Department S

I perfectly remind this TV show from the late sixties and early seventies, that I watched on French channels, afternoons, during my childhood. I loved this TV show, which reminded me a bit THE AVENGERS, same kind of charm, British charm, without being as terrific as THE AVENGERS though. But I still watch DEPARTMENT S again with the same excitment. The score for opening and ending credits is also stunning. I never get tired to listen again and again. A mix up between espionage, adventure and crime in the British manner. Very entertaining and charmful characters: Peter Wyngarde, Joel Fabiani, Rosemary Nichols....

I had never seen Department S until fairly recently when Top Gear did its spoof Sixties show "The Interceptors", which used the Department S theme music. Because I have a liking for the spy-fi shows of that era, I tracked down the DVDs of the series out of curiosity.

And I'm glad I did, because while it's no classic and falls some way short of the likes of The Avengers and The Prisoner, it's still lively and entertaining thanks to the interplay of its three leads. Joel Fabiani's Stewart Sullivan is largely the straight man and muscle, but still maintains a deadpan humour - with a righteous anger whenever politics interferes with justice. Rosemary Nichols' Annabelle Hurst has a flirty relationship with Stewart, and while something of a computer nerd is still more than capable of taking care of herself in the field.

Then... there's Jason King. Jason is the character known even by people who've never seen the show, simply because he's so outrageous. A chain-smoking dandy and fop who drives a Bentley even when trying to be inconspicuous and more often has a glass in his hand than not (he starts drinking when most people would be having their morning coffee and must surely be pleasantly buzzed, if not outright drunk, for 90% of his screen time), he's also arrogant, egotistical, rude, self-centred, lazy, hedonistic, snobbish, bitchy (poor Annabelle takes most of his cutting put-downs), a smarmy lech and is constantly outclassed in fights to the point where Annabelle chastises him for getting "knocked out AGAIN!" in quite an early episode. Yet despite all that, he's still utterly charming and magnetic because of Peter Wyngarde's effortlessly suave and confident performance. Played by anyone else Jason would seem like a buffoon - he was, after all, one of the inspirations for Austin Powers - but Wyngarde gives him class even at his most ridiculously pompous.

The actual stories are mixed; some of the mysteries Department S are called upon to investigate are genuinely clever, while others (mostly those written by Philip Broadley) are bog-standard ITC crime plots involving bank robbers, smuggling rings or the Mafia with a 'bizarre' opening slapped on them to fit the format of "crimes too weird for the normal police to solve". Watching on DVD, ITC's penny-pinching also becomes evident - the same locations and sets appear again and again with only slight changes (watch for the corridor with a distinctive illuminated ceiling, which appears in almost every episode), and if you ever see anyone driving a white Jaguar, you know it's going to go over a cliff! ("Toonces, look ouuuuuut!") But overall it's a fun, lightly tongue-in-cheek adventure show that gets by on pure charisma.

With all due respect to Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicolls and their characters, Department S will be forever associated with Peter Wyngarde's Jason King.

Most people remember him as this camp, flamboyant and debonair womaniser cum detective in the mould of Austin Powers but that will do a disservice to the character: He's far more nuanced than that.

Jason King is lazy (he often lets Stewart fight all the bad guys and only chips in at the end), he is egotistical (his appreciation of people is based on whether they've read his novels or not), a lot of his detective work is speculation without facts to back them up and he sulks whenever Annabelle is right...and she often is. He's clearly a man having a mid-life crisis and drink drives but.......Jason King is brilliant. If Wyngarde had played him purely as a dashing hero, it wouldn't have worked but he shows King often as a paper tiger, led by his libido, love of finery and prone to grandstanding (and it gets in the way of his detective work at times) but he has some of the best lines and put downs in TV history. And by not playing him as whiter-than-white, the chemistry and interactions between the three lead characters is all the better for it.

Watching it again on DVD recently, you get to see just how much depth Wyngarde put into Jason King.

The reason why there are so many men called 'Jason' and to a lesser extent 'Stewart' are about, of a certain age. This popular series was highly influential in its time. So how does it stand up in 2006? The good points are,the leads are just great! the outfits, style and look of the series are still superb and when Dennis Spooner and his writing team's wonderful imagination is allowed to strain at the leash of the budget , then we get some wacky villains and ahead of its time plots and gadgets. Here we come to the main problem of the series, the stingy, always looking for ways to cut corners budget. You can see that Spooner wanted to take the series towards fantasy, while the producer was happy with B picture style crime. The result is when the producer uses his own ensemble pals of directors. some of the dullest and tatty (plot wise) episodes are produced. While in the hands of brought in directors we see Dept S at its best.

Rosemary Nichols apparently got the humph making this series and its not hard to see why , as an intelligent actress she is terribly underused, however we get to see her legs quite a bit, which is perhaps a delightful compensation?.

Like NIGHT STALKER and then X-FILES, the show set up a fantastic situation and the main characters had to sort it out. Unlike these, the hero(es) weren't left holding an empty bag at the end. They had usually tangible results. It was also made clear that the 'good guys' were in a dirty profession where they occasionally had to pull some nasty things. Imagination, wit, acting which didn't always take itself too seriously ... I miss it. One reason being, I'm hard pressed to think of too many shows - BANACEK aside - which did as good a job of taking the viewer and grabbing their attention right off the bat. The writers excelled at setting up hugely improbable, if not downright impossible situations which the characters then had to find an explanation to. explanations which often took 90 degree turns into the clearly unexpected yet, for all that, still made sense. Too, I agree with another reviewer that the Anabelle character was somewhat underused, but when she was on screen, it wasn't just for eye candy. She was quite competent in her own right and stood up to the two male leads when she felt the point she was making warranted it. A rarity in those days. Sullivan? If he wasn't in the Department, he'd be working for the KGB or CIA. He's that sort of coldly efficient, ruthless type. He knows how the world works and realizes what it can take to get the job done. King? It's clearly a game to him. One he excels at and which he parleys into ideas for the detective/spy novels he writes as his ostensible 'real' job. He's probably the most fun to watch of the three, although they all have their moments and often, too. I do agree that the eventual spin-off series featuring only his character lacked the interest of the original, however.