THE LIVING DEAD is one of my favorite episodes from the British spy series The Avengers starring Patrick McNee as John Steed and Diana Rigg as Emma Peel. This series was already on for years in the early 1960s with Honor Blackman teaming up with McNee, but she quit to go into films (like Goldfinger) and Rigg, her replacement, was so wildly popular that in America ABC decided in 1966 to cancel their own similar series Honey West and replace it with this British import. With Mrs. Peel on board, it was one of my favorite series then...and now as well, so much that when I recently bought the complete set of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. series on DVD, I also bought all the episodes of The Avengers featuring Rigg. The Living Dead first aired in early 1967 and in retrospect seems like an improved remake of an earlier episode, The Town of No Return. In a small English town with an abandoned mine due to a fatal accident a few years earlier, one of those thought to have died in it has been seen rising up out of the grave...and ringing the church bells! Steed and Peel arrive to investigate, and their trail seems to involve murder and ultimately a sophisticated conspiracy that threatens the country. I loved the suspenseful climactic scene at the end: one of our heroes is running out of time while the other fights their way to a last second rescue. Well, it was suspenseful the first time I saw it...
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