Series 5 — Episode 3
Escape In Time

Plot summary

Mrs. Peel’s Grand Hunt Ball invitation turns out to be a summons from Steed, and they set out to discover what’s become of the world’s most wanted criminals.
They’re on the trail of Josino and follow him as he acquires a stuffed toy and a shaving cut. Steed takes the same path and ends up going back through time to 1790! Emma follows, much to the gang’s surprise and confusion, and finds herself in the Tudor era after the mastermind cottons onto her. A leap across time saves Emma from the stocks and exposes Thyssen’s fraud.
Exit the Avengers in a veteran taxi — Emma in the driver’s seat and Steed with a face full of soot.

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Prologue

Ministry agent Clyde Paxton (Clifford Earl) investigates the study of a well-appointed country house. In the middle of the rooms is a pedestal with five death masks of generations of the family — all strangely similar. He enters a small alcove and someone pulls the lever of a slot machine, causing the corridor to swirl around him, and Paxton loses consciousness. He comes to some time later, finding the room furnished in an Elizabethan style, the pedestal now holding a solitary head. He turns and is shot by the house’s Elizabethan scion, Bruno Thyssen (Peter Bowles)…

Act 1

Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) dresses for a hunt ball, but John Steed (Patrick Macnee) has altered her invitation¹ with a summons for the case and she goes with him to the morgue instead. There, Clapham (Geoffrey Bayldon) shows them Paxton’s body, fished recently from the Thames and shot with an old bullet which Mrs. Peel accurately identifies:

EMMA: A Sixteenth Century gun of medium calibre, probably a sporting piece. Used almost exclusively by noblemen in the Elizabethan period.
STEED: With that answer you gain ten points; your team goes into the lead.
EMMA: It’s curiously archaic…
CLAPHAM: Ah! But the problem is bang up to date!

Clapham tells them Paxton was onto an escape route for the world’s leading criminals, who are disappearing without trace one by one. Back at Steed’s apartment, they go through the case files of the missing criminals² and Mrs. Peel mistakes one of their agents as one of the wrong-doers.

EMMA: Now there’s an evil face, if ever I saw one.
STEED: That’s Tubby Vincent! He’s on our side!

‘Tubby’ Vincent (Roger Booth) meanwhile is investigating the same country house and finds a note — ‘Josino arriving from South America. Make contact 12.30pm Mackidockie Court’ with the drawing of a black crocodile on it. Unfortunately, he suffers a similar fate to Paxton, sent back in time and brutally stabbed by the Jacobean ancestor, Edwin Thyssen (Peter Bowles) but he knocks Edwin down and escapes the house.

Some time later he nearly wrecks Steed’s doorbell by leaning on it for so long as he nears death — then leaves them the note as the only clue after he dies on Steed’s carpet without saying a word.

The Avengers are on hand when Colonel Josino (Richard Montez) arrives with a toy crocodile under his arm,³ and they have to pretend to be amorously kissing in a doorway to avoid detection.⁴ Josino is given a giraffe in exchange for his crocodile by Vesta (Judy Parfitt), Emma peels off to follow Vesta after this exchange while Steed continues to pursue Josino.

Colonel Josino then takes the new toy to a stall run by Parker (Nicholas Smith), who gives him a kangaroo with a note in its pouch. Josino eats the note and visits a barber, humorously named T. Sweeney.⁵ The strange, skinny, cross-eyed Todd Sweeney (Edward Caddick) comes out and grabs him by the collar before dragging him to a chair before closing the blinds so Steed can’t see in.

Mrs. Peel meanwhile has tailed Vesta into the countryside but strays a bit too close and tips Vesta off. Josino emerges from the barber’s with a plaster on his cheek and a toy elephant, which he takes to an Indian art gallery. When he leaves, Steed is delayed by a cluster of nuns and when he catches up he discovers he’s following a double and the Colonel has vanished.

So too has Vesta, who has dumped the black crocodile from the luggage rack of her MG then sends Mitchell (Rocky Taylor), who is incongruously dressed for a fox hunt in hunting pinks despite being on a motorbike,⁶ to take care of Mrs. Peel. She manages to evade the huntsman’s attempt to run her down with his motorbike,⁷ and it crashes and explodes.

