MRS. PEEL AND MR. STEED

...The character, we’re told, attended Eton...

...Episode directors included Charles Crichton, whose Dead of Night and Lavender Hill Mob rank among the most noteworthy British films of the 1940s and ’50s...

...Shot in kinescope, its noir look and grimy backstreet sets recalled the early thrillers of Graham Greene: Steed and Hendry wore bulky trench coats and smoked...

...Peel, played by Diana Rigg, was Steed’s most famous female partner...

...Steed, Macnee has noted, “was eighteenth century...

...With Blackman, The Avengers became one of Britain’s most successful programs: an international hit and the most profitable export in the history of British television...

...Its mad scientists always get their come-uppance...

...The series parodied itself, and the spy genre generally, and winked knowingly at Goldfinger, Batman, Mission: Impossible, and other popular films and television programs of the day...

...Rigg joined the series when, in 1965, Blackman moved on to more exalted things—playing Pussy Galore in the James Bond film, Goldfinger...

...But as Miller also shows, the series stood as well for what are, in the end, sturdy British values and beliefs...

...Long in the works, a big-budget movie version of The Avengers—featuring Ralph Fiennes as Steed and Uma Thurman as Mrs...

...Peel favors catsuits and modish boots and speeds around in a powder-blue Lotus Elan...

...Miller’s book has been published just in time to provide this summer’s reviewers with all the information they need to compare the movie to its television original...

...The actor Patrick Macnee was—as he remained through the nine seasons of the program—Special Agent Steed...

...For Macnee, The Avengers offered “a surrealistic Grimm’s fairy-tale sort of terror...

...The would-be autocrats it portrays are invariably humiliated and dispatched...

...It also “fractured” stories, sometimes “knitting them into other ones...

...Miller cites a scene at the close of one Avengers episode in which Steed, facing a firing squad, is asked to name his last request...

...All the show’s scripts have been summarized by Dave Rogers in The Complete Avengers, a hefty 1989 reference guide, recently republished...

...It was Clemens who insisted that “no woman should be killed” and that “no extras should populate the streets...

...But the influence of The Avengers is not just in nostalgia...

...But the persistent appeal of The Avengers derives even more from the high quality of its writing...

...Like The Avengers, The XFiles features two government agents—male and female—whose relationship is professionally close but personally unclear...

...show’s second season, and her character, Catherine Gale, was a proto- Peel: a vivacious, educated, leatherwearing widow who sent thugs flying with a bit of ju-jitsu...

...it’s intelligent, allusive, and full of parody...

...Thus, in one episode, Steed and Mrs...

...Peel contend with a band of female fitness instructors bent on cleansing the planet of men...

...The Avengers—created only two decades after the defeat of Nazism— belongs to a world that still believes in its bones that the forces of evil lunacy can be bested by the combined forces of courage, civility, and good cheer...

...In another, a demented cartoonist stalks and kills his victims costumed as “The Winged Avenger,” his own comic strip creation, a monstrous bird of prey...

...If Ian Fleming, Lewis Carroll, and Roald Dahl had teamed up on a television series, the result would have looked very much like The Avengers...

...Its influence is visible, for example, in the 1990s television blockbuster The X-Files, another “cult” favorite that has triggered its own share of fan clubs, critical commentaries, and related product lines...

...Thus in Heil Harris!—one of several “official” Avengers novels published in the late 1960s—we find Steed physically and mentally exhausted after a particularly tough case and considering anew the restorative powers of “a bottle of 1947 Barolo” placed beside some lasagne al forno Piemontese...

...that the no-nonsense Rigg sometimes ditched annoying admirers by noting “it’s illegal to sign autographs in the street...

...it grew increasingly mannered and ironic, “often making style into content...

...Read chronologically, the plots show the series moving steadily from urban grit to high camp...

...He knows books, food, wine...

...Later he trained at Sandhurst, and served as an army officer in World War II...

...Peel—is now set for late-summer release...

...But the program remains in wide syndication, attracting new viewers and sparking a growing number of websites, articles, and books...

...egotism takes its fall...

...So too, like The Avengers, The X-Files mixes wit with suspense...

...Calmly, collectively, Steed and Peel restore order from chaos—and then crack open the champagne...

...Over the years many fine screen actors took roles on The Avengers, Peter Cushing, Donald Sutherland, and John Cleese among them...

...But in most respects the early, low-budget version of The Avengers bore little resemblance to what the show became...

