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100% visitor review coverage. (23 October) Fred Cooper has risen to the challenge of
finally reviewing the last remaining episode that nobody has reviewed up to now: "Death à la Carte."
Even more seriously cool stuff! (20 October) 2007 is turning out to be a
stellar year for The Avengers. First, it was the Laurent-Perrier
champagne commercial; then the extra footage from three episodes (see below); now, for all
of those fans of Laurie Johnson's score who have been waiting so
patiently all of these decades for a
proper soundtrack album,
the waiting is over. The news has been bubbling up on the Forum for the past couple of weeks,
but the news is actually better than what fans think; I have just received an email from Val
Jennings, the Edsel and Music Club label manager for Demon Music Group at 2 entertain, who
writes (my emphasis):
First off, the whole project has been put together by Laurie himself and me. This has
meant a couple of visits to Laurie's wonderful house and hugely interesting discussions
about what to include, not only on the Avengers disc (Disc 1 of the 3 CD set), but on the
other two discs as well. Laurie chose all the pieces of music on the Avengers disc and
there are actually 35 tracks, not the 20 listed on the forum. All the tracks have been
mastered from the original tapes of the music recording sessions (ie there is no dialogue,
or sound effects) overseen by Laurie - indeed, here and there we have left in the engineer's
"take" announcements here and there for authenticity! Laurie wanted the set to represent the
other facets of his career which is why Disc 2 not only contains some of his other TV
themes, but also includes his early singles, some of his film themes and his concert work
"Synthesis". As far as Disc 3 is concerned, he is also immensely proud of his work for
various military bands, and it is worth pointing out that this material is not "marching
band" music, but rather more Laurie's own classical music played by military bands. If this
set sells well, then there could well be follow-up sets, with a similar arrangement of types
of material, showcasing other programmes (guess which!) throughout Disc 1. Lastly, due to
manufacturing hold-ups, the release date is actually this Monday 22nd October - apologies to
anyone who had been looking forward to receiving it the previous week.
More seriously cool stuff. (18 October)
Dick Fiddy,
one of Avengerdom's most respected sources, has passed along a very exciting bit of news:
In 2006 Britain's ITV company announced a new programme and initiative Raiders of the
Lost Archive which would attempt to reunite celebrities with long lost TV items from
their past. They approached both the BFI (British Film Institute—who administer the Missing
Believed Wiped campaign) and Kaleidoscope (a non-profit making group of TV enthusiasts also
determined to unearth lost TV programming) as consultants to help track down missing items.
Last week (Saturday 13th October, 2007) Kaleidoscope organized an event highlighting
material that had been found during the quest. Included was a selection of production shots
and unused scenes from three Avengers episodes, "From Venus With Love,"
"The See-Through Man" and "Escape in Time"
The material was silent but did provide a rare glance at the style of production utilized by
the series. The material came from a private film-collector and lasts about ten minutes in
all. Those interested can contact the collector via the Kaleidoscope website:
http://www.kaleidoscope.org.uk/
I had no idea. (8 October) I was never big on hit counters; they often presented a
misleading idea of a website's popularity. Comprehensive website statistics have been available
for a long time, but at a cost. Now there's Google
Analytics, a website traffic analysis engine that provides more data than you can shake a
mouse at—all totally free. All along I've had this vague notion that The Avengers Forever
averaged around 300 unique visitors a day. Boy, was I wrong... try over 800 a day! In the three
days since I flipped the Google Analytics switch, the web host has delivered over 18,000 pages.
It will be interesting to see what the metrics look like after a year or so...
Important: August was a landmark month for The
Avengers, so if you haven't already seen the news, don't miss it!
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