Voltage and Villagers

Tony Williamson, writer of some of the best fourth season episodes, returns to The Avengers with The Positive Negative Man – apparently he spent the best part of the intervening year working for the BBC on their answer to The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives!. (It’s tempting to say that if Adam Adamant Lives! was the answer, it must have been a very odd question.)

The episode opens with a junior government scientist (Bill Wallis, second of two appearances) getting a visit from a rather odd individual in a pink shirt with a grey, clay-like complexion (Michael Latimer, second of three – both he and Wallis made their Avengers debuts in A Touch of Brimstone, funnily enough). One touch from the visitor results in a flash of electricity and the dead scientist embedded in the wall.

Well, once Steed has stopped flirting with the office manager he and Mrs Peel discover that not only was the man killed but the contents of a safe were incinerated – without the safe itself being opened. It seems that the destroyed papers related to the now-discontinued ‘Project 90’, whatever that was. It seems that anyone who worked on the project is now a potential target for the grey-faced assassin with the shocking touch.

Well, as you could probably guess, there are a couple of inventive sequences as minor characters are stalked and killed by the electromagnetic menace – Sandor Eles (second of two) turns up for what’s a pretty small-fry part – while Steed and Emma are working out what’s going on. It’s all to do with something called broadcast power, where electricity is transmitted like a radio signal: the killer is covered in special make-up which absorbs the power being beamed at him, while at another point the bad guys fry the electrics in Steed’s car while he’s driving along. Responsible for all of this is an embittered government scientist (that very fine actor Ray McAnally in the first of two appearances), who feels his work has been underappreciated and as a result is planning to conquer the country with his army of supercharged supermen.

This is a rock-solid episode with lots of lovely, entertaining touches: Steed is largely able to foil the villains come the climax because he turns up wearing rubber trousers, while at another point he seems more outraged by some of the corny, banal lines Emma comes out with. (We shall pass over the fact that Steed, previously depicted as capable of defeating a highly-trained assassin in unarmed combat without breaking a sweat, is here given a fairly hard time in a scrap by a middle-aged research scientist.) It feels so like a Philip Levene episode – the same kind of plot and structure, the same kind of B-movie sci-fi premise, a climax involving Emma strapped to a table – that it’s a genuine shock (no pun intended) when someone else’s name appears on the credits. Nevertheless, it’s definitely less whimsical than a lot of fifth season episodes and this makes a nice change. After so many episodes written by Brian Clemens and Philip Levene, the prospect of someone else joining the writing team on a regular basis is also a welcome one.

Clemens pops up again for Murdersville, one of the most lavish of the season’s episodes (loads of location filming plus an actual helicopter) and one with an odd mixture of the whimsical and the naturalistic. It opens in the bucolic little village of Little Sworping-in-the-Swuff (actually Aldbury in Hertfordshire, apparently), where all seems quiet, and two yokels are enjoying a nice game of chess outside the pub. Then two visitors emerge from said public house, and one proceeds to put a bullet in the other one. The yokels look on indifferently and go back to their game…

It soon becomes clear that this is another holiday episode for Patrick Macnee, as Mrs Peel is once again about to drive off somewhere in the countryside by herself (will she ever learn?). Actually, not quite by herself: she’s taking an old friend to his new house in the countryside (he has bought it sight unseen, having been abroad), which just happens to be in Little Sworping.

Her friend’s manservant (at what point did it start being odd for upper-middle-class people to have servants?) has already gone down to the country to move in, but the locals are alarmed to learn of the new arrival and begin behaving rather aggressively towards him, clearly trying to provoke a confrontation. It works: first the servant disappears, then Emma’s old friend. Emma finds the body of the servant – but then she is bopped on the head. Waking up in the local doctor’s surgery, she’s told she was in a car crash and has a concussion… but of course the wool is not to be pulled over her eyes so easily…

Yes, it’s another quiet-English-village-with-a-bizarre-secret episode, and one more dependent on fridge logic to function than most. It turns out that the villagers have hit upon a wheeze where they have decided to put financial success ahead of civilised behaviour and morality and decreed that the usual laws don’t apply there (Murdersville as a prescient metaphor for Brexit: discuss) – anyone willing to pay the parish council a quiet million quid (another episode with a fixation on sums of a million quid) is given dispensation to commit murder in the village as flagrantly as they like, which the locals undertake to keep quiet about.

It’s a premise which is really preposterously silly despite not featuring any sci-fi elements, but the odd thing is that in places the episode plays it unusually straight – Mrs Peel seems genuinely distraught when she eventually comes across her friend’s body (I have to say he never seems a particularly likeable chap to me), and shortly afterwards concludes another peerless demonstration of one-handed kung fu by nearly smashing someone’s head in with a telephone. On the other hand, there are a few ridiculous sequences (Mrs Peel is pursued across country by yokels in a helicopter) and some very good gags (a gunman enters a library, and seeing the sign calling for quiet, pauses to attach a silencer – while Macnee has lots of fun with a sequence where he has to get Diana Rigg out of a chastity belt). There’s also a famous in-joke ridden scene where Mrs Peel has to pretend to be married to Steed, calling him ‘Johnsy-Wonsy’ and referring to their four children (whose names are suspiciously similar to those of the producers and executives). Definitely one of the best of the holiday episodes, and a pretty good episode full stop.