The Avengers Dossier, Page Sixteen

It's time for another look at a guest-star from an episode of "The Avengers".

BILL FRASER
In "Small Game for Big Hunters", Bill Fraser plays a reclusive retired Army officer whose charitable research foundation may be the center of something truly evil.

Scottish-born William "Bill" Fraser was born in Perth in 1908. He trained to be a bank clerk, but by his late teens he had grown so miserable and bored that he headed off to London in pursuit of a dream of becoming an actor. His early years there were lean--so lean, in fact, that he often would have to sleep out-of-doors on Embankment by the Thames. By sticking  to it, however, he eventually found success as a comedic actor on stage and just before World War II began appearing in movies as either bumbling or sinister police detectives and other authority figures.

Fraser's acting career spanned from the 1920s through the 1980s, and, although he did most of it on stage, he still had more than 130 roles in both film and television, including lead roles in the television series "The Army Game" (1959-1960), "Foreign Affairs" (1950), and "Bootsie and Snudge" (1960 - 1974). He also had a recurring role as an obnoxious judge on "Rumpole of the Old Bailey" (1978 - 1987).

Fraser also ran his own repertory theater company, and he gave Peter Cushing his first acting job while  working as a stage manager at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. This, in turn, led to Cushing getting a scholarship to attend the school... and the rest is horror and sci-fi movie history.

Fraser's final role was in as Mr. Casby in the 1987 screen adaptation of the classic novel "Little Dorit". He passed away later that year.

The Avengers: Small Game for Big Hunters

Small Game for Big Hunters (1966)
Starring: Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg, Peter Burton, Liam Redmon, James Villiers, and Bill Fraser
Director: Gerry O'Hara
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Men, dressed for jungle safaris and shot with poisoned darts, are turning up near the manor of retired army officer Colonel Rawlings (Fraser). Government problem-solvers John Steed (Macnee) and Emma Peel (Rigg) are tasked with getting to the bottom of the mystery and stopping the violence before scandal occurs. 

"Small Game for Big Hunters" features both the best and the worst of what "The Avengers" series has to offer. 

First the good. It's got a supremely goofy plot that everyone treats with the utmost seriousness and straight faces of characters who exist in a comic-book universe where, on the outskirts of London, a delusion military officer can be kept within a recreation of a British military outpost in colonial Africa while his staff execute evil schemes--and no one notices for an extended period of time. It's also got comic relief characters who are, likewise, treated with absolute seriousness by those around them, because, again, everyone exists in a comic book universe where Crazy is Normal. This is the sort stuff, along with witty banter between Steed and Peel, that make most episodes of this series such a joy to watch.

On the downside, it's got an incoherent plot that sometimes seems to lose track of its own story-threads, which is made worse and even more obvious due to the way there are two separate narrative tracks for most of this episode, one of which is not all that interesting... and it's made worse by some comedic antics that aren't all that funny. At least we're not subjected to the all-too-common action/fight scenes that are so badly rehearsed and/or badly choreographed that one has to wonder if people actually got paid for working on the show--it would have dragged the rating down from a Seven to a Six. It might have been a rating of 5 if not for a couple twists that I didn't see coming, and for the clever social commentary on the faded British empire and the insanity (and inanity) of those who were still trying to revive it as late the the 1960s.

All that said, Diana Rigg's performance in this episode is also one of the strongest things about it, because it made me realize something that hadn't quite clicked before: She always seems to dial up the intensity of her performance if her Emma Peel character has been parked in the more boring parts of an episode, like she is here. It adds a greater sense of drama or comedy to sequences that are otherwise borderline drab. (Here, Rigg's dialed-up intensity saves a few scenes from coming across as too frivolous or silly.) .