album souvenir du TV Times

Le supplément du TV Times de 1976, publié à l’occasion du lancement des New Avengers, est bien plus qu’un simple guide de la nouvelle série. Ce numéro spécial plonge les lecteurs dans l’univers riche et captivant de The Avengers, retraçant l’évolution de la série depuis ses débuts en 1961. Avec des interviews exclusives et des archives précieuses, il offre un retour sur tous les partenaires de John Steed, de Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) à Emma Peel (Diana Rigg), sans oublier Tara King (Linda Thorson), chacune ayant marqué l’histoire de la télévision britannique.

Le supplément ne s’arrête pas là. Ian Hendry, qui jouait David Keel dans la première saison, y raconte en détail les débuts de l’aventure, partageant des souvenirs sur la manière dont The Avengers est devenue une série culte. Patrick Macnee, quant à lui, dévoile une facette plus intime de sa vie, révélant des anecdotes sur son parcours d’acteur et sur la façon dont son rôle de John Steed a façonné sa carrière et son image publique.

Illustré de photos de tournage et de souvenirs rares, ce supplément est un véritable trésor pour les fans de la série, combinant hommage au passé et célébration du renouveau avec The New Avengers. Ce document, en format PDF, permet de redécouvrir l’héritage d’une série qui a marqué l’histoire de la télévision, tout en introduisant ses nouvelles stars, Joanna Lumley (Purdey) et Gareth Hunt (Mike Gambit).

Introduction

I remember it all, right from that very first episode. It’s slightly surprising to think it was as far back as 1960 that I first became an Avenger. My goodness, how the time flies… This is a scrapbook of all those memories. All those startling Avenger girls: Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale… Diana Rigg as Emma Peel… Linda Thorson as Tara King. And now that incredible creature Joanna Lumley as Purdey. Did you know, I wonder, that Purdey is the name of one of the world’s most celebrated and perfect shotguns? Well, it’s all here. My souvenir history of the Avengers right up to and including The New Avengers. I tell my own life story too. Not at all as attractive as the pictures of the Avenger girls, of course… Yet it is still marvellous for me to recall that my Avenger involvement goes back over some of the most exciting years of television history.

Je me souviens de tout, depuis ce tout premier épisode. Il est presque surprenant de penser que c’était aussi loin qu’en 1960 que je suis devenu un Vengeur pour la première fois. Mon Dieu, comme le temps passe vite… Voici un album de souvenirs de tous ces moments. Toutes ces étonnantes femmes Avengers : Honor Blackman en Cathy Gale… Diana Rigg en Emma Peel… Linda Thorson en Tara King. Et maintenant, cette créature incroyable, Joanna Lumley en Purdey. Saviez-vous, je me demande, que Purdey est le nom de l’un des fusils de chasse les plus célèbres et les plus parfaits au monde ? Eh bien, tout est ici. Mon histoire souvenir des Avengers, jusqu’aux New Avengers. Je raconte aussi l’histoire de ma propre vie. Pas aussi attrayante que les photos des femmes Avengers, bien sûr… Et pourtant, c’est merveilleux pour moi de me rappeler que mon implication dans The Avengers remonte à certaines des années les plus passionnantes de l’histoire de la télévision. – Patrick Macnee

Article Patick Macnee tells his own life story par Patrick Macnee

It’s 15 years since I first played the suave, elegant, brolly-wielding Steed in The Avengers. Now, after a break of six years, I’m back in the new series, still leading a life of Champagne, fine foods, beautiful women; still dispatching nasty villains. The real me, however, is totally different, as I explain over the next few pages. My career, for example, started with five words…

This book is my personal scrapbook of The Avengers. The girls… and John Steed. But the real me is somewhat different from Steed. When I decided to write my life story, I thought the most interesting thing that ever happened to me was an almost throwaway appreciation by one of Britain’s foremost critics.

Nearly 30 years ago, Harold Hobson heaped praise on an unknown actor whose name wasn’t even in the programme. “He said only five words,” said Hobson, “yet for me it was the most striking moment in a performance in which such moments are not few.”

I contrived to get the wife of the late Dennis Price to write a letter for me to Hobson identifying this unknown actor. Hobson graciously reprinted part of his review and named the name—spelled correctly I may add—Patrick Macnee.

What I thought was important is that as recently as a few months ago, Hobson recalled the play (The White Devil), saying it was the one in which Macnee “made his name.” And thus I basked, and still do, in the glory of being almost unique in having a prime critic remembering a five-word performance 30 years later. The words? Simply: “This is not true, madam.”

I recall becoming so obsessed with my beautiful review that Robert Helpmann (now Sir Robert), who is a brilliant mimic, used to take the mickey out of me unmercifully…

Then it occurred to me that I have a lot more to say about myself than that, and the telling of a few of these things may be of help to others; others as young as I was, and as old as I am. I am 54 now, and looking back on my life, the big unhappy truth is that I gave up my wife and two young children to chase after money and fame. Later you will learn of the immense irony of how the money and so on actually happened. But the truth of the matter is that if I could do it all over again, I would change practically everything. I would not have left my first wife and our children. I was utterly wrong to do so and I live now, still regretting at leisure.

