The Avengers : Series 4 : Two's a Crowd : trivia

Subject	0-5	Subject	0-5	Subject	0-5	Subject	0-5
Direction	3½ stars	Music	3 stars	Humour	4½ stars	Intros/tags	3 stars
Villains	4 stars	Plot	4 stars	Emma	2 stars	Sets/Props	3½ stars
Overall (0-10)	The lady vanishes - was La Rigg on holidays for this one? She seems completely superfluous. Otherwise, I find this a very funny episode, but humour alone cannot carry it.					6½ stars

The Cars

Marque/Model/Type	Number Plate
(model aeroplane - Cessna)	-
Humber Imperial finished by Thrupp & Maberly, and sporting a black Everflex roof	AWK 948B
Lotus Elan S2	HNK 999C
Porsche 356	-
Austin A110 Westminster	-
MGB (taillights)	-
Peugeot 404 (maybe an Oxford/Cambridge...)	-
(model submarine)	-
(model aeroplane - Hurricane)	-
(model aeroplane - Lancaster)	-
horses	-

Who's Killing Whom?

Victim	Killer	Method	click a name to see the face
Sergei Ivenko ^V*	Vogel ^V*	shot by model submarine
Pudeshkin ^V*	Steed	redirects model bomber
Shvedloff ^V*	Steed	redirects model bomber
Elena ^V*	Steed	redirects model bomber
Vogel ^V*	Steed	redirects model bomber

continuity and trivia

2:22 - The caption scanner has dust all over the screen, so when the titles are superimposed dust and hairs appear all over the screen.
3:43 -

©1961-9 CANAL+IMAGE UK Ltd
The War Department file on Colonel Psev is labelled COL. PZEV P/56079 - we must assume the department guessed at the spelling as the bomb for Brodny has it as "Psev" and the name is later revealed (43:43) to be an acronym derived from the lead antagonists' initials : Pudeshkin Shvedloff Elena Vogel.
One of the files turns up again, for no apparent reason, in Small Game for Big Hunters
10:05 et passim. - Some of the extras in the back row of the reverse shots are also sitting to the left of the catwalk.
20:40 - Ivenko calls the chauffeur who answers the Embassy door to Emma, "Greesha", a Russian slang term for a bully, heavy or strongarm man.
30:40 - Ivenko's file is labelled IVENKO, SERGEI TRANSFERRED on the outside; the paper inside is headed 56076, IVENKO, SERGEI and has been stamped FOR ELIMINATION.
31:08 - Ivenko calls Steed from the Embassy, seeking asylum, but the 'phone is labelled Leadenhall 7141 - have they stolen it from the bar in Dial a Deadly Number?
32:05- passim. - The shots of Vogel at the controls and watching through the binoculars are all marred by a hair, curled into a crescent and stuck to the bottom left corner of the camera lens.
32:48 - The perenial location scout's favourite, Tyke's Water Lake, is used for the location of the Embassy gardens where Ivenko is shot by the model submarine.
36:40 - Brodny says, "Yes, yes, my mother always used to say to me... 'Sergei Dushink', she said, 'you are "slow witted" ... and as for tact, initiative -" but in The See-Through Man he says his name is Vladimir Jaroslav.
43:43 - Pudeskin is a cypher expert, Shvedloff handles sabotage and elimination, Elena handles finance and administration and Vogel handles planning and operations.
45:25 (46:51) - Macnee says "Plessey and I set out to prove it" - but the character's name is Major Carson! Diana Rigg repeats the name at (/48:53), so I've listed him in the credits as Major Plessey Carson.
47:06 - you can see the wires on the bomber as it takes off.
48:32 - there's an oft-repeated story about Diana Rigg having never ridden a horse before they filmed Silent Dust, but here she is trotting across Tyke's Water Bridge on horseback and cantering with apparent ease two months earlier.
Running time: 49'53"

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 12 - Two's a Crowd

Episode Rating

The Cars

Who's Killing Whom?

continuity and trivia