Series 4 — Episode 7
The Murder Market

Production

Production dates: 23/11–4/12/1964 & 16–18/12/1964

This episode started filming on November 23^rd 1964 under the direction of Wolf Rilla, still starring Elizabeth Shepherd as Mrs. Emma Peel. Being one of the early episodes, the heavily annotated draft script alternates between calling Mrs. Peel “Emma” and “Mantha” – short for Samantha, and aren’t we all glad they changed it? Filming was official stopped on December 3^rd although it actually continued with the second unit until the 4^th. Elizabeth Shepherd later reported she was simply told “We’re letting you go”, then told the newspapers a short time later “I don’t want to say anything just now”. An ABC spokesman was quoted by the Daily Express as saying:

It was mutually agreed that Miss Shepherd should relinquish the role. The company admires her talent, but her interpretation of the role did not coincide with that envisaged by us.

With Elizabeth Shepherd gone, the studio had to hurriedly screen-test a replacement and called in twenty actors, eight of whom were short-listed for a second round. Diana Rigg had attended the original auditions in October when Elizabeth Shepherd had been cast as Mrs. Peel and did not take part. Casting director Dodo Watts however suggested the producers watch a recent episode of Armchair Theatre she had worked on, titled The Hothouse. The producers were impressed with Diana’s acting and comedic timing and added her to the short-list.

Opinion was divided as to the best candidate, Brian Clemens preferring Moira Redmond over Diana Rigg, Rosemary Martin and Shirley Eaton but Julian Wintle – or perhaps Howard Thomas – backed Rigg as she was a new face for the general public. Diana Rigg was announced as the new Mrs. Peel on December 14^th with a television interview and photoshoot. The next day, the Daily Express reported she had turned down a £60,000, 3 year contract and instead committed to just one year. (Whether that figure was correct, being the equivalent of £477,560 a year in today’s terms, is open to debate, given that a year or so later Rigg demanded a pay rise as she was being paid less than the camera man.)

Filming recommenced immediately, with Rigg on set on December 16^th onwards. Wolf Rilla had declined to return for the refilming and the versatile Peter Graham Scott stepped in to complete principal filming in only two days. Diana’s performance as Mrs. Peel is more abrasive and Cathy Gale-like in this episode, as she came to grips with the role.

Regional broadcasts

TV Times listing

International broadcasts

Contemporary broadcasts in the Netherlands and Germany did not include this episode, the German title comes from DVD sets.

This was the first episode of series 4 shown in Australia, broadcast on the same night across the nation in what must have been an ABC network first. On the previous Monday, 21 February, The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article entitled “Enough of this sex talk” with a photo of Diana Rigg next to it — but because Diana was appearing in A Comedy of Errors on ABN 2 on February 22 1966, mentioned further down the page. The caption of the photo was SEX IN ACTION: Diana Rigg returns to ABN 2 in the new series of “The Avengers” tomorrow week (see below).

Episode Rating

Cargill’s Lovejoy is fantastic, and Macnee and Rigg ad lib fluidly. Great stuff!

The Fashions

The Cars

Who’s Killing Whom?

Click a name to see the face

Continuity and trivia

1. This episode was the first filmed with Diana Rigg as Emma Peel and is notable for what seems to be an early producers’ directive that didn’t last — to have Diana use a husky whispering voice instead of her usual strident clarion. By 16:38 she’s stop whispering her lines. She whispers again for the interview scene 24:33–27:30 but is back to normal at Steed’s flat.
2. 2:03 – the tank that is damaged in Stone’s assassination contains Hemigrammus ocellifer (Head-and-tail light Tetra) from British Guiana and the Amazon, as well as Lebistes reticulatus (Guppy) from Trinidad, Guiana, Venezuela. Guppies were classified as Poecilia reticulata until 1913 when they were reclassified as Lebistes reticulatus, then reverted to Poecilia reticulata in 1963 so the Aquarium is a bit behind in it’s scientific naming. Unfortunately, the fish in the tank do not appear to be either of these species.
3. 3:30 —
   
   The photo of Jonathan Stone that Steed shows to Mrs. Peel is obviously one of Edward Underdown’s portfolio shots — exactly the same photograph turns up in the Danger Man episode, “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove”.
4. 3:32 — another photograph has “John Beale” written on the back, but the character is called Fred Beale later on. Later on, the noticeboard has F.R. Stone instead of Jonathan Stone, so maybe the characters swapped first names so they could do a “call me Fred” joke for the photographer, which they ended up using with a different photographer in The Bird Who Knew Too Much. I don’t know the origin of the Fred joke but it also appeared in School for Traitors when Patrick Macnee ad libbed to cover Julie Smith fluffing her lines.
5. 10:20 — Steed claims he was a major in THE Guards and expelled from three public schools for having too many “extracurricular activities”.
6. 10:38/10:45 — When asked what he does for a living, Steed replies, “Work? Tried working once, it didn’t work out. Too much like work. Footled around at the Foreign Office for a while, found it all quite baffling.”
7. 11:08 — Steed’s desired partner: So long as she has a good seat… on a horse… plays a fair game of bridge, mixed a dry martini, can whip up a passable soufflé — you might say a good all rounder.
8. 13:40 – When Steed searches Lovejoy’s desk, it looks like there’s a few pages of the script on the blotter.
9. 14:10 – There’s another script in the filing cabinet, I can’t tell what it is but it has the snippet of a conversation between Jenny, Barbara and Hanna, something about taking pity on someone.
10. 14:46 — Mrs. Peel’s name is already on the board, although she hasn’t visited the agency yet.