I came from a socially privileged background, one that has both helped and hindered me over the years. I was born in London on February 6, 1922, but my earliest memories are of where we lived at the racehorse training centre of Lambourn, in Berkshire. My father was a well-known trainer called “Shrimp” Macnee, so there was an early “horsey” influence on me. Not that horses were welcomed by me in the least; they were thrust upon me by my father. I recall the terror I went through when I was shoved on a very tall horse at the age of four. I didn’t mount a horse again until I was about 17. After that, I used to ride racehorses in training sessions with my father.

Virtually all my childhood was spent away from home in various public schools. At five, I was sent for three years to a kindergarten in Minehead, Somerset, followed by four years at Summerfields Preparatory School in Banbury, Oxfordshire.

It was at the latter I developed my interest in acting. I remember a master called Allington being a great influence in that direction. I actually did Henry V when I was eight years old. Eton followed in 1934, and even there the theatre was a strong subject.

But the only time I was home with my mother and father was during the school holidays. That was the pattern of my life for 12 years. On the credit side, I suppose one is immensely well-educated. On the other hand, I feel that not to see one’s parents for relatively long periods and to be put into a cloistered educational establishment away from home—in some cases quite far away from home—for a number of years, has a devastating effect on your later life.

You always feel you are being sent away, and you don’t have any sense of family whatsoever. Educationally, it’s very good, but psychologically it has its hazards. These days I find myself unable to reflect emotionally on my schooldays. I’ve thought about them often, but I can’t come up with an emotional response.

Michael Caine once complained he hadn’t had the advantages of a public school background. Do you feel, when you are a small child, that those advantages compensate for missing out on having a loving, united family? At least, as a small boy, he had his Mum whom he adored and his family and lots of shouting kids. And they were together in a loving situation. You are better off with love in a back street in Tooting or Clerkenwell than without it at Eton.

There’s another aspect, too. When you’re from Michael’s background, you’ve got more incentive to make a success. I was left with less sense of spirit and attack. When everything’s laid on, you become like I was, taking things too easily and too much for granted.

My “privileges” seemed to run out when I was about 17; the family seemed to have run out of money. So, although I was suited to a life of the well-bred, the money wasn’t there to live up to it.

I am supposed to be a descendant of Robin Hood. If he existed, Robin Hood was an Earl of Huntingdon. My grandmother was the daughter of Admiral Hastings, who was the brother of the Earl of Huntingdon. The Earls of Huntingdon are therefore my cousins on my mother’s side of the family.

My mother’s father was a Henry from Kildare, so there’s a chunk of Irish in me. My real first name is not Patrick at all, but Daniel. Because she was Irish, my mother always called me Patrick, and I have always retained her name for me.

Once, my son Rupert, fed up with Macnee being wrongly spelled, dropped the “Mac” altogether, but it completely backfired on him—everyone stuck a K in front of the “nee”.

My great-grandfather was Sir Daniel Macnee, the painter and President of the Scottish Royal Academy. His son was an engineer and one of the many who built the Forth Bridge. The family came from Stirling, a lowland, flinty-walled Scottish town, and later moved to Edinburgh, where they founded an engineering firm called Macnee and Son. My father broke away from the engineering side to take up training because he loved horses. Loved them? He was practically wedded to them for the rest of his life.

He was well over 40 when he married my mother, who must have then been in her early 20s.

« Shrimp » Macnee, as the name implies, was a small man. He had a marvelously wry sense of humor, but he devoted his life to horses rather than human beings. After I left Eton in July 1939, two months before the war started, I helped him in his work. I traveled around most of the racecourses with him—Cheltenham, Newmarket, Brighton, Goodwood—in his scarlet 1928 Chrysler two-seater. I even used to lead the horses around the ring. I had a great love for my father.

I don’t know exactly why we ran short of money; probably he just didn’t win enough races. I don’t think he was a gambler, but in my sort of family, you simply did not know about the family finances. It wasn’t the kind of thing one talked about.

My firm intention was to go into acting, and actress Margaret Rawlings, to whom I was introduced, told me to get into drama school. This was in 1940, and I won a scholarship to the Webber-Douglas Drama School in South Kensington, London, not because of any special merit but because the war had taken so many of the younger men.

I wasn’t there long. I answered a Stage advertisement and managed to get into repertory at Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire. Then I joined the actor-manager Harry Hanson in rep at the Princes Theatre, Bradford. In 1941, I joined a tour of Little Women, where I met my first wife, Barbara Douglas, who was also in the cast. We toured all over Britain, finally getting to the Westminster Theatre, London, where I had my first taste of a West End show.

My last work before going into the Royal Navy was as a general understudy at the Haymarket Theatre in The Doctor’s Dilemma, starring Vivien Leigh.

