Barbican celebrates Avengers' 50th anniversary

It was supposed to be disposable light entertainment: a knockabout spy-fi show that was as much about Sixties fashion as nuclear fission. Half a century on, however, The Avengers is one of the most cherished British television series ever.

Jaz Wiseman, who's curating the Barbican's Avengers 50th Anniversary Evening this month, explains: "A lot of the appeal of the show comes down to the leading ladies." With a knack for equally lethal judo moves, karate kicks and one-liners, Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg would both reappear as Bond totty. But in The Avengers, as leather-clad Mrs Gale and cat-suited Mrs Peel, respectively, they were classiness personified. However, says Wiseman, as the bowler-hatted, brolly-twirling Steed, "Patrick Macnee was the glue that held it all together. The man from the Ministry who has the charm but can fight as dirty as anyone else." Add to that the show's quality of scripts and direction. "In comparison to, say, Dr Who, at that time, it's in a completely different league."

The Barbican will be screening two classic episodes and hosting a Q&A with director Gerry O'Hara and scriptwriter Roger Marshall. Mandrake from 1964 is an edgy affair largely set in a graveyard. It's astonishing how much atmosphere the team wring out of shaky studio sets and single takes in such early, videotaped episodes. "There's a real claustrophobia in those shows," says Wiseman, "the actors were practically standing on each other in the corner of a tiny set, which gives those episodes the intensity of live theatre."

The Hour That Never Was, from 1965, is a characteristic amalgam of the camp (a fight under laughing gas), the spooky (a deserted air-force base at the height of the Cold War) and the sexy (Rigg: always, regally so).

The Avengers 50th Anniversary Evening, Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891) 30 November