Posted in: TV | Tagged: Cathy Gale, chris claremont, diana rigg, Emma Peel, Hellfire Club, honor blackman, John Steed, Patrick McNee, the avengers, x-men

The Avengers: Honoring Diana Rigg's Debut Season as Emma Peel

We look back at Diana Rigg's first season as The Avengers' Emma Peel, still one of the most influential shows and action heroines of all time.

The Avengers, the classic comedy oddball crime caper series, became the classic show fans know and love with the entrance of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in 1965. It was in her first season, the fifth season of the show, that the show came into focus. Patrick Macnee's John Steed finally became the debonair English Gentleman in the bowler hat, the Saville Row suit, and the all-purpose brolly this season from the moment he stepped into Emma Peel's flat. He still had that lecherous smarminess he had in earlier seasons, but he was no longer the hardboiled spiv he was in his first three seasons. Steed and Mrs. Peel became the archetypal unflappable crime-fighting couple that all overs have copied ever since.

The first scene between Rigg and Macnee sets the tone for the series that's immediately different from previous seasons. There's the playful sparring, the double entendre in their lines, and most of all, the sense of gleeful mischief that Rigg matches with Macnee where Blackman was previously all business, even when she began to loosen up in her last season. With the new season, the show took on a lighter comic tone in contrast to the darker hardboiled tone of the previous seasons.

The Avengers' Shift to Surreal Satire

Emma Peel's first season is considered a classic show for its shift to a surreal satire of British institutions. A seaside holiday location is a secret hideout full of enemy spies. A training school for butlers and maids is really a training ground for undercover assassins. A chic department store hides a hotbed of crime and murder. An exclusive club for posh people is a secret society for kink and murder. With plots like these, The Avengers took the theme from previous seasons of the dark secrets in post-War Britain to odder, more surreal, and satirical heights. The season is unique for being the last time the show spoofed British institutions. The next seasons, shot in colour, became more generalized in their Swinging Sixties plots and became less specifically British in their cultural detail. Emma Peel also switched from the black leather catsuits established by Honor Blackman's Cathy Gale to softer designer tracksuits designed by Pierre Cardin.

That first season of The Avengers continues to be hugely influential. Chris Claremont directly lifted from the secret society episode "A Touch of Brimstone" to create the Hellfire Club in the X-Men comics, the White Queen and the Black Queen's fetish corset directly taken from Emma Peel's costume in that episode.

What distinguished The Avengers was always Diana Rigg's air of unflappable mischief. She always had that twinkle in her eye that she was inviting us to share a joke. This carried over even late in her career when she played Lady Oleanna Tyrell in Game of Thrones – of course, she would be the one to kill Joffrey. Everyone always underestimated Diana Rigg. Nobody ever saw her coming till it was too late.

Diana Rigg's first season of The Avengers is streaming on Prime.

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