Trying to analyse The Avengers leads to a conundrum, akin to racing over a sunny morning meadow, straining to net a playful butterfly: it’s delicate and fleeting, never looking back, and you know capturing the creature will destroy its beauty, yet beauty only exists if seen...
...But onward we beat, boats against the current…Let’s do a little analyzing, hopefully without impaling this profoundly original British TV series on the Great Cork-board of Life.
Above all, the Avengers (1961-69) was goofy fun — but goofy in a swinging 60s Matt-Helm kind of way, not a hippy-dippy Rowan-Martin mold. The two lead characters, played by Patrick McNee (John Steed) and either Honor Blackman (Cathy Gale), Diana Rigg (Emma Peel), or Linda Thorson (Tara King), were, by varying degrees, sexy, breezy, detached, bright, chic, educated, athletic and rich without any visible means of support.
Emma kicking butt
The program made London and its surrounding environs a huge playground for grownups, that is, for Steed and his female buddies, blithely laughing over cocktails, meting out judo chops to vaguely threatening villains — always witty, always bemused, stereotypes of a stereotype that they were in the process of inventing. Big kids on expense accounts (though hard currency is never, ever seen. Way too real darling).
Mona Lisa of the 1960s
In fact, it’s hard to think of an Avengers episode in which kids are present, let alone featured. For the appearance of a real child, along side a man-child/woman-child, tends to emphasize the underdevelopment of the latter. (How many kids have you seen in Bond movies?). As for visible minorities...The Avengers managed to salaam its way around most hot issues of the 1960s. Vietnam had no call on Avengerland.
AvengerLand is a world without seasons and calendars, a timeless London of clean, neat streets (usually – strangely - devoid of humans and traffic), of bucolic Britain with lazy, leafy lanes and Elizabethan-era bridges. Technology, when it does appear, is most often associated with evil — sociopathic robots, mind-control machines – that kind of thing). Even Steed drives a forty-year-old car. And rarely is there a gun about, or an explosion heard. Entering AvengerLand is the upbeat flipside of poor ‘ol Patrick (The Prisoner) McGoohan entering ‘The Village’.
Trapping that butterfly called The Avengers will tell you nothing, aside from the notion that butterflies belong in a meadow, not pinned dying to a board: expressions of 60s pop culture should be appraised within that swirling, psychedelic glass dome of their times. Because outside that dome, the air is pure poison and sure to distort perspective and curtail ‘goofy fun’.
The romance of callligraphy
...So now we depart Steed and leather-cat-suited Emma, comforted in the knowledge that they shall always be there, when we need them, ageless and enticing, revolving in the digital aspic of a DVD, in pre-email Land where a man may contact his ravishing workmate with just a tasteful, embossed calling card, as in ‘Mrs. Peel, We’re Needed!’
"Popular culture is the collection of ideas or memes that are popular, well-liked or common and create the prevailing culture.
"Popular culture is the views and perspectives most strongly represented and accepted within a society." - Wikipedia
"What we now call the 1960s began with JFKs Inaugural and ended with Nixon's resignation...roughly."
- I. M. Clarke, in an isolated moment of insight
It's fitting that we begin this blog on 60s pop culture a few days after the death of Number Six, aka 'The Prisoner', aka Patrick McGoohan (1928 - 2009). Thesis have been about this TV program (which lived for just 17 episodes), trying to unravel—what TV Guide suggested—is "a weird, enigmatic drama, a Kafkaesque allegory about the individual's struggle in the modern age."
Very '68.
Which TV programs of today stem from The Prisoner's family tree? What of music? And fashion? As Ray Davies once wrote: "Where have all the swinging Londoners gone? Ossie Clark and Mary Quant. And what of Christine Keeler, John Stephen and Alvaro, where on earth did they all go? Mr. Fish and Mr. Chow, I wonder where they all are now."
We're only 'here' because we were once 'there'. But be careful as we consider 'pop'.
Wikipedia defines 'reminisce' this way: "Indulge in enjoyable recollection of past events." Sounds like a dead end. Why don't we breathe fresh air and 'remember' 60s pop with an eye on 2009.
So long pal...
Let's invite Emma Peel and The Haight and Matt Helm and Lava Lamps and Nehru Jackets and Jim Morrison and Ken Kesey and Mimi Farina and Ram Dass and all of them in for a fondue dinner. In fact, I wonder where they are right now.
Last thought to Ray Davies. "And I wonder what became of all the rockers and the mods. I hope they're making it, they all have steady jobs."
