Welcome

Welcome to Feather Dusters at 400 Yards, my blog about the British television series The Avengers. There’s a lot of cool stuff to explore in this groundbreaking series that spanned the entire decade of the 1960s: the characters, the performances, scene and episode analysis, technical aspects of the production, and more. Plus there are pages for Avengers fanfiction, music videos, and fan art! Links to audio versions of my blogs and fanfic are available on the podcasts page. So click on a tag or a category or something in the navigation menu, or just keep scrolling, and explore along with me.

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If you’re using my blog as a resource for your own research and writing about The Avengers or 1960s television, please be sure to give me proper credit. My pen name here is therealavengers, and you can hyperlink the blog(s) you refer to if you’re writing online, or you can use whatever citation style is appropriate if you’re writing in other formats.

I also maintain two other blogs, A Dish of Orts (ramblings about a variety of topics) and Maunderlust (meta on books, film, and non-Avengers television).

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School Days (Golden Rule Optional)

One trope employed at whiles throughout The Avengers is that of the school as a front for evildoing. I count a total of eleven episodes that use some kind of a school as either part of the setting or else as the cover for the villains’ dastardly plots, or both:

• School for Traitors (Season 2): villains exploiting students via blackmail
• Charmers (Season 3): school to turn men into gentlemen
• What the Butler Saw (Season 4): school for butlers
• Quick-Quick-Slow Death (Season 4): dance school
• How to Succeed … at Murder (Season 4): exercise class
• Sense of History (Season 4): a professor and his coterie of students out to change the world by force
• The Master Minds (Season 4): a MENSA-style retreat
• Correct Way to Kill (Season 5): redo of Charmers
• Something Nasty in the Nursery (Season 5): nanny school
• The Interrogators (Season 6): fake government training facility
• Invasion of the Earthmen (Season 6): training academy for spacemen

Some Mumblings about Tara King

Today is Honor Blackman’s birthday (happy birthday, Honor!), and so a lot of folks over on the tumblr Avengers fandom have been posting stuff about Honor and about Cathy Gale. Reading all the cool things people were writing about Cathy and about the way Honor played her triggered an idea about Tara King (yeah, I know it’s a weird path, but stay with me). Basically I think I figured out why Tara King is the least successful of Steed’s partners in Seasons 2 through 6.

Tara King and Female Physicality in The Avengers

Fight scenes are an important part of each Avengers episode, whether the fights are a quick scuffle to get away from a villain or the big battle at the end that vanquishes the bad guys and puts things to rights. Starting with Season 2 and the advent of badass judoka Cathy Gale, the female leads had at least as much fighting time as Steed did, and possibly even more in Seasons 2 and 3. (I don’t know for sure because I haven’t gone through those seasons and counted, but I’d be willing to bet that Cathy thrashes more baddies than Steed does.)

These instances of combat aren’t just moments that advance the plot and add excitement to the adventure: they also say some important things about the characters. I’ve already explored facets of the combat aspect of the show in some other blogs (links at the foot of this post), but here I want to talk about Tara King as a combatant and about Steed’s responses to Tara’s physicality, in contrast both to the response of Tara’s friend Teddy in “My Wildest Dream” and especially in contrast to the dynamic between Steed and Cathy Gale.