Act 2

Steed finds Mrs. Peel sewing plush toys in her flat and she hands him a giraffe to use on the trail.⁸ She follows him about Mackidockie Court where Parker hands him a plush kangaroo, just as he had with Josino. Mrs. Peel rather obviously watches him pass, and stoops to peer in the window as Sweeney closes the blind. Sweeney directs Steed to the art gallery where he hands the elephant to Anjali (Imogen Hassall) who imperiously orders him not to ask questions and obey implicitly.

Meanwhile outside, Mrs. Peel is rolling up her magazine to pretend that it’s a telescope and peering through the window. Anjali tells Steed he’s now under the protection of Ganesha, the Elephant God and ‘Remover of Obstacles’.

STEED: How do I get the Ganesha to shine on me?
ANJALI: What would you give for an escape, for freedom, for complete liberty?
STEED (jokingly): Half my kingdom.
ANJALI: Our terms exactly.

Anjali orders him to turn right after leaving the shop, then left past the barber’s. Mrs Peel follows him at a distance but is also obstructed by a gaggle of nuns, and when she catches up to Steed she discovers it’s her earlier assailant Mitchell in disguise⁹ and she accidentally kills him when they fight and he falls into an empty concrete water tank.

Steed meanwhile is blindfolded and driven off, accompanied by Vesta and Parker, to the country house where he meets Waldo Thyssen (Peter Bowles) — who is concerned that he hasn’t heard of his exploits. Steed disarmingly explains he hasn’t been caught yet and tells him his ill-gotten gains are in diamonds.

Thyssen shows him his client list, all the men they had been investigating, ending with Josino. Thyssen suggests Steed can see Josino if he wishes, even though he’ll never be there, and plays a film of the Epsom Derby from 1904.

STEED: Huh, a little before my time.
THYSSEN: Not necessarily.
(JOSINO IS SEEN COMING AWAY FROM A BOOKMAKER’S STAND)
STEED: And I would have thought before his time too! … Colonel Josino.

Back at her flat, Mrs. Peel is stuffing another giraffe for her ticket to the escape route while at the house Thyssen is explaining to Steed that he can send a man back to the past, where he can never be found; he offers Steed a trial run so he can see that it’s possible.

STEED: Well, I always had a hankering for the Eighteenth Century… Gadzooks, and stap me vitals! Now where shall I arrive, Waterloo?

Thyssen tells him he is only travelling in time and will arrive at the house, which has been in his family since the Fifteenth Century, back in 1790. He indicates the five heads on a pedestal, his forebears from previous eras, and briefly tells Steed who they were. Steed considers Samuel the philanderer is more his style than Matthew, the Elizabethan torturer.
Now dressed the part, he is instructed to go through the doors and Thyssen pulls the lever, the corridor becoming a whirling time tunnel and the calendar ticking back to 1790…

Act 3

Steed awakes a short time later and finds the room more or less the same, but appointed in blue Wedgewood and Dutch masters and the pedestal has only three heads on it.¹⁰ Peering out the window he sees a horse-drawn coach arrive with Samuel and his ‘doxy’ inside. Steed hides when some of the residents barge into the room; they are in Regency attire and amorously scamper though the door he had come through earlier. When Steed tries to follow them it becomes the time tunnel again and he once again is pulled along it then passes out. When he comes to a while later, he is back in 1967 with Waldo Thyssen, who says he can now purchase a one way ticket to the past.

STEED: The price?
THYSSEN: Well, you said you had diamonds, I am inordinately fond of diamonds…

Steed says he can’t put his hands on them right away so Thyssen says they will be in touch in a day or two, but he must leave as he arrived, blindfolded.

THYSSEN: Forgive me, but it’s our precaution against…
STEED:Against unwelcome intruders.

Mrs. Peel is meanwhile trying the escape route herself, much to the consternation of the gang members. When she reaches the barber’s she runs her chin thoughtfully, nods to herself and enters, and Sweeney gives a cross-eyed double-take when he sees he’s about to lather up a woman’s face. At the art gallery, Anjali complains that she should have been warned and is about to contact Head Office when Mrs. Peel cuts in quickly to stop her cover being blown.

