Series 6 — Episode 10
Look - (stop me if you’ve heard this one) But There Were These Two Fellers...

Regional broadcasts

TV Times listing

The 1980s TV Times listing gets Jay Denyer’s name wrong.

International broadcasts

This episode appears to have never been broadcast in Switzerland and was not seen in Italy until the private channel Tele Torino International broadcast it in 1982.

This episode was not broadcast in Germany and would not screen there until 1999.

Continuity & Trivia

1. 3:24–3:27 — Look- (stop me if you’ve heard this one) But There Were These Two Fellers...
   is one of those rare episodes with more than one title screen:
   
2. 3:43 — Tara is holding the cane nearly horizontally in the mid shot but when we cut to the profile close-up it’s almost vertical.
3. 4:10 — Another Avengers acronym: CUPID - Cabinet Underground Premises in Depth.
4. 4:44 and 4:58–5:35 — The walking stick Tara finds becomes a bunch of cloth flowers - a standard conjuror’s prop, but in the car, they rapidly become a bunch of bananas, a sword (which rips the fabric roof of Tara’s convertible), a bunch of daffodils, and a top hat with a hydrangea in the band.
5. 10:05 — Early inklings of Cleese’s Basil Fawlty character in the nervous and unhelpful civil servant, Marcus Rugman:
   “You are a public office”, says Tara when he tries to deny her entry and he replies, “Yes, that’s the trouble”.
6. 14:28–15:25 — There’s a hair caught top centre in the shot in the clown face records office, it must be on the camera as it disappears in the second angle of Maxie & Jennings dropping the eggs.
7. 15:20 (16:10) - it’s ridiculous that the eggs are raw, they would go off in days and Rugman earlier states they’re the culmination of over twenty years’ work.
8. 15:25 — Marcus slips as he nears the shelves, but Jennings dropped the banana skin at their end of the shelves, not the end nearest to Marcus.
9. 21:00 — There’s an out of focus hair top centre of the lens.
10. 21:55 — There’s a hair at top left in the mid shot of Dessington getting up from his desk.
11. 23:03 — The boom microphone and its shadow are visible at the top of the screen.
12. 30:46 — Steed starts reading a limerick. “There was a young lady of Gloucester, she met a young ...” He then raises his eyebrows and whistles. I have not yet managed to find the full text but it seems to have been current with sailors at the end of the Nineteen Century, so you can imagine how lewd it was.
13. 34:28 — A return to the winding road location used for so many tags scenes in Series Four.
14. 34:45 — Obvious back projection used for the profile shot of Tara driving.
15. 34:48 — The variation of the “The Avengers” theme used in this episode is reminiscent of Edwin Astley’s “Danger Man” theme due to the use of the harpsichord.
16. 36:07 — There’s a hair visible at the top right corner of the screen.
17. 44:22–45:50 — Maxie’s costumes during his fight with Steed after he switches out of his street clothes:
    • 44:22 — Maxie’s clown costume
    • 44:44 — old lady
    • 44:54 — ballet dancer (Nureyev)
    • 45:08 — cowboy
    • 45:31 — boxer
    • 45:47 — admiral
    • 45:55 — Cyrano de Bergerac
18. 45:10 — There’s a hair on the lens in the top left corner in the close-up of Maxie as a cowboy.
19. 46:18–46:23 — You can see a gap in the ceiling of the set at top left as Steed fights off Cyrano de Bergerac.
20. 46:23 — There’s a black smudge in the top right corner of the camera lens for a few angles at the end of the fight.
21. 47:46 — Steed is reading Tintin - “Le Lotus Bleu” in French (it wasn’t translated into English until 1983).
22. 48:25 — Steed’s costumes as he gets ready for the opera:
    • 48:26 — Mandarin
    • 48:30 — Admiral
    • 48:35 — Native American
    • 48:39 — tuxedo (with flashing “Eat at Joe’s” sign on the back).
23. Running time: 49′26″
24. Just who is so obsessed with clowns? We have:
    • Maxie and Jennings in clown make-up in Look- (stop me if you’ve heard this one) But There Were These Two Fellers...,
    • the gang of mercenaries wearing clown masks in Have Guns - Will Haggle,
    • Merlin wearing a clown mask in The Morning After,
    • and Miranda Loxton wears a clown costume for the first quarter of Requiem.
25. This episode has a video Q&A and commentary with Linda Thorson, Julian Chagrin and Philip Hawkins on the Lives in the Pictures YouTube channel.

The Transport

Who’s Killing Whom?

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The Fashions