The Avengers : Series 4 : The Master Minds : trivia

Subject	0-5	Subject	0-5	Subject	0-5	Subject	0-5
Direction	3½ stars	Music	3 stars	Humour	4 stars	Intros/tags	3 stars
Villains	3½ stars	Plot	4 stars	Emma	3½ stars	Sets/Props	3½ stars
Overall (0-10)	An original storyline and great performances by the bit parts as well as the leads.					7 stars

The Cars

Marque/Model/Type	Number Plate
Bentley	UW 4887
Austin Mini	..3 BUF
Ford Thames 800	738 CXE

Who's Killing Whom?

Victim	Killer	Method	click a name to see the face
Sir Clive Todd ^V*	Dr Fergus Campbell (while hypnotised) ^V*	lethal injection
Allan St. Johnson MP ^V*	himself? (while hypnotised?) ^V*	pistol

continuity and trivia

The raiders wear the uniforms of The Blues and Royals Regiment of the Household Cavalry, which Steed wryly observes to be a very good disguise in Whitehall.
4:54 - Sir Clive's eyes are open for a second.
5:08 - Emma stoops to look at Todd, but in the mid 2-shot of her and Plessey, she's standing upright.
6:41 - "A diabolical mastermind", something of a catchcry for "The Avengers", originates with this episode.
9:27 - Grundig product placement?
12:21 - A brief unscheduled appearance of Paddy Ryan as Davinia Todd when Steed jumps her through the curtain - Patrick Macnee still gets to grapple with Georgina Ward's thighs a few moments later, much to his delight.
13:15 - After tackling Davina, she asks if he played Scrum Half and Steed replies, "Wing Three-quarter".
The "cute egghead" was played by Liz Reber, an Australian model and actress who posed for Helmut Newton when he was still in Australia, moving to Europe in the Sixties. She is probably best remembered to television audiences as a regular on "Candid Camera", and worked in the Italian theatre for some years after leaving television.
After leaving the stage and screen, she worked as a designer - everything from children's clothes to magazine covers and handbags. She turned more towards fine arts and has made a name for herself as a painter, exhibiting in Paris and London, and creating murals and trompe l'oeil for hotels, restaurants, private houses and festivals across Britain and Europe. Nowadays, she works and lives in Paris.
Her lines in the script? She only has two, spoken as Steed enters the school for the first time and passes through the babble of high-brow conversation. Later on, she's seen smiling and winking at Steed as he sits the first exam paper (as in the picture shown here).
Here her lines here (MP3 39KB), they are transcribed below:
George Bernard Shaw miscalculated phonetically; he didn't allow for the Liverpool sounds.
[the man listening to her laughs]
So you see..."
19:13 - Sir Clive's word association responses: paper - pencil / clock - time / night - sleep / gun - "kill him"
28:29 - The test answers, written on Steed's cuff:
1. 1. Dubne, Polaris, Alioth, Schedar
  2. Achernar, Acrex, Canopus, Peacock, Rigel, Kent
2. 1 day less 10 min therefore 1° per day 30° or 1/12 of () per month thus 3000/300 x 2 or 20 hours. ... A LEMMA 'V' 52°...

A note on the timecodes
Where I have listed two sets of timecodes, the first is from the 2009-11 Optimum Releasing/Studio Canal DVD sets, any other timecodes are from the A&E and Contender DVD sets from a decade beforehand.
The new releases have been remastered and their frame rate has been changed, resulting in a shorter running time. However, the picture quality has increased markedly. I assume this is because they used a simple 2:2 pulldown (24 @ 25) when converting from the original film masters (film runs at 24 frames per second, while PAL runs at 25fps, the new DVDs are in PAL format).
This pulldown was also the cause of audio errors on many episodes, especially for Series 5, as the audio sped up to match the new rate (4% faster), rather than being properly pitch-shifted. Checking the dialogue sheets, which list the feet and frames of the reels, it looks like the speed change is around 5.04%, so there may be some cuts as well - probably from around the commercial breaks and ends of reels, as they amount to about 25 seconds. All my assumptions are based on the episodes having been filmed on standard 35mm film, which has 16 frames per foot and runs at 24 frames per second, so a minute of footage uses 90 feet of film (1,440 frames).
These audio errors have been corrected in the currently available DVDs, but the 2:2 pulldown remains. There is also the addition of a Studio Canal lead-in, converted to black and white to match the episode for Series Four, but colour for Series Five, adding an extra 18 or 19 seconds to the runnning time and making it harder to match timecodes with previous releases. It's annoying that it has been slapped on every single episode, Series 1-3 didn't suffer this indignity.
The previous Contender and A&E DVD releases didn't seem to suffer from these problems, so I assume they either used soft telecine and preserved the original 24fps rate of the film (my preferred option in DVDs) or they used 24 @ 25 pulldown (2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:2:3 Euro pull-down). Let's hope the much-rumoured bluray release will revert to native 24fps with soft telecine so we won't have these problems again.

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The Episode Guide to Series 4 (1965-6) of The Avengers

Episode 6 - The Master Minds

Episode Rating

The Cars

Who's Killing Whom?

continuity and trivia