Sinister Experiments in Architecture and Shipbuilding

The New Avengers was originally touted as having ‘the highest production values in the world’, which possibly seems vaguely amusing to the modern viewer. Nevertheless, the producers were clearly committed to making a slick and lavish series, which (perhaps inevitably) meant that they were running out of money towards the end of the second season. Up stepped a Canadian co-producer, happy to get involved, albeit with the proviso that the resulting episodes showcase some of the delights of the most northern of North American nations.

Initially at least, the results seem vaguely agreeable, although Dennis Spooner’s Complex opens with a scene which is arguably a cheat: a man on top of a skyscraper initially appears to be taking a sniper shot at someone coming out of a building a good mile or two away – but it’s not actually a rifle, it’s some sort of super-long-range Polaroid camera. Quite why he is doing this – and arguably pointing the camera the wrong way anyway – is never really dwelt on.

It is all part of a plot to expose top Other Side agent Scapina, who is being extravagantly praised by his or her handlers. But word of the photo reaches them and an intercept is ordered, to take place in Britain. Why the photo is being flown all the way to the UK when Scapina is known to be based in Canada is one of those mysteries the answer to which is only known to co-production lawyers and accountants. Well, of course the courier is shot, but hangs in there long enough to tell Steed, Purdey and Gambit that Scapina is in the photo.

So of course they all fly off to Toronto to try and negotiate for information as to Scapina’s real identity. Could it be Steed’s old friend Paul (Cec Linder, best known for playing Felix Leiter in Goldfinger)? Or could the lengthy dwelling on the computerised security system in the office building where their Canadian counterparts are based somehow be relevant to the plot?

Well, in the end it’s an idea we’ve seen done before on the original show: it turns out that Canadian intelligence gave the job of designing their HQ to a card-carrying member of the Other Side’s ruling party (played by an actor with the resplendent name of Gerald Crack), and the whole place is an artificially-intelligent death-trap which has been cheerfully sending classified information to its handlers for God knows how long, to say nothing of ordering or manufacturing hits on anyone who suspects the truth. This is supposedly the big plot twist, but the episode is written and directed in such a way as to ensure that the viewer is well ahead of the main characters.

The opening acts of the story waver between the laborious and the silly – Spooner comes up with a running gag about Gambit’s repeated run-ins with the Canadian rozzers which isn’t very funny but is at least mildly distracting – before we get to the climax, which features Purdey trapped in the killer building with the others stuck on the outside trying to get in and help her. This is also quite silly, often embarrassingly so – Scapina drops the air pressure, supposedly in an attempt to asphyxiate her, but just ends up sucking her skirt off – which is a shame, as there are signs that this could have been an effective paranoid techno-thriller if the script had been better. Still, while the execution is pedestrian and charmless, at least it has an authentically outlandish premise, even if it is an over-familiar one.

There’s something vaguely familiar about Spooner’s Forward Base, the next episode, too. By all accounts the latter stages of the production of the series were not a very happy experience: there was no money to pay the actors’ wages, and by the time filming moved to Canada Brian Clemens was heavily committed to pre-production on The Professionals and had very little involvement – to the point where he tried to have his name taken off the credits. Certainly there is a definite sense of forced jollity about this episode, an air of whimsy somewhat at odds with a drab-looking production.

Steed is looking for the Forward Base of the title, a secret missile installation under the control of the Other Side which they have somehow managed to establish somewhere too close to friendly territory for comfort. A courier arrives in Canada with a new guidance system component for the base, which the team (Gambit and Purdey are particularly badly dressed this week) and this episode’s sacrificial lamb attempt to keep track of. ‘I work alone!’ shouts their latest ally at every opportunity, which if nothing else is convenient for letting him wander off and get killed mysteriously. The component is eventually retrieved by an enemy agent who… chucks it into Lake Ontario.

This could possibly be fairly intriguing were it not for the fact that the episode has already tipped its hand as to what its gimmick is: the Other Side took advantage of a severe storm in 1969 (the entirely fictitious, so far as I can see, Typhoon Agatha) to insert a giant submarine into Lake Ontario, disguised so that when surfaced it resembles a peninsula on the shore of the lake. A comedy local keeps finding himself either high and dry or floating in the lake when it surfaces or submerges beneath him, birds’ nests are full of fish, and so on. As presented, it’s a silly idea which Spooner attempts to have some fun with: there’s a lot of business with the characters floating around in mechanical swans, some rather droll dialogue, and so on.

It does take its time while the characters figure out what’s happening, and a lot of the incidental plot details feel like filler – an enemy agent is sent to destroy old postcards showing the original coastline, there’s a long sequence about trying to scare someone into running to their contact, and so on. Like most of these foreign-made episodes it is notably short on anything resembling an expensive action sequence. You can tell that Spooner hasn’t lost his touch as a scriptwriter, but the constraints placed on him by the production really do give you the impression that with these two episodes he’s working with one hand tied behind his back.