Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins
Martiin Shaw and Lewis Collins are both in the episode called Obsession.
Darn - you beat me to it! I was just about to post this:
Bodie and Doyle preempted!
Interesting to see Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins working together in the 'Obsession' episode in October'77 (albeit as baddies), just a couple of months before the first series of 'The Professionals' was aired (December'77).
Maybe it was this episode that gave them the idea to cast them in the Professionals or maybe they had already been cast and did this as a warm up ?
Check this out from Wiki
An attempt to get Diana Rigg to appear as Emma Peel in the new series was unsuccessful, although old footage of her on the phone from two 1960s episodes of The Avengers, 'The Winged Avenger' and 'The Hidden Tiger', were used to allow the character to make a cameo appearance in the episode "K Is For Kill Part One: The Tiger Awakes": actress Sue Lloyd provided the voice of Mrs Peel for these sequences. Ian Hendry, who played Steed's original partner, David Keel, also guest-starred in one episode, "To Catch A Rat", playing a different role. "Obsession" features two of the stars of the Brian Clemens/Albert Fennell British crime-fighting action series The Professionals: Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins.
In Medium Rare - the third episode of the second series of The New Avengers - a character called George Cowley, from accounts, falls and is fatally injured in a set-up designed to frame John Steed. Cowley wears a trenchcoat, a hat, and thick-rimmed glasses, and is similar in appearance to a younger version of the Gordon Jackson character in The Professionals.
Obsession was quite a poor episode. Shaw and Collins were okay, but the script was bad.
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If you happen to watch the episodes in production order (as I did recently), it suddenly becomes very noticeable that, AFTER this episode, Purdey's whole mood and attitude lighten up. You can see, if you read between the lines, that Larry was a heavy weight burdening her down for years, causing her to walk around with too much "attitude" (so much so that it got in the way of her good judgement a number of times and almost got her killed). She becomes a much nicer person after she's finally able to get over him. I always imagine if they'd managed a 3rd season, that she & Mike would have been a LOT cosier working together. (a lady's man he is, no doubt, but he's also, undeniably, a NICE guy.)
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