    The names are (- is unreadable):

    Clr. Edgar -	-
    -	-
    D. W. Parkinson	The Old House, Warlow BUCKS
    J.G. Henshaw	14, Spurley Court S.W.1
    Lady Diana Rillington Jones	Flat 1, …
    Mr. Marcus Hamplington K.C.B.E.	2 Barrington Street Westminster
    J. Steed	4, Queen Annes Court Tothill Street Westminster
    Mr. E.R. Featherstone Haugh	2, Montpelier Gardens Kensington, S.W.
    F.R. Stone	12, Albany Gardens N.W.1
    A.M.A. Harcourt	The Grange, Welsby by Stow OXON
    Mrs. Emma Peel	Address to come

    Both Henshaw and F.R. Stone have arrows pointing at their row, all the others have a heart against theirs.

    Steed tells Emma that Spurley Court is just round the corner from her, but she lives in Highpoint 2, on North London.

11. 16:47 — not the must subtle use of lighting when Mrs. Peel picks up the candelabra.
12. 16:55 & 30:29 — product placement for Veuve Cliquot champagne.
13. 17:20-17:25 — handheld camera work during the pan and zoom on Henshaw in the bathtub.
14. 17:30 — Mrs. Peel quips the bureau would have had trouble finding a match for Steed. He replies, “Oh, I don’t know — educated, charming, cultured” and she interjects, “ruthless, devious, scheming. Have to be quire a girl. A mixture of Lucretia Borgia and Joan of Arc”. (A similar exchange happens at the wine tasting in Dial a Deadly Number).
15. 20:08/20:17 — the close-ups of Emma & Lovejoy are in Lovejoy’s office (Emma is obviously sitting down, with her hand on her chin, wearing gloves!), whereas the mid shots are in the reception room and she’s not wearing gloves. They’re obviously taken from the footage filmed for the interview scene around 24:00 — the first seems to be a flipped copy of the Emma CU from 24:08, his is the CU from 24:25.
16. 21:20 — Narrative symmetry: Steed says similar lines to those of Jonathan Stone in the teaser, Barabara reaches for her purse, then simply closes the clasp instead of pulling out a gun.
17. 21:40 — An in-joke. When Steed meets Barbara Wakefield he comments she’s Canadian and she confirms she’s from Toronto — Suzanne Lloyd was indeed from Toronto, and Macnee had worked there for many years with Canadian television. These lines are not in the draft script so may have been added for Suzanne.
18. 23:50 — Steed is attached to a couple of polo ponies at the Riding Club, then claims, in order to ensnare Togetherness, that he can’t afford to own them as a cousin stands between him and a fortune. Steed had previously spent a fair bit of Death Of A Batman competing with the Duke of Edinburgh for a pair of polo ponies, but had given up the sport by The Medicine Men because the two ponies took a fancy to each other and lost interest in the game.
19. 25:00 — Mrs. Peel’s prospective partner: “He would have to be mature, a man of culture, and intelligence. With stamina!"
20. 27:00 — Emma plays the wedding march on Steed’s tuba while he practices golf. She later plays (28:12) Battle Hymn of the Republic and (28:30) The Ride of the Valkyries until Steed chips the golf ball into the tuba.
21. 28:12 — when Steed hits his golf ball, the small box he’s using as a tee flies off and lands on Mrs. Peel.
22. 31:05 — During the cake tasting, Dinsford liberally plies Steed with champagne — all over his arm, in fact!
23. 31:30 — Macnee fluffs a line: ”Convenient accident, piece of cake — err, cake of soap at the top of the stairs".
24. 34:20 — Dinsford has put an arrow against Mrs. Peel’s name, indicating that she is to be killed.
25. 38:30 – The wreath in the mortuary has the legend “In Loving Memory of a Faithful Friend”, did Steed steal it from a pet cemetery?
26. 44:33 — fluff on camera lens or smudge on wall?
27. 48:52 — it’s very obviously Billy Westley Jr who falls from the shelf instead of Diana Rigg.
28. 49:34 – …and Ray Austin standing in for Patrick Macnee as he fights Terry Richards. Joe Dunne does the leap past Billy Westley, standing in for Suzanne Lloyd and Diana Rigg respectively at 50:20.
29. 48:50 — Mrs. Peel is driving and Steed is in the back, bare-headed, putting on his tie. When we switch to the exterior shot behind the car, they’re side by side, Steed in the driver’s seat, wearing a top hat.
30. The plot’s a bit like “Strangers on a Train” — the agency facilitates the murder of inconvenient relatives for its members, while providing alibis for them by making sure they’re seen elsewhere at the time of death, the attractive Barbara Wakefield being their chief assassin.
31. An episode of Adam Adamant entitled Death by Appointment Only, also written by Tony Williamson, provoked an angry letter from The Avengers producer Julian Wintle to the BBC, claiming that it had the same plot.
    Williamson contended that it was different, thus:
    1. the episode centred around an escort agency rather than a match-maker’s
    2. the agency wasn’t a “Murder Inc.”, but was instead killing victims for their own ends.
    Otherwise, Wintle was right and the plots were very similar…
    Strangely, Colin Vancao appeared in both episodes as an extra in identical rôles (and it is through Adam Adamant that I have managed to identify him as he was uncredited in The Assassination Bureau and Series 3’s Esprit De Corps).
32. Running time: 49:49
33. This episode was originally filmed second, after The Hour that Never Was under thie direction of Wolf Rilla, with Elizabeth Shepard as Emma Peel. It was later re-filmed presumably in its entirety with Diana Rigg by Peter Graham Scott.
34. 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.