TV Drama: The Avengers (Research)

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Background to television in the mid-1960s

Television in mid-1960s Britain was scarce. Only three channels were available – BBC1, BBC2 and ITV – and one of those (BBC2) was not available on older television sets. Televisions were expensive, small, unreliable, and black and white. There was no broadcasting for large parts of the day and all television channels closed down at night (playing the national anthem). ‘Channel surfing’ was far off in the future: changing channels was more difficult than it is today, as it was done manually at the television set and might encourage malfunction. This meant that audiences were much more loyal to particular channels. Home computing and any technology to record television in the home was the stuff of science fiction. Convergence was yet to occur. ITV started in 1955, designed to be competition for the BBC’s monopoly over television broadcasting and to allow advertising on television for the first time. It quickly gained a large majority of the audience by introducing popular formats such as games shows. So, by 1965 there was competition in the television market, but this competition was very limited by the standards of today. ITV was financially secure as it faced no competition for moving image advertising revenue (except cinema advertising), which meant that this commercial television channel could be highly regulated.

Ownership, funding and regulation

Television in 1960s Britain was provided by a cosy duopoly of ITV and the BBC. Neither was part of an international media conglomerate. The BBC was and is a public corporation governed by Royal Charter and funded by licence-fee payers. ITV was a network of regional television companies who competed with each other to provide programmes for the channel and provided some regional content for their transmission area. The production company behind The Avengers – ABC – for example, held the weekend franchise for the midlands and the north. These companies were not allowed to merge (until after 1990) and their British ownership was controlled by their regulator, the Independent Television Authority (ITA). An ITV franchise was described by one ITV boss as a ‘licence to print money’ due to the monopoly it offered on television advertising to a region. Thus, ITV was highly profitable and could afford larger budgets than the BBC. This profitability allowed the ITA to insist on strict public service broadcasting (PSB) requirements and meant that there was little resistance from ITV in meeting them. The schedules regularly include PSB fare such as: single dramas, educational programmes, children’s programmes, Arts programmes, news and current affairs documentaries, classical music performances, religious programmes, original dramas, and current affairs revues. The BBC was self-regulating – a function carried out by a board of governors appointed from ‘the great and the good’, a group defined by those in power (in 1965, of the nine Governors, there was one ‘Lord’, four ‘Sirs’ and one ‘Dame’).

‘Global’ TV 

World television markets were dominated by US programmes, which could be sold abroad for much less than the cost of producing original programming, but British television production was protected by the rules of public service broadcasting that limited the proportion of foreign content. For example, ABC’s programming for Saturday November 27 1965 included the American science fiction series Lost in Space at 7.25pm, but this is the only foreign programming that day. The schedule reached its climax with The Avengers at 9.05pm. British television did compete on the world market, with prestige productions such as The Avengers being sold to many countries overseas (90 countries by 1969). A lucrative deal with the American Broadcasting Company (reportedly $2 million) required the fourth series of The Avengers to be shot on film and allowed high production values for television of that era. Previous series were very studio bound, as was conventional for television of that era, and so appear to be very ‘stagey’ by contemporary standards. Videotape editing was a difficult and costly process so most television was mixed live, with mistakes and fluffed lines left uncorrected. Many programmes were lost as expensive videotape was re-used for new programmes. Shooting on film for a higher budget enabled more sophisticated camerawork, greater use of locations, more controlled editing and a more sophisticated soundtrack, with a through-composed score. The fifth series of The Avengers in 1966 was filmed in colour, even though the programmes could only be shown in monochrome on ITV. Producing for an international market with a higher budget raised the prestige of television productions such as The Avengers, productions that had been looked down on as inferior to film as an art form. This may be seen as the start of the process that led to some contemporary long form television dramas gaining higher critical and artistic status than some feature films. The budget for series 4 of The Avengers was reportedly £56,000 per show. For comparison, The Ipcress File – a major British spy film from the same year – had a production budget of £309,000. 

Reading Different Audiences

The BBC was slowly weaned away from its stuffy ‘Auntie’ image by the rigours of competition with ITV. However, channel loyalty tended to split on class lines, with ITV seen as the more working class channel – at a time when, with the rise of youth culture, it was suddenly ‘cool’ to be working class – and the BBC seen as more middle class. Thus the BBC’s flagship drama of the mid 1960s, The Forsyte Saga, was a serialisation of a set of novels by Galsworthy, a Nobel prize-winning British author. In comparison, ITV series such as The Avengers appeared much more daring, youthful, irreverent and sexy. The regional nature of ITV production further added to the differentiation. The BBC remained very London-centric, whereas ITV included production centres in the north (Granada/ABC) and midlands (ATV/ABC) as well as London (Associated Rediffusion/ATV). Granada Television, in particular, developed a distinctively northern identity in opposition to the southern establishment, whereas ATV and ABC retained large production facilities in London. Hence, the ABC studios used for The Avengers were in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire and most exterior shots were from London and the home counties

