Ltd".) The first 16 episodes of the fifth series begin with Peel receiving a call-to-duty message from Steed: "Mrs Peel, we're needed". Peel would be conducting her normal activities when she unexpectedly received a message on a calling card or within a delivered gift, at which point Steed suddenly appeared (usually in her apartment). The series also introduced a comic tagline caption to the episode title, using the format of "Steed [does this], Emma [does that]". For example, "The Joker" had the opening caption: "Steed trumps an ace, Emma plays a lone hand". "The Joker" was to a large extent a rewrite of "Don't Look Behind You", a black-and-white Cathy Gale episode. Three other colour Emma Peel episodes were rewrites of Cathy Gale episodes. The "Mrs Peel, we're needed" scenes and the alternate taglines were dropped after the first 16 episodes, after a break in production, for financial reasons. They were deemed by the UK networks as disposable if The Avengers was to return to ITV screens (Dave Rogers' book The Avengers Anew lists a set for every Steed/Peel episode except "The Forget-Me-Knot"). Stories were increasingly characterised by a futuristic, science-fiction bent, with mad scientists and their creations wreaking havoc. The duo dealt with being shrunk to doll size ("Mission... Highly Improbable"), pet cats being electrically altered to become ferocious and lethal "miniature tigers" ("The Hidden Tiger"), killer automata ("Return of The Cybernauts"), mind-transferring machines ("Who's Who???") and invisible foes ("The See-Through Man"). The series parodied its American contemporaries with episodes such as "The Girl From AUNTIE", "Mission... Highly Improbable" and "The Winged Avenger" (spoofing The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible and Batman, respectively). The show still carried the basic format: Steed and his associate were charged with solving the problem in the space of a 50-minute episode, thus preserving the safety of 1960s Britain. Humour was evident in the names and acronyms of the organisations. For example, in "The Living Dead", two rival groups examine reported ghost sightings: FOG (Friends of Ghosts) and SMOG (Scientific Measurement of Ghosts). "The Hidden Tiger" features the Philanthropic Union for Rescue, Relief and Recuperation of Cats—PURRR—led by characters named Cheshire, Manx and Angora. The series also occasionally adopted a metafictional tone, coming close to breaking the fourth wall. In the Series 5 episode "Something Nasty in the Nursery", Peel directly references the series' storytelling convention of having potentially helpful sources of information killed