Series 1 — Episode 23
Dead Of Winter

Production details

VTR: Wednesday, 18th October 1961 18.00 — 19.00

Read-through: Monday, 9th October 1961 at 10.00 a.m. at The Tower, R.C.A. Building, Brook Green Road, Hammersmith. RIVerside 8641/8646
Rehearsals: From Monday, 9th October 1961 at The Tower, Hammersmith.
Camera Rehearsal: Tuesday, 17th October 1961, 11.00 — 21.00 and Wednesday 18th October 1961, 10.00 — 19.00.
Studio details: Teddington Two
Production No. 3423
Tape No. VTR/ABC/1469
Transmission: Saturday, 9th December 1961, 10 p.m.

Schedule

Camera rehearsals were held on 17th and 18th October, 1961, in a schedule similar to the other episodes of this time. The VTR recording took place on the evening of 18th October from 6pm to 7pm.

Regional broadcasts

ITV Broadcaster	Date	Time
ABC Midlands	2/09/1961	10.00pm
ABC North	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Anglia Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm
ATV	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Southern Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Tyne Tees Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Television Wales & West	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Ulster Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Westward Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Scottish Television	-	-
Border Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm
Grampian Television	2/09/1961	10.00pm

TV Times listing

The London edition ended with ABC Weekend Network Production, both editions announced the following as well.

To further herald the return of The Avengers to screens, issue 318 of the TV Times also had a full-page interview with Ingrid Hafner, conducted by Charles Bayne.

Avengers? they’re the sweetest men I know, says Ingrid Hafner

Ingrid Hafner considered the question carefully. “Yes” she said, “I like men, Let’s face it, they’re essential.
“And all in all, I suppose, I’m tolerant of their ways. One has to be, with these two.”

“These two” are Ian Hendry and Patrick Macnee, stars of The Avengers.
Hendry plays Dr. David Keel, the tough but kindly character who uses his medical knowledge to fight crime.
He is aided by the cynical under-cover man John Steed, played by Macnee – a character with a stately home background and a taste for good living.

Keeping the balance between them is Dr. Keel’s glamorous nurse-receptionist Carol Wilson, played by Ingrid.
I asked Ingrid at her London flat what she really thought about her two leading men.
Do they resemble the characters they play?

“The answer is no,” said Ingrid. “In real life, in fact, their roles are somewhat reversed.
“Take Ian first. He is intelligent and hard-working – and easily upset when things go wrong.
“But on the surface he’s a great clown, not a bit like Keel. He loves practical jokes – which is not surprising.
“You see he started in show business in a circus – as private secretary and stooge to Coco the clown.
“I don’t think he has ever forgotten Coco’s advice to take up clowning.”

Ingrid recalled Hendry’s antics one day during rehearsals.

“Things were held up for something or other,” she said. “The set was an old furniture shop and the place was cluttered up with great pieces of ancient furniture.
“Suddenly, there was a great rumpus among the props. And there was Ian crashing through a huge picture frame with a ridiculous Victorian fireman’s helmet on his head, and a false moustache.
“Another time we had a hair dressing salon set and there he was mincing around in a filthy old overall brandishing a pair of scissors and a comb.”
Ingrid added: “Practical jokers, men especially, can be a bit wearing. But really you have to laugh with this character. He’s a harmless soul, bless him.”

She huddled closer to the fire. She had just returned from a visit to Ireland, she explained, and the flat had been unheated for a few days.
“Every time I come back from Ireland I talk with an Irish accent,” said Ingrid.
“This amuses Pat Macnee since I’m actually half Scots.

“Pat is a more mature person than Ian in many ways. Unlike Steed, Pat has a quiet personality. He is controlled, modest and easy going.
“He adopts an amusing fatherly attitude towards his co-star. In the middle of some crazy interlude he’ll say, ‘Now come along Hendry, that’s enough for one day.
“‘Get your script like a good boy and let’s get a move on, I’m getting hungry’.”

Pat and Ian don’t, as it happens, snipe at each other as they often do in the series.

