Jason King

After the huge success of 'Department S', in which the character of Jason King had quickly become dominant, a spin-off series was developed called (not surprisingly) 'Jason King'.

King had left Department S and was working on his novels - the 'Mark Cain' stories. The rest of the cast of Department S did not appear at all, and were never mentioned.

The general premise for the show was that King wandered around the world living a playboy lifestyle and each week was somehow drawn into a crime which he neatly solved in time for the end credits. British Intelligence were often hounding him to work for them as a freelance which he generally resisted until they reminded him of his back-taxes. The series was made on location around Europe, in contrast to Department S which never left the back-lot at Pinewood.

Overall the series lacked much of the original sparkle and zest of Department S, the plots were much thinner and less original, and Wyngarde was becoming to old to play the part of a trend-setting playboy convincingly.

"Jason King" was always an anticlimax after "Department S". Both were made at Elstree Film Studios with many of the same personnel, but "Jason King" was shot on 16 mm rather than the 35 mm of the earlier series and in 1971 the difference was jarringly obvious. Despite a few foreign location shots (mainly King crossing a road in Berlin or Paris) the whole thing looked decidedly cheap.

"Department S" had the great hook of a bizarre pre-credit incident and much of the interest was in discovering the rational cause. The Jason King character was a gadfly with unpredictable, often wrong, flashes of insight. Stewart Sullivan and Annabelle Hurst could be left to do, respectively, the gumshoe and the brain work. King was best taken in small doses which worked in "Department S" as he did not have to carry the plot. However, as the lead character in his own series he was in virtually every scene and had to be sensible and motivated enough to do the traditional detective stuff in order to progress the stories (which were themselves (unlike "Department S") little different to those of a dozen other series).

The tension in the one character between the frivolous dilettante and the determined detective often willing to risk his life for others must have been difficult to reconcile and the tone of the scripts and the degree of King's flamboyance varied significantly from episode to episode. King also suffered from not having strong regular characters the equal of Sullivan and Hurst to bring him down to earth when necessary and balance his excesses. The more interesting episodes were those rare ones where King was angered by the real suffering of others and had to confront, if not the hypocrisy, at least the irony of, his usual moaning about the minor irritations of his luxurious lifestyle.

Extracting King as a character from Department S was an example of an often repeated mistake in TV. Because a character is hugely popular in one situation it doesn't follow that they will work outside their complex support structure of setting, format, other characters, style, etc. (Having Inspector Morse star, in an Australian-set, pseudo-western rather than an whodunnit in Oxford is another example which fortunately only happened in one episode) King might have become even more of an unlikely heartthrob in his own series but the drama suffered badly.

Having said all that, "Jason King" remains a far more interesting, entertaining and original series than most and Peter Wyngarde (view "Night of the Eagle" to see him at his very best) one of the more complex and electric performers let loose in the lead of a major TV series. It is just that coming at the tail end of the "golden era" of ITC filmed series it is difficult not to judge it by higher standards than usual.

I enjoyed Department S when I discovered it on DVD, so decided to give its spin-off series a try, even knowing going in that it was not as well-regarded. I very quickly found out why!

What made Jason King (the character) work in Department S was that he had two relatively normal sidekicks - who appear here only in the briefest of stock footage flashbacks in one single episode - to bounce off, making him seem like an eccentric in a more or less everyday world. Given his own series and shorn of anyone to keep him in check, however, Jason becomes absolutely ludicrous, a camp comic-book creation with barely even one toe in reality. That he's at all bearable to watch is entirely down to Peter Wyngarde's charm, as the scripts frequently make him casually sexist and even racist in a cringeworthy 1970s way. (One episode actually has him say "Ah so, dlagon rady" to a Chinese woman... a Chinese woman played by a British actress in yellowface and false eyelids. Horrible!)

The stories are also bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Since he's no longer part of a law enforcement agency, every contrivance imaginable is needed to force Jason into the plots. He unwittingly uses a codeword meant to identify an arms dealer. He's hypnotised. He's mistaken for a hit-man because he's carrying a rose. He picks up a hitch-hiker involved in a crime. He's impersonated (twice). He's blackmailed by MI6 (several times). He's kidnapped (repeatedly). In the laziest example, he just so happens to know *three* different people - from different countries - who are trying to obtain a stolen statue, none of whom have any connection to each other.

The scripts are not the only thing that were cheap. To pay for location shooting in Europe (Jason visits Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, Venice and other cities - mostly wandering around in front of famous landmarks just to prove that yes, they really sent their leading actor there for the day) the show was shot on 16mm film rather than ITC's usual 35mm, and it looks terrible. 16mm can be decent quality - look at the restored DVDs of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who - but here everything is muddy and astonishingly grainy. The same sets appear over and over (every rich character seems to share a room with a blue domed ceiling), as do even cars. There's a silver Vauxhall Viva that follows Jason to almost every country he visits!

Amazingly, a halfway-decent story does occasionally manage to force its way through the dross; 'As Easy As ABC' sees two criminals using the plot of one of Jason's own novels to carry out a robbery and frame him for it, 'To Russia With Panache' plays like a lost Department S script as Jason investigates a bizarre murder in the Kremlin, and 'Wanna Buy A Television Series?' amusingly bites the hand that feeds it by ridiculing the same US TV networks that ITC depended upon to fund its shows. But most of the episodes are empty, silly and, worst of all, *boring* nonsense that not even Wyngarde's charisma can save.

Compared to its predecessor Department S, Jason King was a generally enjoyable but sometimes uneven show which pointed to the impending decline of the ITC adventure series. Though many of the stories were good with excellent guest actors, and there was an emphasis on style, the series suffered from budgetary constraints compared to its contemporaries in 1971. These included grainy 16mm film, too much studio filming/stock footage and no matter where in the world a particular episode was set, any cars used tended to be right hand drive including in particular a recurring Vauxhall Viva that turned up in episodes set in France, Turkey and the Far East among others. Other ITC series disguised these discrepancies better.

It was also sometimes slow moving and lacking in atmosphere, concentrating on King's style, flamboyance, social graces and relationships with whichever guest actress(es) were in the particular episode, rather than other characters and the ultimate plots, which were becoming clichéd. The show may have benefited if there had been regular support actors to play with/against King in every episode.

Nevertheless, Jason King is one of the most memorable TV characters of that era, if not of all time, and the best episodes were very good indeed. Being forever identified as Jason King, and unfortunately caught up in a minor scandal, whether Peter Wyngarde could have continued to be (or wanted to be) a convincing leading man in subsequent years is debatable. He would have been excellent in lighter fare such as sitcoms and perhaps even as a Doctor Who. His relative obscurity is a loss to TV and movies.

This is by way of a comment on one of the other reviews.

The episode "All that Glisters..." was playing recently on a TV that I could hear but not see. "Thunderbirds!" I thought since I could clearly hear the voice of Scott Tracey. On going in to actually watch the TV I was amazed to see that it was Jason King rather than Thunderbirds and that bizarrely Clinton Greyn was speaking with Scott Tracey's voice. The lip-sync was excellent but it was clearly a dubbed voice since the acoustic was different. And of course, rather than Greyn's rounded Welsh tones we were getting the distinctive Canadian sound of Shane Rimmer. Cant understand why they did this - and then not credit it? Weird.