The Avengers : What's New?

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What's New?

7-14 June 2006

The conceit of having my own Avengers logo is more than I can bear, so it's gone, replaced with the Helvetica Narrow^* titles of the original show. I've also reworked the homepage to remove all the nested tables and move it into the 21st Century, and I've started removing superfluous tables wherever I find them.

* David K Smith points out that it's not quite Helvetica Narrow but agrees with me that it's definitely not Impact. I've seen it used in books printed in the Sixties but never seen a decent printer's typesetting description to verify the correct name of the fount (as we used to spell it).

6 June 2006

These pretzels are making me thirsty! After adding all the new content, I've gone through the site and cleared out dead wood like disused styles and the Lloyd Dalton Google box - all modern browsers support Google searches natively anyway.

3 June 2006

The homepage has been reorganised as I've added too many new guides for them all to fit nicely. Most of the guides have been indexed under the new All Done with Mirrors (Aspects of Lambert) page, including the super-duper new guides:

Square Root of Evil (body counts, what happened to the diabolical masterminds and who rescued whom).
Avengers Timeline (archival status of the episodes, which regular cast members appeared, season number and episode number). Available in widescreen and print-friendly.

March-April 2006

Season 5B finally has full synopses throughout, plus some extra trivia. Just in time for the remaining Cathy, Dr King and Venus Smith episodes that are about to arrive, and the few scraps of Dr Keel that will be with us shortly. I'll work on revising Season 4 while I'm waiting for them to arrive.
Thanks to Mike Kunkel for correcting my misconceptions of Dial a Deadly Number and to Richard Henning for noticing it was a Humber Super Snipe III, not a Humber Sceptre, in The Girl from Auntie so the guide has been updated. He's also reminded me that Steed's bowlers are from Herbert Johnson, which I thought I'd mentioned somewhere, but it seems not.
I've been receiving emails from Australian fans who are reading the site while watching late night repeats on the Nine/WIN network. You can still get the Universal DVD set locally, but it's getting scarce.
Apologies to all our regular visitors for the lack of recent updates - real life, extra work responsibilities and Battlefield 2 (mostly) have been taking up all my time.

The rest of November 2005

The Return of the Cybernauts, Death's Door, The £50,000 Breakfast and Dead Man's Treasure updated with full outlines, and I've added the Trinidad Steel Band, and its members, to the cast list as well as a possible spotting of Susan Hampshire!
I've also relented on Mike's name and made it Colbourne, as per Andrew Pixley's recent book.

15 November 2005

Well, I watched Dead Man's Treasure and I'm convinced that Dave Rogers has mistaken Mike's name, so I've corrected it (he had Colbert, I've made it Cockburn).

12 November 2005

Updated synopses for Something Nasty In The Nursery, The Joker and Who's Who??? (and that's a confusing one!), which completes the whole of Season 5A.

9 November 2005

Watching The £50,000 Breakfast on the way to work this morning, I resolved to finally discover who the Steel Pan band were, and I'm happy to report that I've discovered they were Russ Henderson and his Trinidad Steel Band - you can find more links and information on the trivia page for the episode.
Nostalgia Steelband, the community steel band founded by Sterling and Russ of the trio, has just had its minibus (N542 JGC) and most of its pans stolen (25th October) from outside a home in Hackney, if you see it, ring the fuzz! (Visit the Nostalgia Steelband site for more information).

8 November 2005

Apologies to those perspicacious Opera users who may have noticed strange images at the foot of the Emma Peel episodes - a slight style sheet error had them being resized (I've only spotted one for sure, but there were probably others). All affected pages, and to be consistent, all other pages coded the same way, have been updated.
Meanwhile, I'm as happy as a clam to be one of probably only 100 or so lucky punters to actually have been able to purchase the new Saint Etienne single [all three formats], which Sanctuary "accidentally" limited to 1,000 copies apiece. Bliss!

27 October 2005

It's pleasing when your worlds collide, isn't it? Not only do my favourite band, British melody exponents Saint Etienne, have a station called Chase Halt on their faux London Underground sitemap, but Bob from the band has just written in their most recent news update, "We're all calm as ladybirds on a velvet cushion being properly plumped by Diana Rigg." - I'd be pretty frazzled too, I'm sure Diana can give a cushion a good pounding.

Pretty much the entirety of October 2005

From Venus with Love through to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Station now have full synopses, as well as the occasional trivia or continuity error update for these episodes. - Have I said how much I like using my 3G phone to watch episodes of The Avengers while commuting?

I've restyled all the news update pages (like this one!) and I've also reworked the page layout for the main episode pages for the Diana Rigg episodes (look ma, no tables!) and fixed You have just been Murdered and The Forget-Me-Knot (thanks to Werner for spotting the layout problem).

Okay, it seems my short rant about HBO releasing Get Smart on DVD shortly after the death of Don Adams was a bit misguided - the official release announcement was made a week before his death and had been rumoured in February (thanks to David K Smith for putting me straight).

19 September 2005

Villainous adversaries of the Tara King added, plus a few minor corrections to the Ministry Personnel archives.

15 September 2005

Villainous adversaries of the New Avengers added.

8 September 2005

Every single page cleaned up and reworked, including the extension of The Killing Fields to cover Cathy Gale and The New Avengers, plus the Ministry Personnel archives have been properly completed for 1968 & 1969 (apologies to records clerks who have tried to retrieve the previously incomplete data).