My naval career started off in a paddle steamer on the Firth of Forth. I did the usual officer training and became a sub-lieutenant. Then I trained for the coastal forces on motor gunboats, to which they fitted torpedo tubes, turning them into powerfully armed motor torpedo boats.

Next, I found myself in Dartmouth, a member of the famed Eighth Gunboat Flotilla. From then until D-Day in 1944, our stamping ground was the Channel—off Dartmouth and Dover, Felixstowe, all around there. I didn’t see much action, to be quite honest. We used to go out to sea and have “actions,” but they weren’t very successful.

The only time I missed going on a mission, the boat was sunk. I’d caught bronchitis and was in Chichester Hospital when it happened. I didn’t know about it until I’d reported back to base. A lot of the crew were killed, but the captain and my replacement survived. It was extraordinary. I had been on scores of trips before missing the one that proved fatal, yet the odd result was that it had no particular impression on me. We were immune to shocks in those days. We treated it all very casually, which is easier to do when you’re in your early 20s. I was only 25 when I came out of the Navy.

Then again, with our public school background, we were educated into war. I had been in Eton’s Officers’ Training Corps and we lined the route for King George V’s funeral in 1936, at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor—in uniform at the tender age of 15. We were conditioned to go to war.

I’d first met Barbara at the Webber-Douglas School, but we became close on the Little Women tour. She was the first woman I had seen naked.

We were brought up on romantic love rather than sexual love, influenced by the films of that time. I loved her, and I married her not just because we went to bed together. As I have said, if I could do it all over again, I would still be married to her. There is absolutely no question of that.

But we were not emotionally prepared for marriage or responsibility. I remember deeply resenting having children at an early stage because we had so little money. I was broke. Every day started by thinking of ways to rustle up enough money to get through it.

The pressures were so incredible that when they were released, the marriage ran into trouble. I really believe people ought to be educated in human emotions as they are in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I fully approve that people should live together before marriage. I didn’t even know the concept of that when I was young. Living together isn’t all sex, you know.

The Blitz, I remember, was a fearful time. I felt it was far safer in the Navy. In London, there was an underground club called The Music Box near the Cafe de Paris, which we used because we thought it safer. I was far more frightened during the Blitz than at any time in the Navy. I was lucky during my service; many of my friends were killed, but my experiences were few and I survived without much trouble.

There were so many ironies. There was a man called Francis Head, who was the bravest man I knew. He went through every conceivable naval action during the war, then got killed on the back of a motorbike while popping down to Felixstowe.

I find I am shaken by death and sudden loss much more now than I was then. Like the Royal Air Force pilots, one developed a veneer of “cool.” A person was killed, there was a gap, but you went on. It’s like doctors and patients—if you allowed yourself emotional involvement, you wouldn’t be able to carry on.

The “cool” sprung from the code of discipline, which partly came from my education. When you are sent away to a boarding school, you get used to hiding your feelings; you develop a protective covering. A show of emotion in those days was positively indecent.

We escaped a lot in drink, too. We all drank a great deal of alcohol. One wouldn’t have admitted it openly, but largely through fear, every night we didn’t go to sea, we got drunk. Gin was only 7s 6d (37½p) a bottle. Gin seemed to be a cure for everything; a naval doctor once prescribed gin when I had an attack of dysentery.

But it proved no remedy for one unpleasant malady. For no apparent reason, both my testicles swelled up. One went down after a few days, but the other defiantly stayed up. So, terrified, I reported sick. It wasn’t mumps, it wasn’t V.D. (I was still a virgin). Eventually, they diagnosed it as just one of those things that happened to otherwise healthy 21-year-olds. I read (upside down) what the doctor wrote in Latin and translated it thus: “If this man’s testicle doesn’t subside in a month, it will have to be cut off.” Not a pleasant prospect.

To my immense relief, it did go down, too much as a matter of fact. And to this day, one of them remains small, no bigger than a thumbnail. Yet I subsequently had two perfectly healthy children and a perfectly normal sex life. Looking back, the war went extremely smoothly for me; everything seemed to happen when I wasn’t there, like the night the boat sank. For a time, I actually felt guilty that I wasn’t getting killed or wounded or loaded with medals—a throwback, I suppose, to the influence of my schooldays when I was striving to get to the top of the class.

So somehow, when the war ended, I was still there, relatively unscathed. There simply hadn’t been a bomb or a bullet with my name on it, for which I remain deeply grateful.

I did no acting during my service days. The nearest I came to it was at the Royal Albert Hall at the World War One Remembrance Day service in 1945. I stood up beside the organ pipes in front of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and recited a poem by a quite aged admiral. It started, I remember: “Farewell white ensign, battle-scarred and torn…”

My wife was out front, and there was Ralph Reader and all his Boy Scouts fainting in droves. I was trying to concentrate on this turgid verse on the auspicious and fraught occasion when someone behind hissed at me that I should take my hat off.

