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| False Witness: a rainy day in July 1968 aboard Mother's omnibus |
People watch vintage television for many reasons, most of them nostalgic: rekindling memories from childhood, or simply wallowing in the sight of street scenes, cars and fashions from half a century ago. That’s certainly the case with a series like The Avengers. But on recently revisiting series 6, the Tara King era, I found myself noticing something I’d never been aware of before. The episode in question was False Witness, and a sequence involving a visit to Mother (Patrick Newell), whose office on this occasion was installed on the top deck of a bus. Through the windows, we can see wind-lashed trees, and the panes are spattered with raindrops (the scenes were shot for real on board an actual bus out on the street, as opposed to being faked in a studio). External shots show a still more grim prospect of leaden skies threatening rain, while fully-leaved trees sway in what looks to be a brisk wind. I saw these scenes and I thought to myself: ‘I remember that day…’
Prior to this minor moment of revelation, it had never occurred to me to look at a TV series (or, indeed a film) as a meterological record. On the whole, film makers on location will wait for dry days, preferably with some reasonable spells of sunshine, although in England, even in summer, that’s far from being a guarantee. Dry weather on film lends a kind of meterological homogeneity to many filmed productions, particularly those of the pre-digital era. Conversely, when wet weather was required, it was seldom executed convincingly: scenes in the 1963 Brit-com Father Came Too depict a deluge shot through with the brilliant sunlight of a peerless summer day.
The more I looked at this specific Avengers series, the more I came to realise how certain episodes spoke to me of a dull, cloudy, thundery summer that I remembered vividly from childhood: the summer of 1968.
The Met Office Monthly Weather Reports paint a picture that is entirely consistent with what I recall of that year – May: Mostly cold and cloudy; June: Fine mid-month, otherwise unsettled; July and August: Dull and wet in the south-east. Using these as a starting point, I decided to look at the production dates for series 6 of The Avengers and see how these corresponded to the meterological records for the summer of 1968.
This first Tara King series was made in two production blocks, 6A and 6B, and it’s 6B that’s of interest here, beginning as it did on 1 April 1968, and running all the way through to March 1969. The episodes that interested me were: You’ll Catch Your Death/ 24 May; Super Secret Cypher Snatch/ 14 June; False Witness/ 11 July; Noon Doomsday/ 30 June; They Keep Killing Steed/ 29 August. In all of these episodes, there are a number of scenes that capture dreary, overcast conditions, days where there was sufficient light to allow for filming outdoors, but with a curious, shadowless quality to the light. Such scenes are often intercut with brighter, sunnier conditions, creating a kind of climatic discontinuity, most notably in Noon Doomsday, where T.P. McKenna and Ray Brookes while away the hours before their meeting with Steed’s would-be assassin in an abandoned railway station: one minute, it’s overcast – the next, bright sunshine. The production date, 30 June, can presumably be taken as the beginning of filming on this episode, which would have run into early July. Warm weather on the 30th broke down overnight with the arrival of thunderstorms. These spread into all parts on the 2nd and 3rd which would have made location filming impossible. The overcast skies seen throughout most of this episode are typical of the kind of conditions preceding and following any large-scale thundery breakdown, and it’s likely that most of the location work was achieved on the 30th, with the remainder completed when settled conditions returned, briefly, on the 6th (‘a fairly sunny day’ according to the Met. Office).
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| False Witness: a typically cloudy day on location from The Avengers series 6 |
The weather at this point in July 1968 became notably stormy, with ‘darkness’ being reported in parts of the North East as a so-called ‘Spanish Plume’ (a lofted column of warm air originating on the Iberian peninsula) carried Saharan dust far into the atmosphere. The dust assisted the formation of notably dense thunderclouds, in a system stretching northwards from the Midlands, and beneath the storm a kind of deep twilight prevailed. I remember it with surprising clarity: the storm came almost without warning, during afternoon playtime at school, and the light rapidly dwindled to that of a late winter afternoon as we waited for the teachers to bring us indoors. The rest of the summer kept up the same stormy, cool and cloudy scenario, illustrated for me most vividly in False Witness. By the time that episode entered production on 11 July, the cloudy, thundery conditions were set in, and there evidently wasn’t time to wait for the weather to clear.
Equally typical of that dull, oppressive summer is the episode that went before the cameras on 29 August, They Keep Killing Steed. Like much of series 6, the location work has a notably different look from what had been established during the Emma Peel era. Series 4 and 5 had stuck fairly rigidly to a bucolic background, creating an almost mythical version of southern England that some like to call ‘Avengerland’. By contrast (deliberate, one assumes), the Tara King episodes exhibit more variety of setting, with scenes shot in more urban surroundings (most notably The Morning After). In this case, Ye Olde Sun Hotel in Northaw, Hertfordshire, was chosen as the scene for a peace conference, and all the location work shot here shares the same oppressive, shadowless quality, looking, as was indeed the case, as if a thunderstorm were imminent. The Met Office records August and September 1968 as dull months, with many parts of south-east England receiving only 60-70% of their expected sunshine. Typical English summer holiday weather, in fact. The episode’s tag scene wherein Steed and Tara sun themselves under UV lamps indoors while thunder rumbles without might almost have been an in-joke, considering how the production schedule must have been distupted by thunderstorms.
For anyone interested in weather records, the summer ‘68 production block of The Avengers provides a unique glimpse of a notably dismal spell of English weather. Later in the Tara King era, weather would provide an episode in its own right, in the form of Fog – an effect realised, inevitably, in the studio, with typically unconvicing results (film makers have never managed to create convincing fog – it always swirls like smoke, while the real thing simply hangs in the air). But the dreary, cloudy, rain-threatened days captured in so many of that summer's episodes were the real thing.
For a series so renowned as an icon of Britishness, it’s somehow comforting to know that The Avengers has, in its own small way, captured forever that quintessentially English phenomenon – a rainy summer.