A World of Miraculous Transformations

© 1997 Grant Morrison

THE AVENGERS COMPANION (Alain Carraze & Jean-Luc Putheaud, Titan Books 1997)

A WORLD OF MIRACULOUS TRANSFORMATIONS by Grant Morrison

When I was young, my family used to have an old, broken television set in the bedroom. For years it lay there gathering dust, with its strange, small screen and its cabinet doors. That television set fascinated me; I was convinced that, if I could get it to work, it would display not the current TV shows of the day but programmes that were old and long-forgotten, the ghosts of shows that were running when the set was new. One of the programmes I'd hoped to see was the first Avengers series.

I mention this broken but infinitely mysterious television set because, although part of the attraction of The Avengers is purely nostalgic, it seems to me that the series deserves to be remembered and recognised for reasons other than nostalgia. Like my old TV, The Avengers hinted (and still seems to hint) at a world of miraculous transformation hidden beneath the ordinary and the overlooked. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I dredge up my childhood memories of the series. it's always the same potent images that recur: the giant, lethal game of Snakes and Ladders; the deadly black box in the episode 'Thingumajig'; the London bus, whose top deck has been converted into a mobile office for Mother in 'False Witness'; the murderous golf ball in 'The Thirteenth Hole'. These memorable images confirm for me my contention that shows like The Avengers, and later The Prisoner, were instrumental in identifying and popularising a tradition which I can only describe as English Surrealism.

As is well documented, the original Surrealist Movement of the 1920s picked up and developed a number of ideas which emerged out of the work of the pre-war Futurists and Dadaists. One of the most important of these ideas involved the transformation of ordinary objects by placing them in extraordinary settings. (Duchamp's urinal, Magritte's bowler-hatted men, etc.)

English Surrealism, as a popular aesthetic, was defined and embodied in television series like The Avengers and The Prisoner. Unlike its continental precursor, English Surrealism was distinguished by an element of dark whimsy, which can probably be traced back to Lewis Carroll. What was more unusual and, indeed. more radical was the fact that here was surrealism taken out of the galleries and placed in the living rooms of millions of television viewers. In The Avengers, supremely mundane elements of British life and culture, which had been taken for granted for years, suddenly assumed a new and sinister significance. Undertakers in top hats and frock coats; bus stops and country inns; train stations and toy shops; all were viewed through the magic looking glass of The Avengers and transformed. In the world of John Steed and his partners, country vicars nurtured secret dreams of conquering the world, stately homes were revealed to be Pandora's boxes of amok technology and children's game boards could become the gigantic playgrounds of megalomaniac killers. Even Steed himself, the very epitome of the bourgeois English gentleman, concealed behind his conservative facade the skills of a highly-trained secret agent. It was as though someone had lifted the lid off of the drably cozy familiarity of post-war Britain and revealed a world of vivid delights seething underneath.

It was even more appropriate that all this should occur at a time, in the 1960s, when people were beginning to use chemical means to effect their own transformation of the ordinary. In the series' heyday, the development of The Avengers' style ran almost parallel to (and in some cases, predated) the changes that were taking place in popular culture. Boundaries were being stretched and broken down by new designers, new musicians, new film-makers and, as the black and white world of Merseybeat evolved into Technicolor psychadelia, so too did The Avengers mutate from an urban crime drama into a dazzling hyperreal parody of the entire spy genre. The world of The Avengers became no longer the world we knew but a kaleidoscopic reflection in a funhouse mirror. Style was everything and, in its pace and colour, in its fashions and imagery, The Avengers offered a weekly distillation of the mood of the times.

As a child in front of the television screen, of course, none of this mattered to me. I was simply swept up by the dazzle and flair of the images and bowled along by the vitality of the stories. (When I was six years old, I was given a toy 'John Steed swordstick'. It became a prized possession and lasted for years until it vanished to that place where all interesting toys ultimately go. I'm told now that the swordstick is a rare collectors item!) Watching the series now, I can see that beyond the wit and the imagination, beyond the sixties nostalgia, lies the true appeal of The Avengers as a window into a world where even the most conventional things might suddenly reveal themselves to be miraculous. Using only the everyday elements of British daily life, The Avengers constructed a fantasy world that remains as distinctive and intriguing today as it ever did.

In the end, I think that's one of the major reasons for the continuing popularity of The Avengers. Like my magic television set, the series serves as a reminder of the possibilities for transformation that exist in even the most mundane of objects and situations. It shows us a world where the astonishing and the commonplace are indistinguishable and then remind us that that world, as ever, is our own.