I burst out in a sweat, made a few futile gestures, and finally settled for leaving the hat on. I haven’t the remotest memory why I was chosen for that ceremony—someone must have known I was an actor.

And back to acting I went, in a whole series of plays and reps. Our son Rupert was born in 1947, at the time we were doing the dress rehearsal of the play I’m so proud of, The White Devil. Daughter Jennie arrived three years later. Barbara never returned to work, which was a great shame because she was a very good actress indeed.

I always seemed to be working during those first post-war years, but I never seemed to have any money. In fact, I never did make any real money until The Avengers, which was 20 years after I’d started my career.

We lived in a little flat at World’s End, off New King’s Road, Chelsea. We got it in 1946 and paid £3 10s. a week. There was also a little rented cottage at Rye Harbour, Sussex, which sounds splendid, but it was a very simple place, really.

After the marvelous Hobson notice, I could have gone in as understudy to Paul Scofield in the Phoenix Theatre production of The Relapse. When he left the part, I may even have taken over from him. After that, Robert Helpmann wanted me to go on to Stratford.

I was talking recently to Michael Bates, who took more or less that same route. His top salary in those years of doing high-class drama was £8 a week. But instead of taking the “legit” route, I chose to go into films, doing lucrative extra and bit-part work. I was a member of the court in Laurence Olivier’s film of Hamlet, and one of Sir Percy Blakeney’s (David Niven’s) band of supporters in Baroness Orczy’s The Elusive Pimpernel; both paying £10 a day. I’d toyed with films before joining the Navy and even tested for the lead in Thursday’s Child, a part which got Stewart Granger off the ground.

After Hamlet, I did get a major role—in Mario Zampi’s The Fatal Night, but nothing came of the performance. I remember at the time that actors who were caught up in the war hated those who weren’t. They all seemed to get on.

And there were ironies. I remember trying to get a part in The Cruel Sea, saying that at least I’d been in the Navy. All I got was the old story: “You don’t look the naval type, old boy.”

Frankly, I didn’t really deserve any success. I had no faith in myself whatsoever, no drive, and I was held back by my own background, which implied that it was very bad form to be a vulgar success.

It wasn’t until later, when I went to Canada and life was more rough and tumble—you either succeeded or went under—that I adopted a different, more vigorous approach to succeeding.

I did a year’s rep at Windsor before answering the call to Canada. That was the happiest year of my life. I should never have left. People like Patrick Cargill and Geraldine McEwan stayed on and still made it.

I was in too much of a hurry in those days. I was trying to run before I could walk. I just didn’t know enough; I wasn’t nearly good enough for all that running. I felt I had to do everything in a hurry. I wish to God I hadn’t.

The most I ever earned at Windsor was £15 a week, and I was getting desperate for money. I even convinced myself that my wife and children would starve if I did not take up the marvelous offer that came from Canada in 1952.

I had a friend in Toronto, David Greene (who won an Emmy—American TV’s “Oscar”—this year for Rich Man, Poor Man) who’d got a job as one of the first directors for Canadian television. He was really an actor who had toured with me and was reduced to working in a glue factory in Toronto before he announced himself as a director.

He wired me at the Rye cottage, saying if I could get to Canada in 24 hours, I was in business. I borrowed some money from the man who owned the cottage and fled.

There I was, paid the absolute fortune of $100 a week. Half of it I sent home, and my own living costs weren’t high because I lived in the Y.M.C.A.

Incredibly, it seemed, I became a star almost immediately. I got on well with David (I was the first actor he’d directed!) and I had two series, one after the other: The Moonstone and an adaptation of a Canadian novel. One of my support players was Christopher Plummer.

Suddenly I was a big fish in a very small pool, small because the television transmitter reached only around the Toronto area, so I was only famous in the city. But for all that, it went completely to my head, and I felt quite ashamed that there I was, a star—and still living in the Y.M.C.A.

I was more or less based in Canada for the next eight years. We did all of Shakespeare and Christopher Fry on radio and television. It was the golden period of Canadian expression. Some of the people who were part of it became famous—director Norman Jewison (Fiddler on the Roof, In the Heat of the Night), Lorne Greene, Barry Morse, and Chris Plummer, among others.

I started to get around a bit. I toured America, spent a year in New York; I even came back and played the Old Vic. But I didn’t come back often enough. In 1955, Barbara said she wanted to marry someone else.

I had first met Barbara at 19 and stayed faithful to her until I was 29. It sounds odd in the light of today’s thinking, but it is totally true. It was a case of reverting to discipline again, I suppose. That public school training certainly nurtured endurance in every sphere.

Reluctantly, I agreed to give Barbara a divorce. Actually, she didn’t remarry until nine years later. But ever since, we have remained close.

At the time, I tried to wipe my memory clean of all thoughts of my wife and children. I couldn’t stand the reality of it. I couldn’t watch a film with children in it without breaking down. My guilt at leaving the children when they were five and three was devastating. They have since said it was obvious I had to go to Canada. I repeat, I was wrong. I should have stayed and seen it out with them.

