SO, I feel a little announcement is in order. After almost 20 years digging away in the dustiest corners of movie and television history, unearthing as many undervalued and often unloved gems as humanly possible, this is to be my final Cult Movies column for the Irish News.
I have to say it’s been a privilege trawling through the less appreciated pages of pop culture with you and I want to thank everyone who’s commented on and corresponded about the column down the last couple of decades. As one-time football hard man turned occasional Thespian Vinnie Jones says in Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, “it’s been emotional”.
This is my final Cult Movies column for the Irish News - it’s been a privilege trawling through the less appreciated pages of pop culture with you
I won’t be disappearing from the paper’s pages completely and I won’t stop watching the small but perfectly formed cult classics and curios that we’ve celebrated week in and week out - it’s not easy to break the habits of a lifetime, after all - but I will stop writing about them as of today.
I do however have something rather special for you in this last missive from the sometimes murky but always magical world of cult.
The Avengers was a truly remarkable slice of spy series hokum. An intelligent, knowing and often tongue in cheek take on the standard TV spy drama, it ran on ITV from 1961 to 1969 but arguably reached its creative peak with its fourth season in 1965. That’s when it moved from videotape to film and also when the lead character of John Steed, played throughout the decade by the effortlessly stylish Patrick Macnee, was joined in his task of avenging crime by the often leather-clad and always high-kicking Mrs Emma Peel, played so beautifully by Dame Diana Rigg in what was her break through role on British television.
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Together, they ‘avenged’ evermore outrageous crimes against the State with genuine panache and delivered a true cult classic in the process.
The 26 episodes of season four made with the sparky and enigmatic Steed and Mrs Peel front and centre remain the high watermark of the entire series. Sixty years on, they still stand proud as some of the most stylish and wilfully odd adventures produced by anyone in that golden period of British TV fantasy.
Shot in crisp black and white and crafted like mini movies more than mere television episodes, the stories moved away from the slightly mundane world of espionage, murder and blackmail that had provided the basis for the earliest series to encompass an often surreal world of mad scientists hellbent on world domination and plotlines that plundered some of the greatest fantasy movie tropes ever.
We got adventures with karate chop wielding killer robots (The Cybernauts), Quatermass-referencing killer plants (Man Eater Of Surrey Green) and even a re-born Hellfire Club hellbent on destroying Parliament with the great Peter Wyngarde at their helm (A Touch Of Brimstone).
Fun, frothy and oozing 1960s style, The Avengers pushed boundaries and explored just how far TV fantasy could go in the name of Saturday night entertainment.
Like the very best cult offerings from big screen and small, it also repays endless reappraisal - which is what it’s all about really, isn’t it?
