An old friend of mine, now sadly no longer with us, was a Korean War veteran. He described how difficult it was to adjust to civilian life when he came back home. Everything suddenly seemed boring. In 1966, when The Danger Makers was first broadcast, this would have been a very real problem with which many viewers were familiar. Just over two decades before, the Second World War came to an end, and many military personnel would have returned home and experienced similar feelings to those my friend described. I’m sure most would have had a huge sense of relief, but some would also have developed a nagging feeling that there was something missing in their lives. The Danger Makers is about what happens when ex-military deal with those feelings very badly indeed.

We don’t even need to join any dots for ourselves. What these men are going through is specifically described as akin to a drug addiction. They have left danger behind them, so now they are trying to manufacture some jeopardy in their lives, by doing foolish, life-threatening things: climbing the side of St Paul’s Cathedral; trying to cross the Atlantic in a canoe; playing chicken with other vehicles on the road; dangerous piloting of an aircraft; Russian roulette. They don’t all live to tell the tale of their escapades, and some of those dangerous games also endanger other people. But the biggest crime for these men is “turning chicken”, punishable by death, and a white feather to denote cowardice, another hangover from wartime onto which they cling. It’s an indication of how toxic the championing of bravery and the demonisation of “cowardice” can be.

It is important to recognise that these are not evil people. They are victims of addiction, and we often see their hands shaking. These are frightened men, but they don’t know what else to do. There is only one villain here, and that is the man who is seeking to take advantage of the Danger Makers Club to carry out a crime that will enrich himself. He does not share their view of the world, because for all these unfortunate addicts their descent into the world of crime comes with a code of ethics, and that means there is no reason to do something unless it creates an element of risk to themselves. As soon as they realise that their boss doesn’t share those ethics, and is willing to simply kill an unarmed man in cold blood, the scales fall from their eyes and they walk away. There is no element of risk to him, and ultimately they aren’t looking to be villains. They don’t want to be the baddies. They just want the adrenaline rush, to feed their habit.

This is therefore an extremely well-written and thought-through story. Once again, Steed’s characterisation is spot on. He understands his enemies instinctively and immediately. Something happens that we don’t see very often: both Steed and Emma are captured and chained up at the same time. This breaks the usual pattern of an Avengers episode. Normally one of them remains at liberty to rescue the other. Whilst Emma’s game of giant electric wires is great fun to watch, especially when she is walking across seesaws, the really interesting predicament is the one facing Steed, who ends up with a gun to his head, on the verge of being executed. He very cleverly recognises that there is no element of risk to his captor, and turns that to his advantage. He understands the psychology of his enemy. And not only does he understand that his enemy will be willing to even the score and make it a fair contest, so the jeopardy is shared, he also understands that his enemy will play the game fair, and right there is the weakness he can exploit to escape, leaving a dead body in his wake. It’s just a little bit ruthless, but also entirely believable. The writer does a brilliant job with this one.

The humour is also spot on. There is a great moment where Steed builds up the suspense, opening up a box of chocolates with great care, apparently in fear of a bomb…

“Whatever you do, don’t touch the wrapped ones.”
“Why not?”
“Because I like them.”

And there we have it: Steed’s superpower, the quality that sets him apart from his enemies, that makes him better than them, and able to deal with life’s setbacks so much better than them. He never takes life too seriously. He just has a laugh. My old friend was like that too, having dealt with so many of life’s adversities by having a sense of humour.

Let laughter be your superpower.   RP

The view from across the pond:

In the United States, we grow up with the term “playing chicken” when driving.  In a nutshell, you have two cars plow head on at one another and then wait until the last minute to swerve.  It’s actually REALLY stupid considering the cost of both a car and insurance, but it’s also usually something done by teens and we all know they don’t have the most developed ideas of responsibility out there, do they?   I’d never heard of “chicken running” but it’s pretty much the same thing.  The Danger Makers opens with a loon causing havoc by racing past cars on a motorcycle and causing them to have accidents.  That is, until the rider of the motorcycle misjudges and plows into the lorry and bounces off to his death.  That was when I thought we were in for another comedy, considering how hard I laughed at that point.  Alas, it wasn’t to be and we instead get an episode about how to give soldiers PTSD.

Perhaps it was the timing of the episode for me.  I watched just days after another shooting (which depressingly is about as common these days as saying “I watched after another day the sun came out” but let’s not go all political…), so I wasn’t particularly in love with the idea of PTSD being portrayed, even if only by the villains, as a good thing.  In essence, there’s a group of people who feel the world is too safe (also, this is a surprising script considering when it was written; it would never be written now) and they want to get more of a thrill from life by tempting death.  There’s a moment where General Robertson picks up a pistol, places a bullet in a chamber then plays Russian Roulette.  Sure I was on the edge of my seat, but I also realized this was a deeply disturbing episode.  There’s another moment where Robertson and a fellow officer take 7-second hand grenades and pull the plug and wait to see who chickens out first.  Again, deeply troubling stuff.  (If you want to see that done better, you have to watch the first episode of the BBC’s Sherlock from 2010 where Watson clearly thrives on excitement.  It’s not portrayed in a self-destructive way, which is more than I could say for Robertson.)  To compound matters, Emma is made to walk this double-seesaw device to prove she wants to join their cause that admittedly was scary, but also showcased the lengths Steed and his people will go to in order to solve a case.  Side note: it’s a ridiculous contraption but it is entertaining and it’s probably the best use of padding I’ve seen since I started watching this series.  Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible for Diana Rigg to avoid touching the poles with her handcuffs on, so much of the filming is done in a way that avoids whole body shots so we don’t see how often the metal was resting on the rail.  Still I can’t deny it works very effectively to increase tension.

That does bring to mind some of the other shots that make me twitchy.  When one man is about to jump out a window, the camera goes all woozy as we see how high up he is in some city in the UK, but there are clearly the shadows of trees on his face, which indicate clearly that he’s much closer to the ground and not in a city with mile-high trees.  Look, I’m picking nits because the episode was actually quite good and really didn’t have much to say against it.  Even Steed wins me over when he convinces Robertson to have a game with him for the challenge of it, then cheats because he’s smart enough to know how to beat the bad guy.  (I don’t like cheats, but this just made sense and avoided all the standard tropes.  Sadly, Steed fails to take full advantage, but then, he is the “good guy” so I still give him credit)

Unfortunately for the episode we are forced to wrap up with a cacophonous fight scene that is even harder to take than most from this series because it ends with a call for tea by a woman who clearly doesn’t see the mass of bodies lying everywhere.  It also had the silliness of Steed and Peel fighting superior numbers all of whom pull swords from the same wall-mounted display.  Steed pulls out what looked like either a feather duster or a cat-of-nine-tails and proceeds to use it to blind one of his assailants.  Again, they teeter with the comedy.    It’s like the writers don’t want to end on too heavy a note, so they get lost looking for how best to give us a light ending.  The issue is that we go from tense drama to very tense absurdist drama to action to comedy in very quick order and it barely works.  This is one episode that would have benefited from less comedy, or more specifically less comedy around the ending.  Where comedy works is when Steed delicately opens a box of chocolates as if it’s rigged to explode:

JS: Whatever you do, don’t touch the wrapped ones.
EP: Why not?
JS: Because I like them!

As Steed and Peel ride off in yet another clichéd ending, I wish someone had been around to help guide the writing just a bit.  It could have been a very strong contender for one of the top episodes of the season.   ML

Read next in the Junkyard… The Avengers: A Touch of Brimstone