The great irony of my life is that if I had not gone, I would not have met the man who, in later years, was to offer me the part of Steed in The Avengers, and thus a measure of stardom.

I’d had a reasonably successful career for eight years in Canada, the United States, and other countries. But nothing world-shattering happened for me, and when I returned to England in 1960, I had only $400. I gave up acting—or rather, it gave up on me—so I was happy to take the job of producing the Sir Winston Churchill TV documentary The Valiant Years. I was getting a princely £50 a week and had John Schlesinger as my director.

I was quite enjoying making the series, but I desperately needed to earn more money, so I dropped a line to the man I’d met in Canada, Sydney Newman, who was now an executive in British television. I only wanted some kind of acting job for a few weeks over the Christmas period. He said they had Ian Hendry doing a series which was originally called Police Surgeon. He was the star, and they wanted a sidekick for him for a few months, and perhaps I might like to play that role. Oh, and one other thing, the title of the show was being changed to The Avengers. The basic storyline was that Hendry’s girlfriend gets gunned down in the street, and he takes up the cudgels against the world’s villains as an Avenger.

The girl who got killed was Catherine Woodville, and she was to become my second wife. But it didn’t happen right away. I didn’t meet her properly until 1962. We had a great deal in common and we lived together until 1965 when we married. Idiotically, almost immediately after the marriage, our relationship started to collapse. A few months later, she went to California, where she later remarried and has stayed ever since. She’s a brilliant horsewoman and wins many events out there.

While we were together, we were very close; she opened my eyes in so many ways to a whole new attitude to life. She was keen on health foods and the proper treatment of one’s body. My daughter Jennie was asthmatic, and it was largely through Kate’s influence on proper foods and climate (I sent Jennie to California) that the asthma virtually cleared.

At the time, I was quite a heavy drinker, which wasn’t surprising as I was brought up in alcoholic surroundings. It seems all the people in the horsey world drink a lot, and what with the Navy, and gin at 7s.6d. (37 1/2 p) a bottle, I had become a thoroughly confirmed tippler.

But Kate made me wonder what life would be like if one lived a much purer, closer-to-nature sort of existence. That thought helped me later—when I was having psychiatric help—to get rid of smoking and virtually give up drinking. As a younger man, I was very unfeeling towards others, but Kate helped me develop more concern for my fellow man.

You may ask why we broke up, especially so soon after the marriage. To my mind, it was a classic example of September marrying June. In my case, I think it’s wrong to marry someone 16 years younger than yourself.

I was under psychiatric treatment in Los Angeles, on and off, for three years until 1969. It transpired that I was only getting satisfaction out of acting as compensation for highly unsatisfactory relationships in my private life. But the most extraordinary thing about that treatment was the smoking.

It was pointed out to me that I had to discover why I was doing something which was basically so destructive to myself. The analysis proved an expert job

It was pointed out to me that I had to discover why I was doing something that was basically so destructive to myself. The analysis proved to be an expert job of detective work. The trail led to the cause being someone I hated, who had died of cancer of the throat through smoking heavily throughout their life. I hated that person because of some imagined injustice when I was eight years old. When that person died, I felt so guilty over my hatred that I subconsciously took on the affliction of over-smoking.

In the consulting room, the person’s name was finally dragged from me in a howling primeval shriek. The entire repression was released. I haven’t smoked from that moment onward, and I was an 80-a-day man.

The drinking was less of a problem. It was explained how, all my life, it had been an unnatural cissy thing not to drink. Yet the people I loved and respected did not feel that it was unmanly not to drink. I suddenly no longer felt the need to drink to win acceptance. The self-destructive habits vanished. I was free.

Now I am concentrating my mind on shedding two stone in weight. I am 14 stone, and I should be 12. But I must slim, and I will slim. Perhaps as The New Avengers series progresses, you may notice a visible shrinkage of Steed…

To be quite honest, my weight problem might be slightly difficult to tackle because it is really the only self-destructive thing I have left—and we all have a certain psychological need to abuse ourselves in some way.

Yet, if you confronted yourself with the bald statement that you were trying to kill yourself, you would consider yourself mad. Odd, isn’t it?

Take alcohol, for example. I wonder what the real statistics are for the number of people in hospital with alcohol-related diseases—or diseases aggravated and even brought on by simply drinking too much? Alcohol is a corrosive poison. My second wife put it this way: “You wouldn’t wash your eyes in whisky, would you? Well, your stomach isn’t as strong as your eyeballs.” If you look at it that way, it makes you think…

I suppose all this overeating and drinking doesn’t matter so much when you’re younger. But it’s surprising how quickly it catches up with you as the years go by. I have no desire to go back to being young again, but I do want to retain my fitness. So I’m a great advocate of getting back to the natural things in life. Goodness, the Vietnamese can run all through the night on a diet of berries and nuts!

