Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Anthony Howell, Julian Wadham, Lucy Briggs-Owen, Tim Treloar, Elizabeth Morton, Mark Bonnar, Robbie Stevens.

Prison is not a place where the unknown stays hidden for long and yet for Frank Preston, serving Time for the stealing £100,000 pounds, the exact location of his ill-gotten gains has remained a complete mystery to everybody but him.

In the third of the fourth volume of re-recorded lost Avengers’ stories, Hunt The Man Down, Steed, Keel and his assistant Carol are thrown into a deadly game of cat and mouse which has all-comers looking for the recently released Frank and the money he managed to hide before being caught. It is a game that could have lasting repercussions for the working relationship between all three if handled without care.

Hunt The Man Down certainly fits into The Avengers ethos, especially in the way the first season was delivered to television audiences but like the opening episode of the fourth series of lost recordings, To Kill The King, it feels as though it is just filling in for something that hasn’t quite arrived yet, that hasn’t really been explored further and in the end just becomes a series of chase scenes that for each consequence and action is to be imagined three acts before it is heard.

As a normal plot, a story for which the likes of Z Cars or Dixon of Dock Green might have toyed with during their time on television, it cannot be faulted, it offers the viewer no illusions that crime pays, it shows the steadfast Steed and dogged Doctor Keel being played and playing the system well and even has Carol being thrust into the action properly for the first time in what seems a hen’s age, yet the air of mystery is missing, it has the full appreciation but none of the allure and the one vital component of radio drama, the all important fight scene in which the forces of good overpower is disjointed and lacking an element of truth.

Hunt The Man Down should work really well as an audio drama but in a rare moment of auditory fulfilment it sadly lacks imaginative nourishment, Hunt The Man Down should perhaps have stayed locked away.

Hunt The Man Down is available to purchase as part of The Avengers Lost Episodes Volume 4 from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.

Ian D. Hall