Series 4 — Episode 24
A Sense of History

Regional broadcasts

TV Times listing

International broadcasts

Italy appears to have never broadcast this episode but pretty much everywhere else did. Note that the French title varies - econome, economie, economiste .

Some Swiss newspapers (e.g. La Liberté) report A Sense of History being on 23^rd May on ORTF2 and then again a week later on the 30^th. But L’Impartial has Abus de confiance (How to Succeed .... at Murder) on the 23^rd so it would seem that A Sense of History was moved down the order and pre-empted by the other episode.

Episode Rating

Funny, sexy, furious - and that’s the whole episode, not just Rigg. All the characters are drawn from the Robin Hood saga that the story becomes at the fancy dress rag, a clever twist on the set-up.

The Fashions

The Cars

Who’s Killing Whom?

Click a name to see the face

Continuity and trivia

1. 1:18/1:00 — Broom approaches the fairly large college down an almost unused one-lane dirt road which appears to be the main thoroughfare as the villains are lying in wait there. Talk about backwoods education! Strangely, we later see a much grander entrance (4:16 — actually The American College at Raddlett, seen again in Death’s Door).
2. 
   1:30 and throughout - Throughout the episode, all the characters refer to St Bode’s Academy, but it was obviously a late change - the original name of the university in the script was St. Bede’s (as in The Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler).Only the introductory scene where Carlyon gets out of the boot of Broom’s car do they say St Bode’s without it being redubbed.
   They must have been corncerned about legal action from a real St Bede’s. Such as this one. At 14:10/14:40 there’s an incredibly obvious over-dub when Grindley says the name. The props are all emblazoned with St Bede’s as well.
3. 3:07/2:49 — Steed and Emma discover Carlyon in the boot of Broom’s car, although the tarpaulin over the car would have made it very difficult for him to have got there.
4. 8:00–8:10 — Staircase 3 is the haunt of the protagonists: Room 16 is M. Millerson, J.W. Pettit & C.D.N. Allen are in Room 17; Eric C.N. Duboys gets Room 18 to himself.
5. 8:07 — Poor Rocky Taylor: in his first episode as a regular stuntman, he immediately gets hurled over Mrs. Peel’s shoulder and get hit in the nose by Steed’s umbrella (11:33).
6. 8:54 — Steed says “pretty strong stuff”, referring to the fascistic thesis, then adds, “Yuck, so is this” and hands Carlyon his coffee. Carlyon replies, “What do you mean? It’s continental roasted!”. However, some time later (28:02/28:58), Steed says that he’s very partial to Carlyon’s “continental blended”.
7. 11:20 — Despite the fact that Carlyon’s a marked man, Steed leaves him alone in a brightly-lit wagon in the deserted woods for most of the episode; even more incredibly, the woods-savvy students don’t manage to kill him, only making the one attack which is foiled by Steed.
8. 12:22 — Getting around censorship: Mrs. Peel says she likes her students to be wide-eyed and innocent as she opens a desk. She discovers a pin-up of a girl in black garter belt, stocking and see-through underwear inside and hurriedly closes it.
9. 12:47 — She also finds a 15th May 1965 edition of Lion comic and quickly flips through it.
10. 13:31 — Steed cheekily quips, “an awful lot of theses” (i.e. faeces) when Henge is carrying on at length about how many dissertations had been written at the university over the years.
11. 14:00 — Grindley is wearing prop spectacles with a hole in the middle of the lenses to help him see properly.
12. 21:52 — The caravan is parked in the exact same part of the woods where Broom was killed - the trees are quite distinctive and the students attack from the same direction as they did Broom.
13. 
    23:50/24:30 — Richard Carlyon puts out a flaming arrow with a bottle of brandy - looks like someone had been watering it down!
14. 30:02, 31:48 & 33:23 — Lightning strikes twice! In fact, three times - it’s the same thunderbolt footage used in all the lightning strikes.
15. 33:19/34:25 — The shelves that fall on Petit look too flimsy to kill anyone they might land on.
16. 34:28 — Emma puts the books carefully in order, while Steed piles them onto the shelf all over the place.
17. 48:22 — The picture quality is suddenly worse with the change of camera angle just before the commercial break.
18. 48:50 — The Avengers depart down the same stretch of road as most of the rest of the season.
19. The late, great writer of the episode, Martin Woodhouse, confirmed in 2009 that the “sense of history” runs deep in the script - there’s the university named after The Honourable Bede and the character names are derived from the Robin Hood chronicles, thus the rag week scene with Robin Hood fancy dress.
    Robin Duboys is a name sometimes given to Robin Hood (Norman for “Robin of the woods”), and Millerson is Much the Miller’s son; John Petit is Little John; Marianne Grey is Maid Marion; Richard Carlyon is Richard Coeur de Lion, (i.e. King Richard I, the Lionheart) and the almost completely superfluous Allen is Alan à Dale.
    Woodhouse did a similar thing with his script for A Chorus of Frogs, the inspiration coming from an Ancient Greek play.
20. Running time: 49′43″