Things like cooked meats are simply not good for you (there are other, better sources of protein). They just hang about the stomach. The body is meant to function, not just dangle heavily on your bones.

Having said this, I must tell you one story that knocks all my theories about keeping fit with health foods and so on into a cocked hat. I recently had some arthritic and tension problems with my legs. Mike Collins, the special effects man who makes the explosions in The New Avengers, gave me a copper band to wear around my ankle. I told him I didn’t believe in witchcraft. It was all a bit of a joke, really, but I put it on, and I’ve had no trouble since. Well, the things these special effects men can do… I suppose they’re witchdoctors anyway.

Please don’t get the impression, by the way, that I am some kind of health fetishist. I am not. There was a time, not so long ago, when I used to refer jovially to myself as being an exponent of the “ruined look.” Some people like to feel that a sophisticated decadence is romantic, and I was one of them. My second wife made me see otherwise; life without excessive indulgences not only makes you feel better, but it makes you a fuller, happier, and, I would go so far as to say, a much more considerate person.

It also sharpens your sense of humor, which got me into trouble in America recently. I was being asked some totally inane questions about my Scottish heritage, and out of capriciousness, I referred to the Scots crossing the Border and lopping the heads off the dreadful English. The journalist concerned completely missed the point and wrote an article quoting me as attacking the English. The demented creature didn’t realize I was talking about 400 years ago.

The outcome was that many of my friends turned their backs on me, and one eminent actor, who lives close to me in Palm Springs, was heard to say he could never visit me again.

Fortunately, the record was put straight by an English journalist, Dermot Purgavie, who interviewed me in New York. I told him my daughter had written to say my reported remarks had so upset and worried my mother that she was frightened to go out on the streets; she was so ashamed.

When I was offered the supporting role in The Avengers, initially for three months, the most important thing to me was the size of the pay packet: £150 a week—more than I’d ever earned. (Later, I joined in an Equity strike against ITV for double pay for everyone. It lasted five months, and at the end, my agent said: “Right, now you can pay Patrick £300.” He was told I would get £155, and if I didn’t like it, I could go elsewhere. So much for the strike.)

Ian Hendry was in The Avengers for the first nine months of its life. He was the guiding light, the inventive genius. We clicked immediately. With his originality and a little stimulus from myself, we created a style of show that I believe was ahead of its time.

He took the ordinary cops-and-robbers theme and turned it upside down. For a long while, it wasn’t really made clear whether Steed was a goodie or a baddie. And director Peter Hammond gave it immense imagination. He used a stylised, Germanic shooting style that gave a strange, odd, Fritz Lang effect. When Ian went, Sydney Newman came up with the idea of introducing a woman. But not an ordinary woman. Up to that time in such TV series, women were either wives, secretaries, or sex objects, but not women who used their minds, made decisions, or took part in the action.

So Sydney went a step further. He created a character called Cathy Gale, inspired by a mixture of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead and the late Margaret Bourke-White, who was a great photographer for America’s Life magazine.

The end product was Honor Blackman emerging, hurling men over her shoulders. She very cleverly chose to play the whole thing as a comic strip (to me, The Avengers is comic strip at its best). She played it with the authority of women’s equality, and she was the first person to do it in a popular medium.

Doing The Avengers was hard work but great creative fun. We seemed to have hardly any scenery, and there were all sorts of primitive difficulties in the early days. But that may have been an advantage. I think those sorts of problems provoke the most interesting work, especially when you are also fighting against accepted habit patterns for cops-and-robbers-type television series.

I base Steed on a combination of Leslie Howard’s Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel, a performance by Ralph Richardson in a 1936 film called Q Planes—and on my father.

Steed, of course, has a quite splendid wardrobe, even better in The New Avengers than in the old. Yet the joke is, when I started as an Avenger, my entire personal wardrobe consisted of one rather shabby blue serge suit. But Steed had at least £500 worth of clothes and always looked immaculate.

I design all my own Avenger suits. Pop music boys like Herman (of Herman’s Hermits)—Peter Noone, as he’s now known—admitted in print getting the idea of velvet collars from Steed. For those sartorially interested, most collars are made as a contrast to the suit’s material. I use ladies’ velvet of a kind that could almost be the same material as the suit. It molds and complements the suit. There are no breast pockets and only one button to get the best molding of the chest. I also have a deliberately low waist, and the finished effect is utmost simplicity in clothing but with an individual style. I have never allowed it to be merchandised, but I’m not surprised it has been copied from time to time.

In fact, my own taste in clothing in my private life is positively beachcomberish. I usually wear an old pair of shorts and a safari jacket. Most of my life is spent in hot climates, so I don’t need much in the way of clothes. And I am certainly not going to add to my rather meager wardrobe—at least until I’ve lost those unwanted two stones. Then there will be a slim-line Steed.

In developing him as a character, I considered one of the most important facets was to give him good manners. Again, that fitted my background; it was manners to the exclusion of all, even to a fault. You did not complain about the food, you opened doors for ladies. You could bash someone over the head if you felt like it, but you always observed the social proprieties.