Targetting audiences 

Both BBC1 and ITV were aimed at mass audiences – both aiming to attract viewers to the channel for the evening’s viewing in expectation that they would remain for the whole evening. For this reason, broadcast flow was important: audiences should be led through a series of genres and formats to provide a rounded evening’s viewing. BBC2 was the exception to this television rule – it was self-consciously niche and might address a series of different audiences across one evening’s schedule. Programmes such as The Avengers allowed ‘tent pole’ scheduling – where the evening’s viewing was held up by key popular shows. The series format dominated 1960 television. Narratives that resolved every episode were well suited to a channel-loyal audience with no recording facilities. Audiences could miss individual episodes of a series and still follow their favourite series, which would be harder with a serial narrative. There was less need to try to win loyalty to individual programmes by deploying ongoing serial narratives, as with contemporary long form television dramas, due to the lack of competition in this era. Television audiences were expected to be ‘light-users’ before prime time – busy doing things around the house. Weekdays on ITV in 1965 opened with the daytime soap Crossroads at 4.20, followed by children’s programmes then adult programmes making fewer demands of audiences. 7.30 was assumed to be the time that families would sit down to watch television together in a sustained fashion, thus Coronation Street was scheduled for 7.30 to launch an evening of ITV viewing. The watershed at 9pm – introduced in 1964 – allowed for more adult programming, such as The Avengers. ITV shut down at about midnight, by which time it was assumed that audiences would be in bed. One nice example of these assumptions about audiences is the fact that ITV closed down on a Sunday at noon to allow time for family Sunday lunches. It would prove to be more difficult to make assumptions about international audiences. The change in Steed’s character in The Avengers to fit international stereotypes about English gentlemen proved to be successful, but the use of eroticised imagery – for example, of Emma Peel wearing fetish clothing – caused several episodes to be cut in America and reportedly ‘lost’ the Midwest audience. However, the programme was the first British series to be screened on primetime network television in the US and achieved a 28% audience share in 1966. The mid-1960s saw fierce debates about ‘permissiveness’ in society and on television. This was a time of rapid social change, exemplified by a ‘generation gap’ between a wartime generation celebrating the values of duty and perseverance and a younger generation celebrating values of freedom, spontaneity, and consumption. ‘Permissiveness’ was seen as lowering moral standards and coarsening language by its critics, as freeing society from outdated and oppressive taboos by its proponents. Programmes such as The Avengers were in the forefront of such debate and reflected the desire of television professionals to push the social and artistic boundaries of their times. The success of the programme suggests that audiences found that this met their uses and gratifications.

Social interaction and integration 

Television was more important in the 1960s because of its very scarcity. The fact that there would only be (at most) one screen in the house meant that whole households would watch together or not at all. Programmes that offered unusual and interesting representations, such as The Avengers would generate discussion the next day amongst an audience that could be sure there was a high likelihood that many others would have seen the same programme. Audiences that used television as a substitute for real-life social interaction would find these need met by the recurrence of familiar characters, in the case of The Avengers a familiar central pairing with a slightly enigmatic relationship to retain audience interest. Series such as The Avengers were also important in communicating a sense of Britishness to the country and to the world.

Entertainment 

Audiences were much more naive about television in the 1960s, a naivety that offered utopian pleasures – television could represent a magical world of plenty into which audiences could escape. This escapism was most evident in game shows and talent contests, but drama series such as The Avengers would also offer escapism through their representation of a world of competence, sophistication, humour, and a heavy hint of sexual tension and eroticism. The dominant drama narrative form of the time was the series – a format offering new beginnings every week, familiar characters with whom audiences could identify, and narrative resolution at the end of each episode. As a typical drama series, The Avengers offered an entertaining combination of repetition and difference with a new Proppian villain very week for the central pairing to fight against – the two sometimes swapping the ‘damsel in distress’ role – with familiar signposts along the way (e.g. the programme usually ended with the pair driving away from the scene of their triumph). Spy dramas were a familiar and perhaps dominant genre in the 1960s, both in television and film and suave, sophisticated and hyper-competent characters such as Steed and Peel will have been entertainingly familiar to audiences used to Bond films and American TV spy series such as The Man from Uncle.

Surveillance 

The information function of television was carried primarily by documentaries and current affairs programming and perhaps social realist drama, but even entertainment-focused drama series could offer a sense of looking in to an inaccessible world – in the case of The Avengers, the glamorous world of the upper middle classes and the world of espionage that featured so heavily in the 1960s news, even though the programme has a strong element of pastiche rather than social realism.

Audience response and interpretation 

Much contemporary response to 1960s television drama may be influenced by the cult status that has accrued to programmes such as The Avengers – in such a case the obvious technical limitations of the historical programme (e.g. the use of monochrome), the effect of changing conventions (e.g. of television actors’ performance), and the elements of representation that reflect its 1960s context (e.g. the implication of the viewer in the overt sexism of Steed smacking Peel’s bottom) may become part of its charm. Alternatively, the way the programme reflects its time in terms of both media language and representation may create an alienating effect for modern audiences.