Homicide and Old Lace

It is an episode where the writers were all sick so they recap all the previous episodes. So boring and feel so cheated I wrote my first review on IMDB. Dreadful.

For his birthday, Mother visits his Aunts Harriet and Georgina, he recounts a recent case, in which Steed and Tara take on a group of art thieves.

Looking at one or two reviews, and hearing from fans of the show, I was expecting this to be awful, I can understand why it's not universally loved, but I have to admit, I didn't mind it.

Doctor Who had Shada, The Avengers had The Great, Great Britain crime, an episode that for one reason and another wasn't made. I can understand there were probably pressures on the producers to get episodes transmitted on time, so you can't blame them for trying to salvage the material.

You can see where they were trying to go with Tara at the time, but she wasn't Gale or Peel, I understand why there were frustrations with her character's early episodes.

Obviously it would have been better if it had been completed in its original format, but what was cobbled together here was actually quite fun. Patrick Newell's Mother was entertaining enough, but Joyce Carey and Mary Merrall are great value as the crazy Aunts.

I preferred it to Whoever shot George and Have guns, will haggle.

6/10.

In American TV series there is a tradition that each season has precisely one episode (sometimes referred to as a clip show episode) that consists almost completely of clips from earlier episodes. Typically this is done by making two or more protagonists reminisce about their exploits. As a 1960s British TV series, The Avengers thankfully does not follow this tradition. However, after a change of production teams one of the earliest Tara King episodes produced was reworked by the new team into something that has pretty much the same feel, even though there is only a small number of scenes taken from earlier episodes and most of the clips are original. (To the original episode that is, which unfortunately we can't watch instead.)

This episode is a bit of a counterexample to the principle that the quality of an experience is determined by the beginning, the end, its best moment, and its worst moment:

The beginning, a spoof of Arsénico y encaje (1944), is extremely strong. The end, in which Steed is irritated by the fact that Mother's assistant never speaks, and tries to do something about it, is slightly better than the average Steed/King ending. The problem is that the beginning is also the high point, and is followed immediately by the low point: the set-up of the boring framework in which Mother tells the original story.

Despite these problems, I did enjoy this episode because there is enough of the original version left to be genuinely interesting. It's framed to make it ridiculous, but personally I don't mind. Ever since the days of Tara King's predecessor Mrs. Peel, the series has never taken itself very seriously anyway. I assume I would have enjoyed the original version even more, but apparently it is lost. (To be honest, the material that didn't make it into the clip show may have been awful; it seems unlikely, but we just don't know.)

The story told in the clip show concerns Intercrime, and is a continuation of Intercrime (1963), an episode of the era before the series was sold to the US, featuring Mrs. Peel's predecessor Mrs. Gale.

"Homicide and Old Lace" may have arrived at the very end of the original series (Jan. 1969), but it was conceived in the fall of 1967, as one of the earliest Tara King episodes (witness her blonde wig, wisely discarded but not soon enough). Scripted as a sequel to the excellent Cathy Gale episode "Intercrime," this entry features the new boss, Dunbar (Keith Baxter, perhaps the single dullest villain of the entire series), leading what he describes as the crime of the century, namely the theft of priceless art treasures from under the nose of security man Colonel Corf (Gerald Harper, "Death Dispatch" and "The Hour That Never Was"). The final result is a total mishmash, half comprised of endless new footage of Patrick Newell's Mother, who never appeared in the original version titled "The Great Great Britain Crime," coupled with scenes from Emma Peel episodes, "The Bird Who Knew Too Much," "Murdersville," "The Fear Merchants," and Christopher Lee's cottage battle from "Never, Never Say Die." All of Tara's footage was shot before "The Forget-Me-Knot," with Steed making two token appearances in new scenes opposite Mother. Also featuring Mary Merrall ("The Girl from Auntie"), Donald Pickering ("The Winged Avenger"), Bari Jonson ("The Yellow Needle"), Bryan Mosley ("The Gravediggers"), and Anne Rutter ("Super Secret Cypher Snatch"). Even the producers showed their contempt for it by inserting ridiculous silent film piano music at random, creating an utterly bizarre effect that does not go unnoticed (unthinkable during the Emma Peel era). Is it the worst episode? I've always believed so, and found my father in agreement (Among many contenders, Cathy Gale's worst was "Conspiracy of Silence").

You know you're in trouble when you're past the 9-minute mark and you haven't seen Steed or Tara since the credits. The dread increases when it becomes apparent that the star of the episode is Mother, whose very presence is one of the biggest blots on season seven. Apparently, the producers were trying to salvage footage from an episode that was shot and too terrible to use, so they chopped it to bits (along with scenes from other old episodes) and had Mother talk over it, with occasional accompaniment from Laurie Johnson's tack piano. Despite the humorous bits by Mother's old aunties, this script is dead in the water and a mess to follow with any sense of logic. I guess it was a budget-saver, but it was so embarrassing that they didn't air it until the show was on its last legs.