When you put a man like that alongside an emancipated woman, the effect can be quite amusing. The “marriage” of Steed and Cathy worked. They had what I like to think was a sexual elegance. There was always the suggestion that their relationship went further, sexually, than was shown on screen. But it was suggested and implied—never revealed.

I was the one who suggested to Honor Blackman that she dress Cathy Gale in black leather, using the expression “kinky.” It came to mind because once, in New York, I saw actress Viveca Lindfors make an entrance dressed completely in black leather. It delineated her body and made her look quite sensational.

It was not until later I discovered the whole skin-and-leather fetish was a basic primitive erotic. But at the time I made the suggestion to Honor, I honestly did not know I was hitting on a well-known subterranean deviation.

I had never met Honor before she joined The Avengers. I recall vividly being struck by her incredible beauty. And she has a very secret thing, an occasional flash of vulnerability that makes her fascinating to men.

Honor left to become a James Bond girl in Goldfinger, and Diana Rigg replaced her in January 1965. She reminded me very much of my first wife, Barbara, and we have always had a very close, fond friendship. She was wonderful to work with, and we shared a mutual obsession for detail. We deliberately set out to contrive a new and different relationship from the one I had shared with Cathy Gale.

We used a sort of shorthand in our communication. And we evolved a style of playing two-handed scenes for comedy. We put Emma and Steed in routine situations, like having a meal or playing a game of chess. They would casually discuss some mastermind’s plan to rule the world at the same time as serving the soup.

We took the sexual relationship for granted. By the mid-Sixties, the Pill was part of life, so we took it for granted that Emma and Steed slept together, but simply didn’t dwell on it. We treated sex as naturally as we would eating. For years now, I’ve been asked if Steed slept with Cathy Gale and Emma Peel: now you know.

Because we didn’t have to bother about sex, we could get on with the plot. In fact, in my private life, I find that in one’s 50s, the sex urge is somewhat diminished. This, I think, is rather helpful. One doesn’t have to spend all one’s time chasing after the opposite sex, so the time and energy involved can be devoted to other things.

Linda Thorson came into the show in the autumn of 1967. We did 30 episodes through until 1969. She played Tara King, a veritable sex bomb of an agent. She certainly devastated me with her strong tone of sexuality. As I have said, with the previous two girls, sex was as normal as eating a meal. To continue the comparison, Linda played Tara King like an 18-course banquet…

Today, seven years on, I feel that The New Avengers has a fresh validity; the timing is perfect for a whole new series. But if I had been asked at any time in the past seven years to do it, I can assure you I would have refused.

For me, a most exciting thing about the old Avengers is its recent apparent discovery by American youth. It has become a cult thing in the colleges. There are 83 episodes of the series with Diana and Linda currently showing in some American city every day of the week.

From this, you will assume I must be vastly wealthy from the repeat fees. Not so. Down in the small print on the contract, there’s a clause that says no repeat fees will be paid unless it is shown in more than 20 places at the same time. This time, just in case, I’ve looked very closely at the small print…

In fact, we never picked up the usual fringe benefits from The Avengers. Pat Phoenix once told me that a lot of money could be earned from opening supermarkets and so on, but I never made any money that way. I was working seven days a week, for a start. And for one three-month period, I made two one-hour episodes a week. I didn’t have the time to open a bottle of wine, much less open a supermarket.

I have never been a good businessman. My politics are primarily to the Left, and I subscribe to the view that national wealth should be shared more wisely than in the past. It’s no use labeling me as a hypocrite; I’ve only lived outside this country because it was easier to get work elsewhere, and I’ve lived abroad since 1952—a very long time before it was a tax advantage to do so.

I have never been a great supporter of capitalism, and I’ve never invested in anything except my children’s education. I sent Rupert to public school and later to university. Jennie was also well educated, so in some small way, I’ve been able to alleviate the guilt I have felt for leaving them when they were young.

It’s only lately that I’ve gone in for a few insurance policies. My only real possession is a small bungalow with a small plot of garden in Palm Springs, California. I don’t have a sense of ownership or need for it. Despite my upbringing, I would hate to have servants. I have a daily woman who comes in now and again and cleans up, but the thought of employing people to do things appalls me.

Although I live alone, I am by no means a “loner.” I have a regular girlfriend, and I enjoy the company and conversation of people; and I am longing for my children to make me a grandfather. I like to live alone simply because I always wake in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep when there’s someone else there.

Two days after I finished the final episode of The Avengers in 1969, I left for California and settled in a little apartment. Then I worked on films in Cyprus and Malta and toured Australia and New Zealand in The Secretary Bird.

At first, I got bad reviews in Sydney for the play, and it worried me. But I worked hard, and when we went to Melbourne the following year, it was an enormous success. Then I was asked to go to London to take over from Anthony Quayle in Sleuth. I made the excuse that I was otherwise committed.

