We don’t want to offend the effendi.

The Avengers

26: Honey for the Prince

The last of the season, and the last black-and-white episode, Honey for the Prince isn’t quite as strong as I’d remembered. It’s also a tad problematic in places. That said, Brian Clemens’ teleplay maximises the accompanying quirkiness, the guest cast includes a particularly memorable turn from Ron Moody as Ponsonby Hopkirk, the director of QQF (Quite, Quite Fantastic Incorporated), and there’s an even more memorable Dance of the Six Veils courtesy of Mrs Peel (it would have been seven, but she was “poorly educated”).

Who is also again memorably in early hours post-party form this episode (see previously The Girl from Auntie), only this time with Steed too, who has evidently been getting down with the younger generation, and with a teddy bear and balloon in tow. He even gets a pat on the posterior for his dawn treading.

Indeed, there’s much in the way of carnal considerations in Honey for the Prince, what with a masseuse (Carmen Dene) attending to villain Arkadi (George Pastell, Kleig in The Tomb of the Cybermen) by various methods, ranging from lighting his cigar, to massaging his chest with a well-oiled leg and stroking him with a bear claw glove.

Prince Ali: Ah, Number 33. Charming girl, cost me a bag of salt and four goats. I’ve got lots more out the back.

Steed: Goats?

Prince Ali: Wives. Got to have a lot of them. Matter of status, you see. What was it at last count?

Grand Vizier: 320, your Highness.

Then there’s the harem of Prince Ali of Barabia (Zia Mohyeddin, later of Gangsters), where Steed is impressed by his roster of 320 wives (“The Prince is renowned for his ardour”) until Ali offers the sobering qualifier that this also means he has 320 mothers-in-law (eat that, Terry Medford). When Steed has successfully saved Ali from certain death, the latter announces “Anything I have is yours. My horses, my jewels. My favourite wife”; Emma’s stern “Steed!” calls a halt to any further discussion of the matter. We also learn of the fantasy life persona of “One of the best undercover men in the business”, Ronny Westcott (Jon Laurimore, Count Frederico in The Masque of Mandragora): chief eunuch in a harem.

Steed: Tell me, Mrs Peel, what size do you take in Turkish trousers?

But the main selling point of Honey for the Prince is Emma’s dance, giving what is rightly hailed as a cracking display. In the manner of bedroom farce, this is followed by the lusty Prince’s intention to consummate with his 321^st wife (“Retarded, your majesty. Definitely what you’d call retarded” Steed explains of Emma’s earlier unresponsiveness to questioning; the Avengers HR department subsequently had words with him over his choice of language). Prior to setting eyes on Mrs Peel, Ali seems much more preoccupied with playing cricket (such that it vaguely recalls Denis Quilley's reluctant lothario in What the Butler Saw).

Mrs Peel: Good morning.

Mr Bumble: Good morning, dear lady. Oh, forgive me, I’ve just been attending to my little charges. Buzzing around the hive, so to speak. Bumble. B Bumble at your service.

The episode has its share of eccentric vignettes of course, most typically in the form of Mr Bumble (Ken Parry), seller of honey and outfitted in an appropriately-striped jumper (“Happy bees make bumper honey” he enthuses). Admittedly, there’s something of formula to the character, but Ken Parry’s effusive performance (and Rigg’s responding cheerfulness) make him irrepressible.

Hopkirk: Well, the QQF, the Quite, Quite Fantastic Incorporated, can help you, quite simply, to help you satisfy your most repressed desires. In a nutshell, Mr Reed, we will recreate your fantasies and let you live them.

Hopkirk’s business, “A million dreams made to order”, provides the setting for Arkadi and gay hit man Vincent (Ronald Curram: a comparable performance to Philip Locke’s in the same year’s Thunderball) to practice their various assassinations, Ali being the target of one of them, inevitably. Hopkirk nurses the illusion that it “helps him get something out of his system and no one gets hurt”, until he’s on the receiving end, that is, in a blackly comic scene where he coaxes Vincent to be more forcefully murderous (“Point it at me!”)

Hopkirk: Got it, you’re a secret agent. Yes indeed, ideal for you. Licensed to kill, pitting your wits against a diabolical mastermind. Make a change from your everyday humdrum existence, wouldn’t it?

Steed: Hah ha ha, yes. Certainly make a change.

Hopkirk’s most ambitious fantasy recreation was the sinking of Titanic (“Several of my staff had to be resuscitated afterwards”) and his most delightfully meta is Fantasy Number Four – “Escape of Arkadi from Pursuing Agents” – since Steed discovers it just as Arkadi has taken flight. Also self-reflexive is Hopkirk’s suggested fantasy for our hero, right down to another reference for diabolical masterminds.

Steed: I’m most terribly sorry, colonel. It’s another body entirely.

Earlier, there’s an amusing scene between Steed and the unseen Colonel Westcott, in which he calls to ask for a body to be removed from his apartment, only to learn it already has been; this is a different corpse, that of Bernie (Peter Diamond, stuntman extraordinaire), eliciting Steed’s profuse apologies.

The laugh-off has the appearance of a complete flight of fantasy (a magic carpet ride), until it’s revealed that Steed and Emma are on the back of van (“How do you stop it?”: “That’s a very good question”, making you wonder who’s driving).

