User Reviews

Enormously fun if unusual episode that first aired at Xmas 1976. A better title would have been 'Shadows' but the pun of 'Gnaws' came off of the back of the mega-successful 'Jaws' the previous year. An adventure in the dank underworld of London's sewer tunnels for our heroic trio this time where a killer shark... no wait, a snake... no wait, it's a giant rat is lurking to consume a myriad of victims that just happen to pass by. Gulp! With Russian spies, giant tomatos, monster spiders and loopy scientists thrown into the goofy Hammer horror like plot this is simple, disengage the brain entertainment. Pure hokum ensues with familiar faces from the era cast. The climactic ending is the part that has stuck in my mind from 43 years ago when it was first shown on British TV and the unintentionally hilarious reveal when Gnaws finally comes face to face with Steed, Purdey and Gambit is a picture for their horrified reactions. Well, it's not every day you see a rat the size of a London bus, is it?

Two government scientists called Carter (Peter Cellier) and Charles Thornton (Julian Holloway) are specialists in radioactive growth, in which they hope to end world starvation by cultivating huge food plants. In order to pursue this ambition, they both quit their jobs at the ministry and set up a private laboratory stealing a number of top secret papers that aid their experiments in the process. However, when Carter foolishly spills some radioactive growth fluid down the sink, they unwittingly create a giant rat that runs amok in London's sewers. Steed, Purdey and Gambit are sent in to investigate because detectors pick up something big moving around, which they believe to be some new method the opposition has devised to bug their embassy. Yet this is far from the case as our heroes soon discover and they must find and destroy the monster rat before it kills hundreds of people...

Take a script about two mad scientists with good intentions of saving the masses but unwittingly unleashing a monster that's very much in the vein of the hokey b-movie horrors of the fifties and you have a lacklustre episode that is sadly totally unrepresentative of the series. The basic premise of being stuck down a sewer with a killer rodent does send a certain amount of shivers down the spine, but the direction is so flat in that the shock sequences are sloppily executed with the minimum of imagination and when we finally get to see the monster at the end, you can see that its a small scale model with an ordinary rat blown up to size with some poor trick photography. Macnee, Hunt and Lumley seem to be just going through the motions here whilst the rest of the cast perform competently but without much inspiration. The most interesting member of the supporting cast is Jeremy Young as foreign agent Ivan Chislenko who believes that Steed's government has launched a device in the sewers to bug their embassy. Young previously appeared in three of the original Diana Rigg episodes, A Touch Of Brimstone, Never Never Say Die and The Forget Me Knot.