EMMA: Head Office already know, they were my original contact.
ANJALI: Even so… I ought to…
EMMA: I was told to expect an efficient operation, the minimum of fuss… if this is an example of your efficiency —
ANJALI: Wait! I should have been warned…

Anjali give Emma the same directions as she gave Steed and when she walks down the alley behind the barber’s, hands rip through the fake paper wall and drag her through it with Vesta stepping out disguised as Mrs. Peel to take her place. Moments after becoming Mrs. Peel’s double, Vesta realises she’s disguised as the woman who was following her before and turns back but the wall has been replaced with a solid one and she’s too late to stop Parker and Sweeney who have already taken Mrs. Peel to Thyssen.

Some time later, Parker removes her blindfold and she is surprised to see the heads on the pedestal — more so when she sees Waldo peering at her though them. Meanwhile, Steed calls at Mrs. Peel’s flat¹¹ and, finding her sewing gear out, realises she may be in trouble.

Steed sets off with Clapham to try to find Thyssen’s Fifteenth Century house but as he was blindfolded a turkey farm is their best clue. Mrs. Peel meanwhile is being introduced to the idea of escaping to the past and peruses the heads on the pedestal.

THYSSEN: Victorian?
EMMA: I hardly think they’d be amused.
THYSSEN: No, perhaps not… women then, well, they lacked your … independence.
EMMA: I’m thoroughly emancipated.
THYSSEN: Mmmm… Does Elizabethan appeal to you?
EMMA: Not at all — the men were so… tiny.

Thyssen says just as well, his sadistic ancestor Matthew was alive then. Instead he suggests the 1790s, which delights her¹², although Waldo’s somewhat lascivious attention delights her less:

EMMA: Ah! Georgian!
THYSSEN: A mannered, gracious age. Women has their say then… and men appreciated them. And you, Mrs. Peel.. you n-n-need to be appreciated.
EMMA (turning away, unimpressed): I … appreciate your … appreciation. When do I leave?

Thyssen suggests there’s no time like the present. Meanwhile, Clapham and Steed have arrived at the turkey farm and Steed has just determined where the house must be when Vesta drives past them and runs into the house before they arrive.

In the meantime, Mrs. Peel has dressed in a purple silk robe à la française with white stockings and a light grey powdered wig, which Thyssen thinks suits her and suggest she might rival Pompadour as a beauty of the era. She reminds him that would only be if she took up full-time residency and he gets the time tunnel ready.

She has just entered when Vesta enters, informing Thyssen that Mrs. Peel was the one who followed the escape route, and he decides to divert her to meet his cruel Tudor ancestor, Matthew, in 1570 instead.¹³

Mrs. Peel wakes in a stark stone room, with apparently only one head on the pedestal — and Josino’s body in an oaken trunk. She can’t open the door so goes to try the windows and the pedestal head revolves slowly and opens its eyes, revealing it to be the sadistic Matthew Thyssen (Peter Bowles) in the flesh. She tries to escape, managing to open the doors, but a hooded executioner (Terry Plummer) bars her way.

Act 4

Clapham and Steed pull up outside the house, which Clapham dismisses as not being Fifteenth Century,¹⁴ but the image of Ganesha swinging from a nearby signpost convinces Steed this is the place.

Inside Mrs. Peel is locked in some stocks¹⁵ and interrogated by Matthew Thyssen, who demands to know who she is and how she came there.

THYSSEN: These strange clothes you wear, they’re the devils’ work. Designed to daze and to bewitch a man’s senses. To inflame him to lust!
EMMA: You should see me four hundred years from now.
THYSSEN: You are a heretic, a bawd, a witch!
(MRS. PEEL LAUGHS LOUDLY AT HIM UNTIL HE PULLS OFF HER WIG)
EMMA: I can think of some names to call you too. Short, up-to-date, highly descriptive names.

Matthew gets angry and pulls her hair then threatens to loosen her tongue violently. Meanwhile Clapham and Steed approach the house but Sweeney spots them and radios to warn Vesta. Clapham is knocked down by the butt of Sweeney’s shotgun and he turns it on Steed who sprays knock-out gas at him from his umbrella tip.

