The Avengers
4.9: Room Without a
View
If The Gravediggers’ eccentricity feels
entirely natural, Room Without a View’s
seems plastered onto a standard issue spy plot, one that wastes the talents of
the majority of its cast and leaves Steed polishing off the best table
leavings.
Even the premise of
Roger Marshall’s teleplay is the sort of thing we’ve heard every other week,
with seven physicists having disappeared “over
the past year or so”, accompanied by then-topical references to the Brain
Drain. One of boffins has resurfaced, though, Dr Wadkin (Peter Madden, coming
on like Father Jack), who “suddenly
popped up in the middle of the chop suey”.
Lest this seem like a casually
racist reference to Wadkin’s wife Anna (Jeanne Roland of You Only Live Twice), Marshall tempers Steed’s stereotyping by having
her observe the doctor can’t bear to be around her anymore: “It’s because I’m Chinese that my husband
can’t stand the sight of me. It’s like that bad joke; now we all look alike to
him”.
Carter: In a Chessman Hotel, all service
is superlative.
Yes, Marshall has been
watching The Manchurian Candidate,
quite overtly grafting a brainwashing plot line onto the otherwise innocuous
Chessman Hotel setting, in which the kidnapped are led to believe they have
been sent to a prison camp in Manchuria (that it is actually a mock-up of one
in North Korea may be intended to emphasise such blasé stereotyping). Add in
the Canton Chinese Laundry and some yellow face, and Steed’s stunt double
pulling a rickshaw at the coda, and the attempts at sensitivity are, shall we
say, somewhat insufficient. The broader problem with the episode, however, is
that this simply isn’t inventive stealing. It only ever feels like a cheap
rip-off.
Carter: I, er, hope you’ll give us your award of merit, sir.
Steed: You mustn’t ask that! Makes me
quite nervous. I’m likely to get quite severe indigestion.
So it’s fortunate that
Steed, posing as M Gourmet, the famous food critic, is on hand to enliven the
proceedings. He has decent foils in hotel manager Carter (Philip Latham, The White Dwarf, and considerably
livelier than as the final Borusa in The
Five Doctors) and Paul Whitsun-Jones, Sir Charles in the previous Season’s The Wringer and Man with Two Shadows, and of course the Marshall in The Mutants).
The latter, a fat man
with thin blood (he maintains the room temperature at 80 degrees) is on a diet
– a pea and mineral water for lunch, forgoing the banana – living vicariously through his critic (“He’s very much looking forward to testing
your reputation as a gastronome” – “Delighted!”
responds Steed) and mortified when “Gourmet” informs him that salted Normandy
butter was used on the rye bread. Steed also gets quite carried away describing
his Cuban cigar (“Rolled against the
thigh du jeune fille”).
Carter: For a receptionist, you
undertake a great many tasks, Mrs Peel.
Mrs Peel: As a receptionist, I expect to,
Mr Carter.
Emma, having decried
the suggestion of going undercover (“I
dislike the idea of working in a hotel”), soon finds herself in hot water
when she comes under suspicion, gets gassed in the dreaded Room 621 and
interrogated by a Chinese soldier and a made-up English actor, requiring Steed
to rescue her.
Pushkin: It took nineteen seconds for
this lift to arrive. This would not be tolerated at home.
The rest of the cast
are put to mostly below-their-station work. Peter Jeffrey (The Macra Terror, The
Androids of Tara), in his first of three
Avengers appearances, probably enjoyed playing the buttoned-down,
by-the-book Varnals, there to have his sexist assumptions about Mrs Peel
dashed, but we can’t help but wish he was better serviced. Likewise, Peter
Arne, who stole Warlock in Season
Two, is all but forgettable as a red herring chemical company tout. In a more
minor role, Vernon Dobtcheff fares better as a very precise Russian Chess
grandmaster (working for the Ministry of the Interior and interested in doing a
deal with Chessman in return for the latter building hotels on the Black Sea
coast).
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.
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