“I’m grateful for that,” said Ingrid, “I couldn’t bear that.
“Pat is a bit of a dreamer. He’ll tell you this himself I think he secretly wishes he was a character like Steed.
“At rehearsals if he’s not busy poring over his script or holding incredibly intense conversations with the director, he will be tucked away in a remote corner of the room reading masses of magazines.”

Ingrid gazed at the ceiling.

“You get to know people pretty well, working with them every day, don’t you?
“My leading men are not without faults. But, to be honest, they’re two of the sweetest men I know.”

Charles Bayne

Ingrid’s anecdotes about Ian Hendry refer to A Change of Bait (which had not yet aired and must have confused readers) and Ashes of Roses (which Hendry was barely in, so why he was performing homophobic jokes on set is anyone’s guess).

Episode availability

• Video - no original footage is known to exist; a video reconstruction is available on the Studio Canal series 1&2 DVD set
• Audio - reconstruction in The Lost Episodes vol. 4, by Big Finish
• Script - clean archive copy of the rehearsal script entitled The Un-Dead and dated 28.9.1961, in the British Film Institute collection.
• Publicity Stills - 116 frames on contact sheets
• Tele-Snaps - 79, 11 of the small Tele-Snaps are repeated at a larger size

Continuity and trivia

1. Eric Paice’s original script was titled The Un-Dead, the title changing sometime in October 1961. Eric Paice also wrote two other scripts for series 1, entitled Fifi and the Scorpion and The White Rook, but neither progressed beyond the plot outline stage. He of course wrote several scripts is series 2. Fifi and the Scorpion bears a resemblance to Box of Tricks.
2. The plot for this episode is a good one- neo-Nazis sneaking into Britain by freezing their operatives, and it has elements found in other episodes, such as The Springers where Dr. Keel impersonates A dubious doctor. It may have been the basis for much later episodes as well. The Nazi survivors in The Eagle’s Nest are an almost identical plot, although there they coerce a good doctor to revive Hitler himself. The frozen agent Boris Kartovski in Split! seems to have some of the same plot elements. And the foreign invaders in The Living Dead, who planned to destroy Britain with nuclear weapons while safe in their underground city.
3. The prologue is not described in the rehearsal script, which starts with Dr. Keel arriving at the mortuary. This suggests that the scene was added later, perhaps by the story editor, John Bryce.
4. Norman Chappell is back for another comic turn in the series as the nervous new father, Ted. (Not that Father Ted!) To underscore his comedy, his character dresses in a 50s rocker style, colloquially called Teds or Teddy Boys in Britain. The script lists him as “Ted, a Ted”.
5. This was the last episode of series 1 recorded and was officially numbered as episode 26 in the original paperwork. There was a three-month break in broadcast following a new arrangement between ABC and ATV which had been brokered by Brian Tesler, which returned both The Avengers and Deadline Midnight to weekly schedules. ATV’s Deadline Midnight was shown from 9th September and The Avengers returned on 9th December. This gave the producers the luxury of reordering the broadcast schedule, and this episode was promoted ahead of the other three episodes in the final production block. The rehearsal script was typed up on September 28 1961 and stated the broadcast date as “TBA” so the producers had not yet decided the broadcast order at that point.
6. This was the first episode of The Avengers to be broadcast by Grampian Television, which had started broadcasts on 30th September 1961 while The Avengers was off air.
7. Conversely, Scottish Television did not show the last four episodes of Series 1 and this episode was not broadcast to that region. Scottish Television did not show The Avengers again until they started a short run of Series 2. This started on April 11 1963 and ran for twelve weeks, skipping all the Julie Stevens and Ian Rollason episodes, and several Honor Blackman episodes: Bullseye, Death on the Rocks, Immortal Clay, Warlock and Six Hands Across a Table.
8. About a week after this episode completed, Leonard White sent a memo announcing that Reed de Rouen was no longer engaged on script re-writes for the series. I suspect Reed’s last script was The Deadly Air but there’s no evidence to support that. From this point on, John Bryce is the sole credited script editor until he became producer, replacing Leonard White. At that point, Richard Bates took over as sole script editor. Doreen Montgomery is later announced to have left script-editing duties so she may have been involved with some of those series 1 episodes where we don’t know the script editor assigned. John Lucarotti is another possibility as he edited Double Danger.