Series 4 — Episode 6
The Master Minds

Production

Production dates: 17/12/64 — 8/01/1965

While the second unit was still finishing off the reworked The Murder Market which officially finished filming on December 18^th, this, the next episode, started filming with Peter Graham Scott as director on December 17^th. Filming saw a welcome return to extended location filming, lending the episode a modern, open feeling. Most of the filming was at Caldecote Towers, Bushey Heath, not far from the Elstree Studios. The Rosary Priory High School at the location was used inside and out as the “Dorrington Dean College for Young Ladies”. Other location work was done around the rural roads of Elstree and in the Elstree backlot and there was stock footage of the Houses of Parliament used in a couple of establishing shots. Filming was completed on Friday, January 8^th 1965.

The production office were happy with the episode and the author is on record as saying Scott had done a marvellous job in bringing the story to screen.

Regional broadcasts

TV Times listing

International broadcasts

Italy never broadcast this episode.

In Spain, it was originally scheduled — and listed — for 14^th February 1967 at 10:15pm, but Nueva España shows that it was pre-empted by The Town of No Return. It was rescheduled for June 12 1967 at 4pm.

This was the last episode in the first series of The Avengers in the USA to be shown on Monday nights, the fourteenth episode in that time slot. The next episode would be Dial a Deadly Number ten days later, starting a run of seven episodes on Thursday nights. The remaining five episodes were not broadcast and the show was reported as cancelled and not returning in the Fall.

Episode Rating

An original storyline and great performances by the bit parts as well as the leads.

The Fashions

The Cars

Who’s Killing Whom?

Click a name to see the face

Continuity and trivia

1. 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.
2. 5:08 — Sir Clive’s eyes are open for a second.
3. 5:24 — Emma stoops to look at Todd with Plessy just come past her to stand alongside, but in the mid 2-shot of her and Plessy, she’s standing upright and he’s just coming round her again.
4. 6:01 — the shadow of the boom microphone swings alarmly past Sir Jeremy.
5. 7:00 — “A diabolical mastermind”, something of a catchcry for “The Avengers”, originates with this episode.
6. 9:51 — The chess knight lampstand reappears in Room without a View.
7. 9:53 — Grundig product placement, we get a very clear close-up of a TK-40 reel-to-reel tape machine.
8. 12:51 — product placement for “Red Hackle De Luxe” blended whisky.
9. 12:55 — A brief appearance of Ray Austin as Davinia Todd when Steed (or at least, a stuntman) jumps her through the curtain — Patrick Macnee still gets to grapple with Georgina Ward’s thighs a few moments later, much to his delight.
10. 13:48 — After tackling Davinia, she asks if he played Scrum Half and Steed replies, “Wing Three-quarter”.
11. 14:45 — Georgina Ward’s line continues as the camera angle shift, but her mouth isn’t moving as she says “even I don’t know”.
12. 17:35 onwards — Steed finds a RANSACK test paper 1 (245/53/4) under Allan St. Johnson’s slumped corpse, on his desk. A couple of the questions are visible, and are as follows.
    1. Pick out the circumpola stars (stars which never set) for Cambridge (52°12′ N) from the Almanac list. Which of the more important STARS can never be seen at Cambridge?
    3. At midnight on March the 6th the Pointers of the Plough are vertically above the Pole Star. Can you think of any way of using the line joining the Pointers to the Pole Star as a kind of clock hand by which to tell the time for the rest of the year.
    4. You are guiding a party, in Southern England, by the stars, and your course is first due South and then due West. Supposing that your permissable error of direction is 2°, how often, approximately, will you have to change your guiding star on each course?
13. 

    The “cute egghead” was played by Liz Reber, an Australian model and actress who posed for Helmut Newton when she was still in Australia, moving to Europe in the Sixties. She is probably best remembered to television audiences as a regular in the ensemble cast of “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 greeting cards and 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 the Montmartre district of Paris. I met her one rainy day in 2002, after all her years in Paris she still didn’t speak French and had a strong but refined Australian accent. She showed us photos of her tromp l’oeil and had a large body of work in her portfolio.

    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..."

14. 20:06 — Sir Clive’s word association responses: paper — pencil / clock — time / night — sleep / gun — “kill him”
15. 22:00 etc. — the close-ups of Ian McNaughton, playing Dr. Campbell, show that he had terrible teeth and needed to trim his nose hair. You’d think make-up and wardrobe would have done something about it!
16. 25:09 — Emma says it’s the “Dorrington Dean Academy for Young Ladies” but the sign outside reads “Dorrington Dean College for Young Ladies”, with the school motto “Defend thy honour” — it’s all very St. Trinian’s. The building is actually Caldecote Towers, Elstree Road, Bushey. It’s used for the Rosary Prior High School.
17. 27:37 — Leeming says Steed has an IQ of 152, which of course is because of Mrs. Peel’s intervention.
18. 29:42 — The test answers written on Steed’s cuff are:
    1. 1. Dubhe, Polaris, Alioth, Schedar
       2. Achernar, Acrex, Canopus, Peacock, Rigel, Kent
    2. 1 day less 10 min ∴ 1° per day 30° or 1/12 of O per month ∵ 3000/300 x 2 = 20 hours. G.H.A. Α LEMMA γ 52° …

    They seem to be the answers to the test paper Steed found in St. Johnson’s office.

19. 32:50 — When Steed enters the gym there’s an assembly of stuntmen: Paddy Ryan on parallel bars, Jackie Cooper on the trampoline, Billy Westley Jr and another man vaulting the horse, and Joe Farrer on the rowing machine. Most of these stuntmen are in the climactic fight at the end of the episode, with the addition of Joe Powell fighting Billy Westley Jr in the silhouette fight between Hollt Trent and Mrs. Peel.
20. I paid a visit the the Australian National Archives in May 2018 and found some hitherto unrecorded information about The Avengers. Sixties uber model Annabella Maccartney is the model in The Murder Market wearing nothing but a man’s shirt and tie — and Steed’s bowler. Also, Harvey Hall and Paddy Ryan both had named characters in The Master Minds — Findler and Filson respectively.