What started as an homage to Diana Rigg became a commentary on "filthy stamp collectors" and popular culture

I was going to post a couple of more legitimate commentaries on IGY philately before this one, but a chronological synchronicity convinced me to move this to the top of the queue.

After Diana Rigg passed away recently, I went back to look at some old episodes of The Avengers (not the contemporary movies of the same name), but the spy-fi series starring Patrick Macnee as John Steed. I chose Series 4 from 1965, the year that Ms. Rigg playing Mrs. Emma Peel replaced Honor Blackman (who was on her way to playing Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and who also died this year) as Steed's colleague. I watched this show as a teen, and was, how should I say, rather impressed at the time by Ms. Rigg's élan. The stories were a bit fantastical, silly even, but tongue-in-cheek. People did suffer and die, but the violence was not graphically gruesome like in detective shows of today. Steed and Mrs. Peel might have had a relationship, or not, but they were always collegial, successful, breezy, and completely free of the angst that plagues contemporary tv detectives (such as Jasper Teerlinck, in a recent favorite PBS show of mine, Professor T.).

The episode I watched this week was #9 from this series, The Hour That Never Was. While I was playing with this post yesterday, I saw in the thorough description of this episode in Wikipedia that it had been first aired on Nov. 27, 1965, 55 years ago to the day! Can't remember if I saw it back then, but that meaningful (?) coincidence moved this post to the top of my queue. (And apologies for difficulties with image captions.)

Episode title, The Avengers, series 4, episode 9 (1965)

Our intrepid investigators, Mrs. Peel and Steed

The philatelic commentary of interest appears while Steed is exploring an old RAF base, and runs into a dumpster diver, Benedict Napoleon Hickey (played by Roy Kinnear). Their exchange inexplicably veers into some nasty invective about stamp collectors. Beneath is a video clip, and a similar series of screenshots:

Hickey: " ... "I detest was or violence ..."

Hickey: "... or stamp collectors."

Steed: "Stamp collectors?"

Hickey: "Filthy habit, collecting stamps."

Hickey: "All that old saliva."

Hickey: "More diseases get spread that way."

Hickey: "Generations of old saliva."

Hickey: "Foreign saliva, too"

Ha ha, that's pretty funny. My experience with stamp collectors is that they are really a rather fastidious lot.

It is interesting to note how philately is treated in popular culture. A recent American Philately Society talk by Howard Summers, who has also written a book on this topic, focuses on Stamp Collecting in Popular Culture:

My own recent encounters with such intersections come from:

1. watching the movie Charade (1963), where Audrey Hepburn finally realizes (spoiler alert!) the money her dead husband left to her was in the form of valuable postage stamps on an envelope;

2. reading the alternate history novel The Plot Against America (2004), by Philip Roth, in which the pre-WWII protagonist, young Philip, is an avid stamp collector, and an admirer of the First Collector, President Franklin Roosevelt; and 

3. reading another alternate history novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick, in which a collector of Americana in a post-WWII occupied America comments on analogies to stamp collecting, and how collectibles are authenticated and acquire their value:   " 'I am a collector,' Major Humo had explained. ... It was on the order of coin or stamp collecting; no rational explanation [for the addiction to collecting] could ever be given."