There's really nothing wrong with Tara King

While waiting for the Doctor Who Christmas special and Sherlock series 3, I'm indulging in some vintage geek viewing: I'm watching The Avengers. No, not the superheroes - the old cult series featuring John Steed, the British special agent who belongs to a very quirky secret service department indeed, and his various sidekicks. More specifically, I'm watching the Tara King episodes. I've already seen the Emma Peel episodes - I bought that whole part of the series a few years back. Some of the Tara episodes I've seen before, but now I have all her episodes too. And I must say they're not half bad.

The consensus among the hard-line fans of The Avengers seems to be that compared to ultra-cool, leather-clad, upper-crust Emma Peel as played by Diana Rigg, Tara King is a bit of a poor fish. She is introduced as a new recruit of The Department who promptly falls in love with the much older Steed, and I agree that's not a great beginning. But for the life of me, I cannot see any marked deterioration between her episodes and the ones featuring Emma. She can fight like a whole man - in one episode, she defeats a karate champion, in another, she has already taken care of the bad guys by the time Steed rushes to her rescue - she's sassy, and were I a man (of the kind that's into chicks) I'd have no complaints on the looks front either. She may have to be rescued by Steed once or twice, but for the most part, she can hold her own with no problem whatsoever. Anyway, isn't there a single episode where Emma has to be rescued by Steed? There is, surely. Steed's magnificence is a given in this series, and if you've reached the point when you think "hold on, he's not that great", then you know it's time to take a break from it for a while. On the whole, Tara is one plucky agent and does not deserve the Damsel in Distress label given her by fans online (like here, on the Avengers Forever web site - a perfect gold mine if, like me, you have a yen for many of the sterling British character actors who appeared in the series).

So why does Tara get so much bad press? All right, it might be because real fans, as opposed to ignorant day trippers like myself, are more discerning and can appreciate all the small nuances of difference between RSC-trained Diana Rigg and relative newcomer Linda Thorson. But I think that at least partly Tara is the victim of Charismatic Character Successor Syndrome. When a popular character is written out - and Emma Peel was very popular indeed - the one who takes his or her place in the story has a tough time of it. This can lead to the new character being replaced with yet another one pretty soon, and this second replacement will ironically find things easier, as he/she is compared not with the inimitable original but with the undervalued replacement number one.

We find an example of this in Midsomer Murders. The first Inspector Barnaby's first sergeant, Troy (Sergeant Troy! Get the Hardy reference), was a great sidekick - bumbling, tactless, but loveable with it, and as crime sidekicks tend to be a good deal more intelligent than his superior gave him credit for. (The Troy of the books isn't like this at all - in the novel I've read he was sharp, vain and a somewhat nasty. A bit my type, actually.) He was replaced by Sergeant Scott, an over-confident ladies' man from The Big Smoke who was very surprised at the non-boringness of policing Midsomer. Scott was also a good sidekick. His arrogant attitude, which had to be tempered as his collaboration with Barnaby continued, provided a pleasing dramatic tension between him and his inspector, and the way witnesses responded to him was interesting: for instance, his confrontation with one possible suspect - another man's man - led first to glowering hostility, then to bonding during one of those fatal folksy celebrations found only in Midsomer. Nevertheless, he was soon replaced. Why? I'd say CCS Syndrome. He was in his turn followed by Constable - later Sergeant - Jones, an amiable sort, but a little personality-less. He's made it all the way into the new Barnaby era. I wonder if he'd stood a chance, though, if he'd followed directly after Sergeant Troy.

One argument in favour of my CCS Syndrome theory is that sometimes series makers consciously create a "rebound" character who temporarily fills in between a Charismatic Character and his/her real successor. This rebound character can be anything from a real dud to someone quite nice but not really up to scratch. Of course, it is not always easy to see which characters were meant to stay but were then written out because they did not catch on, and which characters were only meant to stay for a bit anyway. But surely the blighted Caan in Grey's Anatomy was never meant to become a fixture. (I know I go on about her ghastliness a little, but that's what you get when you deny Christina surgery.) By the time "Desert Storm Barbie" appeared, I for one didn't care that she wasn't Burke: I was just glad she wasn't Caan. A series dear to my heart appears set to use the rebound character gambit twice, once successfully, once less so - but more about that another time.

Tara's problem is not that she's too green, or too weak, or too gooey towards Steed. Her problem is that she's not Emma Peel.