender expectations reminds me a lot of Olivia and Peter in Fringe - the power dynamic is different there in that Olivia is the professional and Peter the amateur with exploitable skills, but she has the gun and is more likely to utilise the traditional tools and techniques of the male hero. The American tradition means that Olivia’s model is closer to Philip Marlowe than John Steed, but I think there’s definitely an argument to be made that Peter is the Mrs Peel of Fringe Division… useful, clever AND decorative.
Both Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee give highly mannered performances: Avengersland is a stylised version of England, quite old fashioned even at the time it was made. It’s a vision of a world where everyone is upper or middle class, where there are no policemen, and the whole thing is entirely whitewashed. But the joy of the show is in the banter, the dialogue, the beautifully tailored clothes, and the odd not-quite-speculative-fiction crimes and mysteries to be solved.