MRS GALE

Ah yes, well, with all that talk of Mrs Peel, it's easy (although, not all THAT easy) to forget about Mrs Gale, and, indeed, all of the other "Avengers" sidekicks who featured in that other rather groovy and groundbreaking 1960s drama conceived by one Sydney Newman.

Tara King, Venus Smith, Dr Keel and his close facsimile, Dr King, who was hastily pencilled in when the original star of the show, Ian Hendry, quite to go on to do bigger and better things.

Ah yes, it's hard to remember now, but in that (mostly) long-lost first series, it was John Steed himself who was playing the part of the "sidekick" most of the time.

Incidentally, we also ought not forget Purdey and Gambit who arrived a little later on when the "New Avengers" appeared in 1976 and, to my young mind, the old show seemed like something talked about reverentially as if it was a legend from out of ancient history, even though the gap was a mere seven years and these days I can find foodstuffs in my kitchen cupboards older than that.

But things always change and, way back at the dawn of the 1960s, when I was nowt but a twinkle, to a certain extent, "The Avengers" proper began during that second year when Mrs Catherine Gale streamrollered her way onto our screens on the back of her rather powerful motorcycle.

Mrs Catherine Gale was played for the better part of two television seasons (until she was whisked away to grapple with that other 1960s spy icon as Miss Pussy Galore) by the literally knockout (just ask the stuntmen!) Honor Blackman, and her portrayal of the independent, free-thinking, leather-clad whirlwind that was Mrs Gale was, of course, what paved the way for Diana Rigg's portrayal of Mrs Peel later on.

Without the first, audiences might never have accepted the second...

Of course, this performance is often lauded as one of the breakthrough roles which helped women become "accepted" in a more dominant capacity on television although, given the departure of Ian Hendry, because so many episodes had already been written for two male protagonists, it just happened to be an act of serendipity that she was written that way, at least at first.

After all, once the producers and writers had seen that audiences quite enjoyed watching this "strong, independent" female character, they played up the implied "kinkiness" and pretty soon she was lifting up her skirts to reveal the occasional stocking top and garter whenever she needed to get her pistol out.

Same old, same old… but, to those crusty old buffers, that's what "independent" meant...

To be fair, Honor Blackman played whatever she was asked to with good enough grace before departing, and she managed to mostly hang onto the strength and dignity of the character in an era when most women who appeared on our TV screens were seldom anything other than the "little woman at home" or disturbing "femmes fatale" out to rock the stability of normal family life.

And it is now popularly accepted that having Mrs Catherine Gale appear in a more than capable capacity on a primetime weekly television series across the entire country was one of the things which led to it becoming more "acceptable" to portray women in those sort of roles on both television and in the real world, and opened all sorts of doors which helped further the cause of feminism at a time when the role of the woman in society was still rather restricted to what men thought it should be.

Look… I'm not making this up, or condoning the attitude, but it's just the way society was structured back then. Some people still like to think that the world should still be like that, and some still act as if it always has been, but things, I like to think, have improved a lot since then. Sometimes it's just the "drip feed" effect of seeing something being treated as "normal" in television dramas that finally helps to "normalise" it to otherwise closed minds. This is one of the ways, in the end, that various minorities have used to become more "accepted" by the big, hostile world at large.

Meanwhile, and getting back to my point, Mrs Catherine Gale seems to be less well remembered than the other characters from "The Avengers" and that's something of a shame. Perhaps she suffers because of her episodes having been made in television studio on videotape and in black-and-white whereas her successors were all shot on lovely expensive film, shifting to colour later on, which meant that those episodes were the ones which got the international sales and the repeat seasons in later years.

So, whilst I was lauding the utter fabulousness of Mrs Peel the other day, I ought not to have neglected to mention Mrs Gale.

After all, for another generation, it was indeed she who was the stuff that dreams are made of.