The Avengers: Dance with Death

This blog post is about a first series episode of The Avengers which no longer exists. It has been recorded as audio by Big Finish but this post is based on the original script here: https://www.dissolute.com.au/the-avengers-tv-series/series-1/112-dance-with-death.html where there is also an episode synopsis.

Back to April 15th, 1961, when this episode was first broadcast. It feels like it's a long time ago in all sorts of ways - the episode refers to old money and old phone numbers which are long gone, and of course is from the early days of the show before it became the wild thing it did towards the end of the decade. I think you could probably also say that the plot reaches back in time even before the 1960s in some ways - it is essentially a straightforward detective story about a murderer who is working his way through the staff of a dancing academy. On the face of it this is therefore a rather pedestrian story.

Except it isn't. How it isn't. I hadn't read this one before and I loved it as soon as I started reading.

The original blurb in the TV Times summarised it as 'A corpse in a bath and Keel and Steed go ballroom dancing in an attempt to save the next victim'. Apart from the suggestion that Keel and Steed were dancing with each other (they weren't), if you replace the name Keel with the name Peel, this immediately sounds exactly like a later episode and you would just know some crazy stuff would be going on. This summary was actually the first thing that attracted my attention to this episode, because it makes it sound so much like Quick, Quick, Slow Death from series 4: 'A corpse in a pram and Peel and Steed go ballroom dancing in an attempt to save the next victim', type thing.

Of course being an early episode it's not quite as wild as the later ones, but we do have all the hallmarks. One of the striking things is how Steed really doesn't treat Keel very well, which is indeed how he treats all his opposites in the early shows. He is particularly delighted after Keel loses his scarf at the dance school and as a result is one of the suspects for murder. He treats it as if it's hilarious. Let me tell you that in those scenes if the dialogue was much more brittle it would be by EF Benson or Noel Coward, and in fact they do feel very much like Mapp and Lucia sparking off against each other. This dialogue is an aspect of the show which I hadn't even thought of before.

Elsewhere Steed is recognisably the Steed we know and love, joking away as he pretends to sign on to learn to dance at the school. There is also a magnificent scene where he bores holes through a bathroom door to see if the woman inside is ok, with the porter protesting all the time and obviously thinking he was spying on her. As I suppose in one way he was.

In the trivia on the Dissolute site linked above there is the magnificent detail that Steed comments on how Keel's surgery has been redecorated, and this was actually because they'd had a new set to go with the new ABC franchise - a detail which would be completely missed by the people who'd never seen the show before!

This is not a criticism because this show is a delight from start to finish but it can be slightly difficult to follow both the original script and the synopsis purely because the plot is obviously intended to set up different suspects for who the murderer is, and of course we are not seeing the characters. I haven't heard the Big Finish reconstruction.

An excellent first series Avengers, with some hints as to what was going to come later in the show.

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