We find ourselves back in the orbit of Venus for Roger Marshall and Jeremy Scott’s The Removal Men, which is a bit less pedestrian than it sounds. Marshall has said he was not initially interested in writing for what he believed to be a rotten programme, but agreed after he decided that sharing the credit would mean he only got half the blame. Once again this is a very uncharacteristic and occasionally quite slow episode, but one with some entertaining moments that go a long way towards redeeming it.
We open in a nightclub where two men are apparently discussing a very important business deal – they finally agree on terms, but the twist is that they are actually working out the contract for an assassination (the ‘Removal Men’ of the title are actually hired killers). The scene then shifts to an apartment, where the lady of the house (alone in the place) is awoken by a burglar in the dead of night. This turns out to be a gun-toting Steed, who relieves her of her jewellry before locking her in the bathroom (she opts to take a bottle of wine in with her).
It turns out that Dragna (Reed de Rouen), the husband of Steed’s victim, is the leader of the assassination gang, and following reports around town (we are somewhere non-specific in the south of France this week, although naturally the episode is filmed almost entirely in the studio) of an Englishman – ‘dark, snazzy dresser, acts like life’s a big joke’ – trying to sell his wife’s jewels, the head man tracks him down to the nightclub run by his henchman Siegel (Edwin Richfield doing an interesting Australian accent). He is here visiting Venus, who is in the area quite by chance, it would seem. Steed claims to be on holiday too and contemplating retirement, and Venus actually buys this obvious load of old nonsense.
Dragna and Siegel turn up and they prove to be just as credulous as Venus, as Steed professes to have heard of their operation and has been actively trying to attract their attention so he can apply to join them. Once Steed arranges for a vacancy to open up, they take him on for their next job – a young film starlet (a 19-year-old Edina Ronay, exceedingly well-cast as the Bardot type) has been making some unwise political interventions and is now to depart the scene – and Steed is to arrange her final exit…
(Why Edina Ronay never became a much bigger star mystifies me (if you will forgive a brief digression). Could it just have been down to the slightly dodgy roles she ended up taking? Oh. Well – British film and TV’s loss was knitwear’s gain, I suppose.)
So, a slightly mixed bag, but much more positive than negative in the end. The plot is rather reliant on multiple coincidences to function, while the episode also contains some very obvious filler scenes: there are not one but three musical interludes, one of which is an instrumental, and the director eventually resorts to just pointing the camera at Julie Stevens’ shimmying midriff to pass the time. This isn’t a dreadful episode for Venus, I suppose, but her role in the show basically seems to be Steed’s stooge – he occasionally wanders into her life and creates complete havoc, for which he smoothly evades any responsibility: the final scene depicts Steed, relaxing on a studio-set beach in his bermuda shorts, while Venus (suitcases in hand) complains that she can’t get home as Steed shot her boss before she got paid. It’s amusing, but a bit cruel.
Patrick Macnee is in his element as Steed goes undercover with the assassins, and gets another particularly droll scene where he meets up with his boss One-Ten, once again on the beach. Both men are in their swimsuits and all the procedural exposition is mixed up with Steed being asked to put sun-tan lotion on One-Ten’s back – the follow-up to this comes at the end, where One-Ten is looking after Ronay’s character in the same location, and possibly enjoying himself just a bit too much. This is an uneven episode, but still probably the best non-Cathy episode of the season so far.
Something much more like ‘classic’ Avengers comes along next, in the shape of The Mauritius Penny, the first contribution to the series by writers Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks (both of whom are far better remembered for their work on a different Sydney Newman-created fantasy series). This was in fact Dicks’ first TV writing credit, and the beginning of an immensely distinguished career that was only brought to an end by his recent death (like many of my generation, I feel I owe Terrance Dicks an enormous debt as both a reader and a writer, and I make no apologies for being so fulsome in my praise of him).
The episode is set in the unexpectedly cut-throat world of stamp collecting, and opens with a stamp dealer being interrupted in the middle of a phone call and shot dead by his own assistant (you can’t get the staff any more), the subject of the call being the apparent discovery of a Mauritius Penny, an immensely rare and valuable stamp. As it happens, the victim had a tangential connection to a recent murder on the continent, which is why Steed happens to be having his phone tapped. Rather surprisingly, it turns out that philately is one of Mrs Gale’s areas of expertise, but she finds the reference to the rare stamp in this context baffling.
Well, Steed goes to a stamp auction where the sound of someone being shot is masked by the bang of the gavel, Mrs Gale gets a job working in the shop, it turns out that the stamp collecting world has been heavily infiltrated by a neo-Fascist group looking to stage a coup, there’s a bit with two evil female dentists, and it’s all rather ridiculous and delightful. Honor Blackman gets to have a fight with Alfred Burke (this was still a few years before Public Eye got going), we see Freckles the dalmatian again, and there’s a very witty scene where Steed, after being knocked out, wakes up on the floor of his flat to find his cleaning lady hoovering around him.
In short, there’s not much wrong with this at all, as it is smartly scripted, giving both Steed and Cathy some great moments, and well-directed too. Of particular interest to some viewers may be a sequence where Mrs Gale infiltrates a rally of the neo-Fascists, where various rousing speeches are being made in what’s basically a function room – but she is rumbled and taken captive: an almost identical scene features in another Terrance Dicks script from the mid-1970s, and the similarity was apparently a great surprise to the writer when it was pointed out to him many years later. But as the great man said, to be a successful writer you just need a good strong original idea, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be yours. In this case it turns out he was stealing from himself, and I’m sure that would have amused him. A great episode from two great writers.
No Chic. Just Geek. 