There’s absolutely no reason why I should, mind- it’s a full five years before I was born, and Season 4 is famous for nothing quite so much as the paucity of surviving episodes. But there’s something about that year in particular which is worth looking at, if you’ll only bear with me.

Consider for a second, if you will, the state of Who in 1967. The first episode screened that January saw Jamie joining the Doctor in the last episode of ‘The Highlanders’, setting up the central partnership of the Second Doctor’s era. By this stage, Patrick Troughton was ten episodes into the role -effectively three months into the job- and starting to create a portrayal of the Doctor rather different from anything William Hartnell would have attempted. Ben and Polly were the established characters and the production team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis were coming to terms with the need for the programme to change. The sedate serials of 1963 and 1964 were no longer appropriate now that British television had embraced the filmed action series. The American craze for secret agent shows had its contemporaries here in the likes of Danger Man and subsequently The Prisoner, and would later give us the likes of The Champions. Head and shoulders above the lot, however, was one of the greatest adventure series this country has ever produced- and like Who, it aired on a Saturday night. I refer, of course, to The Avengers .

Nowadays it seems almost incredible that, on the same night in 1967, you could have seen an episode of Season 4 Who, and then a couple of hours later on The Other Side, one of the most perfect partnership ever put together in the history of television. It’s difficult to talk about seasons in the context of The Avengers because the production breaks don’t match what we would normally think of as seasons, but talk about colour Diana Rigg Avengers and everybody knows what you mean. Style, panache, cracking guest casts and the absolutely blissful mating dance between Steed and Mrs Peel. And having been made in colour specifically for export, The Avengers also has the distinct advantage of having all its episodes from this period in existence. We have one complete Who story from 1967 in existence, although to be fair all but two of this year’s stories have at least a surviving episodes, and the minute or so of ‘Macra Terror’ footage does give a good impression of what the serial must have been like to watch.

So how do these two series attempt to deal with the fact of being made at a time of changing social attitudes? 1967 was, after all, the year of the legendary Summer of Love. Bearing in mind that the Vietnam conflict was ongoing, it perhaps jars with the generally liberal consciences of modern fans to hear Patrick Troughton’s Doctor advising that there are some evils which must be fought- indeed, the moral certainty of Troughton’s darker moments is something you only appreciate after delving in some of the less-explored corners of his era. A story later, however, he’s telling Polly to make up her own mind and not do what everybody tells her to do- well, I never claimed he was consistent. Ben and Polly were brilliantly innovative companions for 1966; Polly in particular was very much of the moment, attractive, spirited and independent. And I can imagine Ben heading for the World Cup Final once he’d been dropped back in his own time. Once ‘The War Machines’ had taken the Doctor to contemporary London, however, something had changed in the Who format forever. It’s usual to comment on the end of the historical stories at this point in the show’s development, but not on the fact that what effectively replaced it in the mix was science fiction with a contemporary setting. ‘The Underwater Menace’. for all its faults, attempts a near-future setting, and we find out a date for ‘The Faceless Ones’ and the early episodes of ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ which makes it contemporary to within a year. Only the latter stories attempt a recognisably contemporary situation, however; setting a story at Gatwick was a masterstroke just as package holidays were (excuse the expression) taking off. But the overall impression is of a series trying to come to terms with the fact that Britain was no longer the paternalistic society it had been in 1963, and that the dynamics between the regular characters which had worked in the Hartnell era would no longer suffice. Rather than Grandfather-knows-best, we have a scruffily-dressed maverick with no ties- more appropriate for the spirit of 1967 than might at first appear the case.

But it doesn’t change the fact that Who was chasing the game- The Avengers, meanwhile, embraced the cutting edge of sexual emancipation and stayed ahead of the game by taking place in an England which never existed, rather than trying to reflect one that did. There’s a fine line between a stylised representation and a caricature, and most of the time Steed and Mrs Peel stay on the right side of it; the chaotic production teams of Patrick Troughton’s Doctorship would probably have danced a Highland fling all over it. Don’t get me wrong- Season 4 has at its heart some very good stories indeed and Season 5 would see the production team finding a formula which worked so well they didn’t see any need to think up another one, but like most of the Troughton era it’s horribly inconsistent. I used to be slightly sceptical of ‘Evil’, having heard a very vague audio copy some fifteen years ago, but the fact is that the Dalek and Cybermen stories in Season 4 provide a springboard for the monster-heavy Season 5. A weak Who story, however, hangs around for up to six weeks like the smell of drains while a weak Avengers is gone in the space of an hour.