The truth is I was too scared to play in the West End in such a role. Even with all my experience, I didn’t feel up to it, especially after all those years working in television.

But after two years, I felt ready again, successfully played in Sleuth, and enjoyed a 16-month run on Broadway.

I believe Sleuth was my personal turning point as an actor. I think it made me stronger. For the first time in years, I realized I could do more than lift a bowler and dash about as Steed.

For all that, I don’t like to underestimate Steed—the character is much more difficult than it appears.

I’ve concentrated almost entirely on the stage for the past seven years, but I’ve “guested” in a few TV series: Columbo, The Virginian, and Alias Smith and Jones. It was while doing TV that I worked with Faye Dunaway—definitely one of my favorite actresses.

The New Avengers sort of sneaked up on me. Last year, I was in a play at Chichester Festival, and on the very last day, I had to travel to Elstree Studios, Hertfordshire, to do a Champagne commercial for French television. It was an Avenger-style commercial, mainly featuring Linda Thorson (who’s a big name in France), and I was only there as a kind of reminder of The Avengers. They kept on at me to do my lines in French, which I find difficult. Time was getting late, and I had a 100-mile drive to catch the curtain at Chichester. I was just dashing out of the door when a tall Frenchman called Rudolf Roffi asked me if I’d like to do The Avengers again. I rushed past him saying: “I certainly can’t do it in French.”

I forgot all about it until six weeks later when Brian Clemens rang me at the Schubert Theatre in Chicago, where I was playing in Absurd Person Singular. He said it was no joke—The Avengers was going to be done again, and they wanted me in it. I said send me a script. They never did. I didn’t see a script until I came back to Britain. My daughter Jennie was very suspicious at first. She said there must be some kind of catch.

But when I did get some scripts, I realized they were better than ever before. And there we were, doing it. Now it’s almost as if I’ve never been away.

I’m the only survivor of the original Avengers cast, and I’ve been in this business too long to wonder whether or not The New Avengers will be a success. The new Avenger girl, Joanna Lumley, and her partner, Gareth Hunt, are absolutely wonderful. They are young, fresh, new—and both have strong attitudes towards their roles.

Because I’m much older now, my own approach as Steed is different; you may find it more relaxed. The last time I desperately needed the extra money, and I had been out of acting for many months.

My daughter Jennie, now 26, is a professional cook and caterer in Los Angeles, California. Rupert, 29, is a TV producer and director in Toronto. My first wife, Barbara, whose second husband, Dr. Graham Foulds, has just died, lives in Menorca.

Now I don’t need to earn the money; my needs are small. I can work all over the world at something or the other in films, TV, and theatre. I’ve still got my legs, my voice, and my memory.

New Avenger Gareth Hunt is a fellow Aquarian. A man full of innovative energy; a fine actor from the National Theatre, but also a man who has had wide experience, gained in naval service, all over the world. Joanna is Joanna. A highly individual person. I love her. She just radiates—whether with fire and brimstone early in the morning when confronted with yet another irritating inadequacy—or conversely, with deep compassion and understanding of other people’s problems, at all times of the day. Between them, they should generally create a truly New Avengers. The series is being made by an independent new company called The Avengers (Film and TV) Enterprises Ltd.

The New Avengers storylines are great, and the action is terrific. Much of the recent TV I’ve seen seems sadly lacking in high-powered action. I think what we’ve got this time is a thriller show with comic undertones. Anyway, you’ll soon let us know if it’s any good.

As for the future, well, even if the show does click, I’m not too sure I ought to stay on too long as Steed. You can’t have an arthritic secret agent (although I hope I’m a long way off that condition). I was quoted once in an Australian magazine as saying I wanted to spend my remaining years vibrant, healthy, and sexual. Well, who doesn’t?

I have said I have simple needs, including those of the spirit. I have an uncomplicated belief in God, but I distrust institutionalized religions. They have been responsible for more war, devastation, inquisitions, and downright cruelty than almost any other single force. They also control too much of the world’s wealth and guide far too many of the world’s people. But my own belief in the Almighty is simple and, like the best thing in religion, within myself.

Now, as my autumn approaches, I like to feel I’m a better person than I once was; that I’m nicer to people; that I’m less vigorously competitive.

Happy? Content? Satisfied? No, they are all words I don’t like. Satisfaction implies self-satisfaction; happiness suggests sloth and self-indulgence; content always makes me think of someone who’s had too much to eat.

No, I like curiosity, particularly intellectual curiosity. Out of fear and nerves as a young man, I always strove to give the impression I knew a great deal more about life than I did. Now I know better, and thus I am gaining more insight into the broadness of life. It disturbs me to see people in such a rush. So many don’t bother to stop and notice anything, least of all each other.

When I was younger, I was so neurotically blinkered by my own worries and self-interest that I didn’t see anything going on around me.

Now I find the very moments of time—and people—very precious. And if you conclude that this is maturity, then it’s been a hell of a long time coming.