“Red noses – what does that conjure up?”
“Inebriates.”

It also conjures up an image of clowns, source of a common phobia called coulrophobia. The first link on Google suggests that it is not a well understood phobia, but I think it’s simple enough. They are all evil. Ok, no they aren’t (probably), but I think it’s fairly obvious why a lot of people have a negative reaction to clowns. They play havoc with the uncanny valley response. I wouldn’t say that I’m a sufferer of coulrophobia as such, but at the same time I don’t actually like clowns. I recently found a photograph showing myself as a child providing the piano music on stage for a clown performer. I had blanked that completely out of my memory, for some reason, so it seems my brain was pretty determined to forget the fact that I had ever been in the same room as a clown.

I’ve never liked Punch and Judy either, and that might be to do with the uncanny valley response as well, or maybe because it’s comedy brutality for little children. Punch and Judy is a form of entertainment that exists to this day, as are clowns, but maybe it’s time for them to be consigned to the past. This episode explores what happens when some performance artists find that they are not wanted any more. The world has moved on without them. There’s some truth in that, because the forms of entertainment represented were once hugely popular, but rarely draw huge audiences any more. It’s probably still possible to make a living as a ventriloquist (another uncanny valley tormentor), but I don’t suppose many of them could fill a theatre.

“He couldn’t adapt himself to the new.”

So this is a representation of what might happen when somebody’s life’s work becomes no longer relevant. Skills do become irrelevant all the time. Things people work hard to be really good at can become redundant. When this episode was first broadcast, a big example that was in living memory for a lot of viewers was the change from silent cinema to talkies, and a lot of big stars “couldn’t adapt”. More recently, a lot of skills in various jobs have been replaced with computer systems. The Avengers being The Avengers, things are taken to extremes, and the response of a group of entertainers to finding themselves put out to pasture is to go on a killing spree.

It’s all hugely entertaining, although I believe this is a marmite episode for fans. I loved it. This is a show that often tries to be funny, but rarely raises more than a half smile, but this episode had me laughing out loud at times. Maybe I’m childish, but although I dislike clowns those giant feet did make me laugh, especially when the evidence is shown of a clown shoe footprint. There are some quality comedy actors involved too. Jimmy Jewel is great as Maxie Martin, Bernard Cribbins gets to die laughing, and as I once read in a review of the Doctor Who story City of Death, just when you think it can’t get any better, John Bloody Cleese turns up. By the way, that business of copyrighting clown faces by painting them on eggs is a real thing. Type “clown egg museum” into Google images if you really want to freak yourself out. But I doubt they are actually raw eggs, stored on free-standing shelves, barely a shoulder-width apart. It was worth the artistic licence to see Cleese’s character killed by a clown and his body surrounded by broken eggs, which crunch under foot when Steed and Emma show up. So bizarre. There’s obviously little attempt at realism here. The episode doesn’t even work as a mystery, as the identity of the mastermind is blatantly obvious. He disappears out of the episode early on, and he’s clearly going to be revealed inside that Punch and Judy show. But this no longer seems to be a series that’s interested in making us believe anything we are seeing. It’s as much a form of light entertainment as a pantomime horse, and about as sophisticated. I don’t mind that one bit. I’ve never enjoyed an Avengers fight scene as much as the one between Steed and Maxie, with those mid-fight costume changes. Steed even punches Maxie’s fake nose right off his face at one point. This was a show that was made for adults, but invited them to be childish again. Who wouldn’t want to accept that invitation? Let me know if you agree. Honk your nose once for yes, or twice for no.   RP

The view from across the pond:

With just about 20 episodes to go with a show that is remarkably outdated, I’ve been struggling to push myself.  I keep saying to myself, “you’ve got 20 more, just push on!”  I sat down to wait for food to be delivered, which too longer than I’d have liked, but that’s life.  Nevertheless, I sat down to watch another piece of drivel with a title that was just too long to ever retype.  And laughed for nearly an hour…

Look – (Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One) But There Were These Two Fellers… is a ridiculous title and the episode does require you to check your brain at the door, give it to FedEx, have them ship it to an overseas butcher and have him make mince pies out of it but it has a stellar cast that makes you laugh for most of the episode.  The standout performance is John Cleese as Marcus.  Unsurprising, really.  The moment he comes to the door when Tara knocks, before he’s even opened it, I was laughing.  Cleese has a fantastic way of looking annoyed by the most basic things.