Honey for the Prince is less than sensitive in its trading on Middle Eastern stereotypes; it’s said the Hyucks studied the episode when researching offensive ethnic tropes for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. What just about saves it, however, is its prevailing self-awareness and undercutting of assumptions (a magic lamp yields a machine gun killer, the exotic prince, who offers Steed the left eye of a mountain rat – “A very rare delicacy” – is revealed as an anglophile – well, it is The Avengers – female objectification, the value of a wife counted in goats, is taken to ridiculous, even banal extremes; a duty roster is necessary for the week) via the same general irreverence exhibited by the rest of the series at this point. Nevertheless, it occupies similar ground to How to Succeed… at Murder; where many episodes of the season transcend their era, the prevailing sensibility means this one is very much confined by it.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

I never strangled a chicken in my life!

Rope (1948) (SPOILERS) Rope doesn’t initially appear to have been one of the most venerated of Hitchcocks, but it has gone through something of a rehabilitation over the years, certainly since it came back into circulation during the 80s. I’ve always rated it highly; yes, the seams of it being, essentially, a formal experiment on the director’s part, are evident, but it’s also an expert piece of writing that uses our immediate knowledge of the crime to create tension throughout; what we/the killers know is juxtaposed with the polite dinner party they’ve thrown in order to wallow in their superiority.

They'll think I've lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

Time Bandits (1981) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam had co-directed previously, and his solo debut had visual flourish on its side, but it was with Time Bandits that Gilliam the auteur was born. The first part of his Trilogy of Imagination, it remains a dazzling work – as well as being one of his most successful – rich in theme and overflowing with ideas while resolutely aimed at a wide (family, if you like) audience. Indeed, most impressive about Time Bandits is that there’s no evidence of self-censoring here, of attempting to make it fit a certain formula, format or palatable template.

You must have hopes, wishes, dreams.

Brazil (1985) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam didn’t consider Brazil the embodiment of a totalitarian nightmare it is often labelled as. His 1984½ (one of the film’s Fellini-riffing working titles) was “ the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984 ”, in contrast to Michael Anderson’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1948. This despite Gilliam famously boasting never to have read the Orwell’s novel: “ The thing that intrigues me about certain books is that you know them even though you’ve never read them. I guess the images are archetypal ”. Or as Pauline Kael observed, Brazil is to Nineteen Eighty-Four as “ if you’d just heard about it over the years and it had seeped into your visual imagination ”. Gilliam’s suffocating system isn’t unflinchingly cruel and malevolently intolerant of individuality; it is, in his vision of a nightmare “future”, one of evils spawned by the mechanisms of an out-of-control behemoth: a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. And yet, that is not really, despite how indulgently and glee

Oh, you got me right in the pantaloons, partner.

The Party (1968) (SPOILERS) Blake Edwards’ semi-improvisational reunion with Peter Sellers is now probably best known for – I was going to use an elephant-in-the-room gag, but at least one person already went there – Sellers’ “brown face”. And it isn’t a decision one can really defend, even by citing The Party ’s influence on Bollywood. Satyajit Ray had also reportedly been considering working with Sellers… and then he saw the film. One can only assume he’d missed similar performances in The Millionairess and The Road to Hong Kong ; in the latter case, entirely understandable, if not advisable. Nevertheless, for all the flagrant stereotyping, Sellers’ bungling Hrundi V Bakshi is a very likeable character, and indeed, it’s the piece’s good-natured, soft centre – his fledgling romance with Claudine Longet’s Michele – that sees The Party through in spite of its patchy, hit-and-miss quality.

I'm an old ruin, but she certainly brings my pulse up a beat or two.

The Paradine Case (1947) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock wasn’t very positive about The Paradine Case , his second collaboration with Gregory Peck, but I think he’s a little harsh on a picture that, if it doesn’t quite come together dramatically, nevertheless maintains interest on the basis of its skewed take on the courtroom drama. Peck’s defence counsel falls for his client, Alida Valli’s accused (of murder), while wife Ann Todd wilts dependably and masochistically on the side-lines.

A herbal enema should fix you up.

Never Say Never Again (1983) (SPOILERS) There are plenty of sub-par Bond s in the official (Eon) franchise, several of them even weaker than this opportunistic remake of Thunderball , but they do still feel like Bond movies. Never Say Never Again , despite – or possibly because he’s part of it – featuring the much-vaunted, title-referencing return of the Sean Connery to the lead role, only ever feels like a cheap imitation. And yet, reputedly, it cost more than the same year’s Rog outing Octopussy .

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019) (SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds . Juno and the Paycock , set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

Miss Livingstone, I presume.

Stage Fright (1950) (SPOILERS) This one has traditionally taken a bit of a bruising, for committing a cardinal crime – lying to the audience. More specifically, lying via a flashback, through which it is implicitly assumed the truth is always relayed. As Richard Schickel commented, though, the egregiousness of the action depends largely on whether you see it as a flaw or a brilliant act of daring: an innovation. I don’t think it’s quite that – not in Stage Fright ’s case anyway; the plot is too ordinary – but I do think it’s a picture that rewards revisiting knowing the twist, since there’s much else to enjoy it for besides.

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you ripped the fronts off houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (SPOILERS) I’m not sure you could really classify Shadow of a Doubt as underrated, as some have. Not when it’s widely reported as Hitchcock’s favourite of his films. Underseen might be a more apt sobriquet, since it rarely trips off the lips in the manner of his best-known pictures. Regardless of the best way to categorise it, it’s very easy to see why the director should have been so quick to recognise Shadow of a Doubt 's qualities, even if some of those qualities are somewhat atypical.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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