„One night, watching the news on television, I saw an item that dealt with the Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya. I was powerful moved by a woman settler calmly speaking of a frightful occurence. When she was cooking dinner, she heard screams coming from the rest of the house. As she turned to find out what it was, three terrorist Mau Mau flet past her with machetes, dripping blood as they ran out the kitchen door. She rushed into the living room to face the horrible sight of her two young sons and her husband dead, the later decapitated.
She was a woman of about forty wearing slacks and bush jacket. On her back was her baby in a papoose-like bag, but strapped around her waist was a bullet-studded belt with an enormous pistol in a holster. She and her husband had come out from England years prior to farm; she explained that the terrorists attacks were so common that all settlers’ wives carried guns.
That woman was beyond my imagination. Unforgettable. And it gave me the answer to the Hendry casting problem. The next morning I dictated a memo to Leonard (*White) saying, that a woman, but with the same charateristics as Hendry, needed to be found to be Macnee’s foil. I descriped how Steed would find her working as an anthropologist at the British Museum after her husband and children had been killed by the Mau Mau in Kenya. To protect herself she had become proficient at using weapons and knew Jui Jitsu. She would be in her early thirties and beautiful. She would be primly dissapproving of Steed’s amorality and Steed would always be wanting to bed her. With the exception of the sex angle, the chemistry of the two characters was to be the same asthat between the old „avengers“.The new sex angle would help the format.”
from: Head of Drama, The memoir of Sydney Newman
