Recent viewings : The Avengers (original series)

After hearing several participants in a fiction-magazines listserv sing the praises of Diana Rigg, I finally broke down and watched a few episodes from the first season of the old Avengers television series in which she played the sexy and, perhaps, ambiguously kinky secret agent Emma Peel.

It's enjoyable enough as a kind of lightweight cross between James Bond and a screwball romantic comedy, but even in the few episodes I watched, I couldn't help but notice a rather weird subtext. At the end of every episode, there's a brief vignette, completely unrelated to everything else, in which Emma Peel is shown, in some way, dominating her male partner, John Steed (played by the patrician Patrick McNee). In one, she's riding in a rickshaw that he's pulling down an English country lane for no apparent reason while she cries out commands in a strident voice; in another she's ordering him about while he rows a boat. It seems rather apparent that "Steed", in addition to his eminently English virtues of suave demeanor and elegant apparel, may a devotee of "the English vice".

As for me, I think I prefer my English secret agents to be a little less overtly kinky.