1.18 - Double Danger

[Allard]

LOST EPISODE - episode summary from The Avengers Dissolute website:

Two thieves steal valuable diamonds, but one is shot as he escapes. Steed has no clues, until Carol decyphers a call for help from Dr Keel: he is being forced to treat the wounded man. The man dies, but gives Keel "Bartholomew's Plot" as a clue to the location of the hidden diamonds. Keel is forced to reveal this clue to the gang or they will kill Carol, but Steed already has the diamonds by the time they arrive at Bartholomew's cottage. The police wrap-up the case as the Avengers go to dinner.

[Frankymole]

The write up at https://www.dissolute.com.au/the-avenge ... html#other says "Gerald Verner wrote the episode but, displeased with changes made to the script by John Lucarotti, crossed out his name on his own copy and printed: "[by] John Lucarotti - Put on under Gerald Verner". When the episode received scathing reviews in the press, Verner wrote to the publications, laying the blame squarely at the producers' and editors' feet, effectively burning all his bridges. He was never asked to write for "The Avengers" again. There was a great injustice in this, as Verner's original script is clearly superior to the cliché-ridden and incomprehensible rewrite."

Is the original script available anywhere, e.g. on a DVD extra?

It's ironic that John Lucarotti faced a similar problem in 1966, with his third and final* Doctor Who script "The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve" (a "double danger" episode since it was the first story to feature a living doppelganger of the Doctor, rather than an android or other artificial copy) being so heavily reworked by story editor Donald Tosh that he didn't recognise a lot of it; he got to redress things when the novelisation was commissioned in the 1980s and reinstated most of his original ideas.


* except for a fourth one, written in the 1970s long after the others, which was deemed unsuitable and Lucarotti was paid off, with the story rewritten from scratch by BBC script editor Robert Holmes using only the same general setting, a space station for which sets may have already been commissioned.

[dissolute]

Yes, so on the Tunnel of Fear PDF archive there should be a rehearsal script for "Double Danger", which is Verner's original, and a camera script, which is Lucarotti's rewrite.

I'm struggling with how I handle it for my next update! Do I write it twice, list differences? It's going to be hard. I'm currently writing it from the camera script but I know there's this elephant in the room.

[Frankymole]

In McGinlay's book, I think the episode has a second write-up in an appendix giving the original version of the story, because it was altered so much. Usually I'm in favour of reading the major alterations as notes after the main synopses, but if it's vastly different then "excerpts" like that may be hard to follow as an alternative story without seeming disjointed. It's a lot of work doing two different synopses, and the (inferior) finalised version is probably the correct one to document on a page about the televised series, I guess. But the original intrigues me more! A dilemma indeed.

Even the Big Finish version feels riddled with clichés but that's the fault of the script not their adaption. Feels like a bad parody of a Jimmy Cagney gangster movie. There's even an "why, I oughtta!" The music's great though.

Leonard White read the summary for the Tele-Snap and production stills reconstruction on the DVDs. I wonder if he thought all the episodes were this plodding and he'd misremembered the series, because so far Series 1 has mostly been extremely interesting and varied.

[mousemeat]

In McGinlay's book, I think the episode has a second write-up in an appendix giving the original version of the story, because it was altered so much. Usually I'm in favour of reading the major alterations as notes after the main synopses, but if it's vastly different then "excerpts" like that may be hard to follow as an alternative story without seeming disjointed. It's a lot of work doing two different synopses, and the (inferior) finalised version is probably the correct one to document on a page about the televised series, I guess. But the original intrigues me more! A dilemma indeed.

Even the Big Finish version feels riddled with clichés but that's the fault of the script not their adaption. Feels like a bad parody of a Jimmy Cagney gangster movie. There's even an "why, I oughtta!" The music's great though.

Leonard White read the summary for the Tele-Snap and production stills reconstruction on the DVDs. I wonder if he thought all the episodes were this plodding and he'd misremembered the series, because so far Series 1 has mostly been extremely interesting and varied.

well, overall season one episodes did skirt the region of plodding..as plot lines, characters, dialogue was being fleshed out in my opinion..

[Frankymole]

This is a rare instance, though, of a witty script being turned into something resembling hack work; it's hard to understand how it happened, as Lucarotti is normally a lyrical and intelligent writer so I doubt all the changes are due to him - perhaps a committee of unnamed would-be script editors are to blame (perhaps told to make the sets more interesting than a bungalow and a newsagent/tobacco shop), or the director amending things before and during rehearsals.

The original script has some good dialogue, more eccentric character stuff, and is ahead of its time with Steed being inventive with his umbrella in fight scenes, tricking people that it's a gun, etc. Plus an amusing tag scene which was totally excised.

[dissolute]

I've started reading them both and I see it starts well with lots of the dialogue kept although I confess I'm glad the melodramatic bit with Keel being blindfolded by Brady in the car has been removed.

[mousemeat]

This is a rare instance, though, of a witty script being turned into something resembling hack work; it's hard to understand how it happened, as Lucarotti is normally a lyrical and intelligent writer so I doubt all the changes are due to him - perhaps a committee of unnamed would-be script editors are to blame (perhaps told to make the sets more interesting than a bungalow and a newsagent/tobacco shop), or the director amending things before and during rehearsals.

The original script has some good dialogue, more eccentric character stuff, and is ahead of its time with Steed being inventive with his umbrella in fight scenes, tricking people that it's a gun, etc. Plus an amusing tag scene which was totally excised.

had to be a rare occurrence...i.e. witty and snappy script, being reduced to hack work..any idea why ? then again, a lot of season one, was listless at times, as the writers were trying to find their niche...

[dissolute]

Series 1 gets a bad rap for being listless and standard hard-boiled thriller but it seems to have been anything but for the most part.

[dissolute]

I'm trying to work out what this line would have been, it's not in Verner's version at all and seems to have been edited along the way:

KEEL: I 'm waiting for a t :,":',;, ,·t God to come to his senses and g%~:, this
man to hospital.

The second bit of scrubbed text has been changed to "get" but the first one is just two ts, surely it couldn't have been "twat"!
(Too many characters anyway, it looks like 3 characters have been rubbed out)