It’s honestly hard to acknowledge the plot here, but here goes… Cleese works at a registry office where all clowns nationwide have to be registered and their faces painted on eggs (which IMDb trivia says is a real thing…).  These eggs are left in open shelves by the door with a narrow walkway between them.  The sign on the door is absolute farce, being so massive that it would be impossible to miss even from space.  This sequence comes no closer to sense than Pluto has ever come close to Earth, but it makes for some ridiculously funny comedy.

Coupled with Cleese, we also have that most loved of British actors, Bernard Cribbins as Marler.  Always great seeing him onscreen, but his personality is just too silly to really connect with, laughing at everything he says like someone was constantly telling him a great joke.  His room has so much excess paper waste that he has to wade through it to get to the door.  Granted, some of his lines are funny but he could have dialed it back a bit.  (But make no mistake: he’s still a highlight!)

Steed gets some fun moments with the chief villain who does the fastest quick-changes in history, going from one outfit to another within the blink of an eye.  Ridiculous but 100% memorable.  This show will go weeks with tedium and then suddenly hit you with one like this that is absolute comedy gold, capturing the very things I would want to see on a regular basis.

That doesn’t change the ridiculous-factor.  We have a bunch of eccentrics that make me look as normal as rain in Seattle who take orders from Punch and Judy.  They all treat their meetings like comedy acts and get orders to commit murder without knowing who is giving them the orders.  This is made abundantly clear when they are told that the last in a series of targets would be left alive.  That’s because Seagrave (John Woodvine) is the would-be target and he’s running the Punch and Judy show.   You might as well have a documentary about the real live Easter Bunny, this is so outré!

I mean, this is the episode that gives us a plaster cast of a footprint made on solid ground and it’s not even an imprint!  Another man is killed by a cartoon-style bomb with the word “BOMB” written on it, which he proceeds to hold until it detonates.  Another is almost killed with a pie made of quick setting glue to the face.  A classic, I’m sure. Marcus is killed by slipping on a banana peel (and wiping out the entire English registry of clowns…).  Another man is killed (hilariously) by pulling a red carpet out from under him making him fall out the window.  Now, bear in mind, this red carpet had to be pushed under a closed door, past the two people sitting right in front of it, and then the perpetrators of the crime would have to know when to pull.   The camera watches the man fall and I burst out laughing deeply.  I have a warped sense of humor.

On top of that, the two killers are clearly meant to be a play on the Marx Brothers complete with horn honking and leg holding shenanigans.  (“Zooty, zoot zoot…”)  Jimmy Jewel and Julian Chagrin play the two worst killers in the history of the show, dressed as a clown and a mime and who dance to a game show tune every time they kill someone.  I mean honestly, this episode has to be seen to be believed.  I think if I went to work tomorrow and told someone about this, they’d say, “I don’t believe you.  I’m going to have to go watch this for myself!”  They’d come back and tell people too, but heaven help us if they ever pull these episodes off Amazon because if this episode couldn’t be corroborated, the claimant would be locked up in a mental hospital.  Actually, I’m betting that’s what happened to the writer of this whackadoo production (which by the way is Doctor Who writer Dennis Spooner).

The supporting cast makes this episode memorable, along with crazy antics unlike any I’ve seen before.  Tara has a win too, explaining a much-needed fact about camels in Alaska.  I’ll memorize that in case it comes up in Jeopardy one of these nights.  “It is the key feature of Northern Alaska.”  “What is: absence of camels!”  Unfortunately, Steed isn’t as good.  When he goes to see Marler, he has to find a note left on the desk which has fallen into the sea of notes.  With a room full of them, he starts at the farthest point from the phone which has been yanked down off the desk which would only be the most obvious place to start.  It ends up being the note he’s sitting on too…   He then leaves the dead man under a mound of paper for the cleaning crew to deal with.  The winner of the Not My Problem award goes to: John Steed!

This has been one of the most bizarre episodes I’ve ever seen and I don’t regret it one bit.  I don’t know if this is for better or worse, but I wasn’t given a return label for my brain so I’ve no idea what this will do to my continued viewing of The Avengers, but I’ll have to try another episode to find out.  Fingers crossed.  Wouldn’t it be nice if the last 20 episodes were as much fun as this one was?!  ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: Have Guns – Will Haggle