...The Avengers had always faced up to the reality of the Cold War...

...As the show grew more whimsical, its villains became colorful cranks with dotty but dangerous schemes to rule Britain or destroy the world...

...In the 1960s, the show’s wide appeal owed much to Rigg’s chic good looks and Macnee’s aristocratic panache...

...It was smart too, demanding from its viewers what Kingsley Amis, a devoted admirer, termed “mental agility...

...In The Avengers, a new book about the series, Toby Miller offers fresh facts about its evolution and amusing anecdotes about its stars...

...Mulder and Scully—a humorless pair—are forever mucking about in swamps and sewers, tracking a vast, endless conspiracy that appears to involve nearly everyone: space aliens, Pentagon generals, cigarette smokers, and the guy next door...

...But, being a good Brit, the unflappable Steed never takes himself too seriously...

...As Miller notes, The Avengers has inspired a host of spin-offs and imitations, beginning in the mid-1970s with The New Avengers (a short-lived series that even Macnee, one of its principals, describes as “an extremely bad retread of Kojak”) and culminating with the new Hollywood version of The Avengers...

...Clemens himself described the show as a “Doris Day comedy” and “a spoof with dramatic overtones...

...Honor Blackman replaced Hendry in the Brian Murray teaches in the department of writing and media at Loyola College, Baltimore...

...When The Avengers debuted on British television in 1961, John Steed’s crime-fighting partner was a male physician played by Ian Hendry...

...Certainly, politically, it endorsed nothing more radical than the workable virtues of democracy, civic responsibility, and political moderation...

...Even as he’s bashing the bad guys Steed leaves the impression that, all things considered, he’d much rather be doing something else—a bit of gardening, perhaps...

...At other times, the hero and heroine faced man-eating plants, deadly robots, and house cats programmed to kill...

...Would you,” he replies, “cancel my milk...

...The X-Files, however, is also portentous and dark, owing more to Oliver Stone than Oliver Hardy...

...In fact, from its start, The Avengers enlisted some highly imaginative scriptwriters, including Tony Williamson, Philip Levene, and Dennis Spooner, who later contributed to another legendary British series, Dr...

...Its producers—Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell—very cleverly met American expectations by mixing nostalgic images of Merry Old England with products and symbols meant to underscore Britain’s post-Beatles place as the center of European fashion and style...

...Steed, the show’s mainstay, is in Macnee’s own words, “a hero dressed and accoutered like a junior cabinet minister...

...but, by the mid-1960s, Soviet agents are likely to be faintly clownish figures bearing names like Ivan and Nutski...

...Miller, indeed, suggests that The Avengers was “all about common sense in place of the grand narrative of scientific progress...

...The Avengers ended production in 1969, one year after Rigg’s exit brought Steed a new partner, Tara King, played by Linda Thorson...

...He notes, for example, that Macnee modeled Steed’s character in part on a “foppish but strong” figure played by Ralph Richardson in a 1939 film, Q Planes...

...The Avengers, in other words, was postmodern before postmodern was cool...

...At its best during the Rigg- Macnee years, the series was consistently witty, suspenseful, and fun...

...But she wasn’t the first...

...Mrs...

...The show’s early creators fancied her the likely combination of Grace Kelly, Margaret Bourke-White, and Margaret Mead...

...But Brian Clemens—acting as producer, writer, and story editor— probably did most to define and refine the show’s urbane style and uncluttered look...

...But the woman was essentially twenty-first century...

...In fact, although his wardrobe is strictly British, Steed’s palate—and much of his style—is decidedly continental, as befits a hero at work in the era of the Common Market and the devalued pound...

...Self-importance, of course, has long been a cardinal sin in Britain, and a prime target for comic artists from Shakespeare to Dickens to Monty Python...

...As Miller points out, The Avengers made frequent use of fairly sophisticated cinematic techniques: Dutch angles, hand-held cameras, and worm’s-eye shooting...

...And that, more than ever, is the real secret of its charm...

...Each week agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully find themselves in bizarre and deadly situations, dealing with vampires, paranormal pyromaniacs, and mysterious mutants posing as any number of things, including Renaissance scholars and computer geeks...

...that in 1963 Macnee and Blackman, performing as a duet, released the single “Kinky Boots,” a musical satire of fashion that has been variously described as the first example of Marxist rap and—more plausibly—as one of the ten worst records ever made...

...Thus Steed sports a bowler, totes a brolly, and drives a Bentley...