Back inside, Thyssen shocks Mrs. Peel by pulling out a branding iron and handing it to the grinning executioner to heat up.

Steed enters the house and Vesta ambushes him with a pistol but he quickly overpowers her. A short time later he has handcuffed her to a pillar; he pulls the cables from the time machine and pulls the handle, the tumblers ending on 0000 and a Roman coin dropping into the return slot.

Thyssen tells the executioner to keep heating the iron, which he doesn’t think hot enough yet. Meanwhile Steed passes through the rooms of the different eras in the house, defeating a Georgian redcoat (Joe Dunne) and Parker, dressed as a Cavalier, then finally bursts in on Thyssen and the executioner, much to Mrs. Peel’s relief.

He frees her and they overcome the villains, Thyssen anachronistically pulling a pistol on them and revealing, of course, that all the Thyssens were Waldo. He’s overcome and they return through the centuries, and the ‘time machine’ — which was just simply lights, mirrors and sleeping gas ¹⁶ — to the modern study.

STEED: Back into the 1960s: Next stop the moon!
(MRS. PEEL SPOTS THE HANDCUFFED VESTA)
EMMA: Didn’t we get the vote?

Epilogue

Later, at Mrs. Peel’s flat, Steed offers her an escape route — to a party, he has a taxi waiting.
The taxi is an ancient Edwardian Unic taxi which has escaped its time, Mrs. Peel suggesting it’d be safer to go by horse. Sure enough, Steed gets a face full of soot as Emma tries to start the taxi while he pushes it.

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1. Steed’s summons are always on improbably altered items or places, this time he has seemingly managed to re-engrave Mrs. Peel’s invitation. ⭮
2. Steed stops at one point to make yet another disparaging remark about another of his surely fictitious aunties: “Now there’s a face full of avarice… ha!, reminds me of an auntie of mine!” ⭮
3. Josino passes a Daily Mail headline banner asking “Where is Blake?”, indicating that this scene at least was filmed after 22 October 1966 when the Russian double agent George Blake escaped Wormwood Scrubs prison. ⭮
4. The scene is played like a pantomime, with them ducking into doorways and behind objects while otherwise very obviously following Josino. ⭮
5. A reference to Sweeney Todd, the (fictional) demon barber of Fleet Street who murdered customers with a straight razor. ⭮
6. This encapsulates this series of The Avengers, mixing the traditional and familiar with an unlikely and incongruous twist. ⭮
7. But only just — stunt woman Cyd Child relates the story that the second unit director, Richard Dalton, kept reshooting the sequence because they weren’t close enough, and eventually the bike actually hit her leg as she leapt out of the way, after which she went up to Dalton and asked, “Was that close enough?” The sequence where it hits her is the take that made it into the final episode so his answer was clearly “yes”. ⭮
8. Steed comments that he didn’t know she could sew and she cheekily replies, “Well, our relationship hasn’t been exactly domestic, has it?” ⭮
9. This is very meta because Rocky Taylor was frequently Patrick Macnee’s stunt double and stand-in is playing Mitchell pretending to be Steed. ⭮
10. There’s a continuity error here, the scene starts with a close-up of Samuel’s head, but is surely from before the step back in time as Steed counts only Matthew, Bruno, and Edwin’s heads when he gets up and looks at it. When Steed returns to 1967 it’s the same close-up. ⭮
11. Once again Steed lets himself in to Mrs. Peel’s flat by using a secret button at the top of the door. ⭮
12. She and Steed have similar tastes, she’s probably a massive Bridgerton fan. ⭮
13. Why does he pull the level on the machine, given everything is fake? My guess is it’s to alert his team to prepare the room and get in costume for the Elizabethan era. ⭮
14. The house is Starveacres, 16 Watford Road, Radlett and large houses like this were not built in the area until the Nineteenth Century. Starveacres probably dates to the 1840s. ⭮
15. Bondage in The Avengers once again, but it's much tamer this time as the holes are too large and would never hold her. ⭮
16. It’s very Scooby Doo. ⭮