Just rewatched an episode of "The Avengers" -- the proper Avengers, John Steed and company, none of this Marvel gubbins -- which I haven't seen in nearly thirty years: "Homicide And Old Lace". Good God, it's a particular kind of genius.
As someone who's occasionally had to salvage a complete dog of a film project, I have a real affinity for the inventive rescue job, in which the producers use footage in ways they'd never intended to try to make something out of nothing. And in this case... During the few months when Brian Clemens was sacked from "The Avengers" before returning, his replacement had produced a cold mess of an episode, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke's "The Great Great Britain Crime". Contrary to fan legend, it was actually finished -- but it was 63 minutes long, it veered between painfully straight-faced bits and lame jokes, and it had massive plot-holes and characters being idiots to advance the story. Even by Avengers standards, it made no sense. Clemens salvaged the other two episodes produced while he was away, but he wanted to bury this one deep.
Fast-forward a year. They're about to be cancelled, they're behind schedule and down-to-the-wire for their last American airdates, they're way short on money, Brian Clemens is in dire need of sleep... it's time for desperate measures.
What we got is like if Gene Roddenberry, when writing "The Menagerie" around the original Star Trek pilot, first got really really drunk.
Just over half the episode (27 minutes) is the edited highlights of "The Great Great Britain Crime" -- reworked for comedy, stitched together with silent-movie music and a lurid pulp narration from Steed's boss Mother. Plus he throws in clips from other old episodes, similarly recut for comedy. There's only about two-and-a-half scenes of new material with Steed -- all the rest is a framing story, with Mother telling a story to his spy-adventure-loving maiden aunties.
But what makes this episodes something special is how dear old aunties Harriet and Georgina are *merciless* to the story -- seizing on every plot hole (why *does* Steed go along with the villains' plan?), every unbelievably idiotic authority figure ("Did he marry into an important family?"), every convenient bulletproof vest, even the villains firing a machine-gun on an ordinary London street with no one noticing -- and forcing Mother to justify them on the fly. What it is, is like sitting in on a gleefully malicious notes session with Brian Clemens as script editor, skewering everything the writer has tried to get away with. ("They had reached an impasse," intones Mother. Harriet: "What does that mean?" Georgina: "It means they'd run out of plot.")
I can only imagine what it must have been like for Dicks and Hulke to switch on the episode when it finally aired...
But to top it all off, the restitching of the old scenes is a masterclass in how you can lop out swathes of dull footage and still make the results flow. All the missing explanations are neatly covered in one new scene between Steed and Mother (who wasn't even in the original episode). In an elegant bit of plot judo, they use a blatant implausibility in the shot footage (a bomb goes off right beside the baddie and *doesn't* kill him, just blows a hole in the wall) to justify lopping out an entire redundant action sequence (the bomb actually *does* kill him and they can skip chasing him any further). And the half-scene mentioned above is where they've presumably replaced a serious action sequence with a comedy one -- in just four shots they manage to do a stylish little fight in which *every single actor* is doubled, both the long-gone guest actors and the regulars, so you never see a single face clearly. And it's seamless!
Avengers generally fans hate this one, presumably because it's Just Too Silly. But as a writer, and as an editor who knows what it's like to go to war with uncooperative footage -- there's a sort of malevolent enthusiasm to the whole thing. It manages to make the cliches look deliberately stylized, and find wit in the witless. That's a hell of a job.
As someone who's occasionally had to salvage a complete dog of a film project, I have a real affinity for the inventive rescue job, in which the producers use footage in ways they'd never intended to try to make something out of nothing. And in this case... During the few months when Brian Clemens was sacked from "The Avengers" before returning, his replacement had produced a cold mess of an episode, Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke's "The Great Great Britain Crime". Contrary to fan legend, it was actually finished -- but it was 63 minutes long, it veered between painfully straight-faced bits and lame jokes, and it had massive plot-holes and characters being idiots to advance the story. Even by Avengers standards, it made no sense. Clemens salvaged the other two episodes produced while he was away, but he wanted to bury this one deep.
Fast-forward a year. They're about to be cancelled, they're behind schedule and down-to-the-wire for their last American airdates, they're way short on money, Brian Clemens is in dire need of sleep... it's time for desperate measures.
What we got is like if Gene Roddenberry, when writing "The Menagerie" around the original Star Trek pilot, first got really really drunk.
Just over half the episode (27 minutes) is the edited highlights of "The Great Great Britain Crime" -- reworked for comedy, stitched together with silent-movie music and a lurid pulp narration from Steed's boss Mother. Plus he throws in clips from other old episodes, similarly recut for comedy. There's only about two-and-a-half scenes of new material with Steed -- all the rest is a framing story, with Mother telling a story to his spy-adventure-loving maiden aunties.
But what makes this episodes something special is how dear old aunties Harriet and Georgina are *merciless* to the story -- seizing on every plot hole (why *does* Steed go along with the villains' plan?), every unbelievably idiotic authority figure ("Did he marry into an important family?"), every convenient bulletproof vest, even the villains firing a machine-gun on an ordinary London street with no one noticing -- and forcing Mother to justify them on the fly. What it is, is like sitting in on a gleefully malicious notes session with Brian Clemens as script editor, skewering everything the writer has tried to get away with. ("They had reached an impasse," intones Mother. Harriet: "What does that mean?" Georgina: "It means they'd run out of plot.")
I can only imagine what it must have been like for Dicks and Hulke to switch on the episode when it finally aired...
But to top it all off, the restitching of the old scenes is a masterclass in how you can lop out swathes of dull footage and still make the results flow. All the missing explanations are neatly covered in one new scene between Steed and Mother (who wasn't even in the original episode). In an elegant bit of plot judo, they use a blatant implausibility in the shot footage (a bomb goes off right beside the baddie and *doesn't* kill him, just blows a hole in the wall) to justify lopping out an entire redundant action sequence (the bomb actually *does* kill him and they can skip chasing him any further). And the half-scene mentioned above is where they've presumably replaced a serious action sequence with a comedy one -- in just four shots they manage to do a stylish little fight in which *every single actor* is doubled, both the long-gone guest actors and the regulars, so you never see a single face clearly. And it's seamless!
Avengers generally fans hate this one, presumably because it's Just Too Silly. But as a writer, and as an editor who knows what it's like to go to war with uncooperative footage -- there's a sort of malevolent enthusiasm to the whole thing. It manages to make the cliches look deliberately stylized, and find wit in the witless. That's a hell of a job.