Cult TV Blog

It's been a while since I've watched a Jason King and I'm suffering from some culture shock, so perhaps I'd better start with a disclaimer that it's very unlikely this blog post will be very serious. Because, well, Jason King. When I started this blog I made a conscious decision to minimize pure description of shows, because it gets so wearing reading the same stuff all over the internet. However I am going to make an exception for this episode because how otherwise am I going to reference   Jason King's Groovy Pad ? Original ITC Synopsis (contains spoilers) Jason King falls in love with a gangster's girl friend - and finds that the arrows of love can lead to death. Olivier  (DAVID BUCK)  is a man with a mission. He wants to steal one million franc's worth of emeralds from Paris' Orly Airport. And he needs the help of gang leader Jean le Grand in order to carry out the raid. But le Grand  (KIERON MOORE)  knows that Olivier would very much like to ste...

Department S is one of my all-time favourite shows, simply because the plots are insane and the characters wild. It is as if they looked at every other show, dropped a few LSD and started writing what they saw. I have really noticed the difference coming from other ITC shows for these posts, and have also realised that the comparison of different shows is another thing we miss out on with the tendency to binge watch box sets. On the other hand this one has been so confusing. The moral is, if you have two or more cars written off during the course of a show, don't make two of them white. It makes it terribly confusing to Google five decades later. Even the internet movie car database, which is otherwise scarily precise, seems to have got confused. Anyway as far as I can tell the first white car to crash, which is driven by a dummy, is a first generation Chevrolet Corvair (don't tell me if it isn't!). I went to the trouble of finding out because I was interested by its transa...

Reality vs unreality, that is one of the continual themes in the TV of this age, that I write about here. I err on the side of unreality myself, and would identify the intrusion of brutal reality into the television world, as the seventies wore on. One of the doyennes of unreal television is the character of Jason King, and somebody leaving a comment (you can see it  here ) about a forthcoming biography of Peter Wynegarde has caused me to watch the eponymous series today. The opening scene makes the location of this episode clear: the manor house used to set the scene is used in many ATV series as well as The Avengers, so the episode is firmly set in Avengerland, thereby making its setting in unreality clear. The premise is even more unreal: the plots of Jason King's crime novels start to happen in reality and naturally he is suspected of the crimes. I love this Jason King, particularly that pretty well everyone is a caricature, in fact I think that generalisation can be exten...

Image: Female fans being held back from Peter Wyngarde as he opens the Woolworths shop in Luton in 1973 (credit: http://m.lutontoday.co.uk/news/nostalgia/when-tv-star-peter-wyngarde-aka-jason-king-opened-luton-s-woolies-store-1-5552393 ) Things have been a bit fraught recently, but I've now started a much-needed week of annual leave, & intend to prove my superficiality by starting with a post on the confection that is Jason King, rather than any more serious cult TV show. I'm sure I wrote in my general post about this show that my interest in this show was partly aroused by my godmother telling me - some shamefacedly - that she had a raging crush on Peter Wyngarde in the 1970s. And how much of the 1970s Jason King is! I have to give it full marks for the tropical establishing shots in the opening scenes. I have read criticism that this stock footage has not worn as well as the film used for the actual series, but my recollection of seventies TV's use of stock footag...

Apologies for the recent hiatus on posts here: I have been, & remain, unwell, so have not been able to get my head round my usual acid interpretation of a defenceless TV programme. My recent watching of Department S, & conclusion that it had hidden depths, left me wanting more, so today I bought the box set of Jason King, its follow-on. In vain will you seek my first impressions of the series on this blog: they happened some time ago with an odd disc & I was not impressed, but I thought I'd give it another go. 'The series featured the further adventures of the title character who had first appeared in Department S (1969). In that series he was a dilettante dandy and author working as part of a team of investigators. In Jason King he had left that service and was concentrating on writing adventure novels following the adventures of the fictional Mark Caine, [which the Jason King character was also writing about in Department S] who closely resembled Jason King in ...

It's interesting, watching this Prisoner straight after Department S's Black Out, where I commented on the dodgy use of medicine in that show. It isn't actually half as dodgy as the use of medicine here. On the one hand, people are over-medicalised, & of course it's anything like nonconformity that is marked down as a disease. On the other hand the 'treatment' is clothed in a facade of kindness. Also similarly to the last episode of Department S, when placed into its historical context in the heady 1960s, this episode becomes a terrible warning of the way in which society was perceived to be going. The chess game is a rather obvious allegory for the way society pushes people into ordered positions, & the Village is an allegory of how this is inescapable. Power, control, the use of emotion, the misuse of medicine & psychiatry are all servants to the theme here: society's control is inescapable. I must confess to yet another Prisoner heresy her...

This Department S first & foremost at this length of time, hits me as a real blast from the past. I've only ever seen a couple of episodes of Jason King, the successor to Department S, & for no reason I could fathom didn't take to it, but this episode of Department S actually seems to press some of the same buttons. It does this by accessing the same luxury zeitgeist that so many sixties series tapped into. I like to think of the show's contemporary viewers watching the show in a flat (already a decade old, though) in Park Hill in Sheffield, or the local example would be the Castle Bromwich estate in Birmingham. Before these developments went horribly wrong, there was a real sense that things would get better, & that slum living was over once & for all for the inhabitants of these palaces. They would also watch a film in the city centre of an evening, & could eat continental food - even I was taken to Gino's Omelette Bar in Birmingham as a child. A...

(I will return to The Prisoner soon: I just need time to get my head round allegory in Dance of the Dead!) Classic Avengers territory, here, as far as questions of identity, doubles, deception, & state secrets are concerned. Watching Department S this time has really made me re-evaluate it as a successor to The Avengers, in a rather Series 6 mould, in terms of bizarreness, eccentric, flamboyant characters, & an organisation behind the characters' odd lives. Of course I have my usual gripe that the actors' faces are too familiar from sixties TV & have a tendency to make you wonder where else you've seen them - Basil Dignam & Robert Urquhart would be the ones that do that to me here. I'm intrigued by the impressive use of Steed's library - the books that appear in Stable Mews - that I can spot in no fewer than three locations in this episode. I don't always disapprove of repetition! Of course this is a piece where momentous matters of state ar...

I was surprised to find, on checking just now, that Department S only consisted of one series, when I really thought it had two. I'm not thinking of Jason King as a second series; I realise I'm thinking this because the way the DVDs in my boxed set are divided into two sections. I'm also thinking it because of the nature of the programmes: there is an assurance about the later episodes, that show the series had become established, & that is no more the case than with Last Train to Redbridge. One of the things I find most interesting is the way the episode looks. In terms of the choice of images it has much to interest, views are changed quickly enough to maintain visual interest. The choice of what you see maintains interest as well - I always say you can't go wrong with the appearance of a coffin on the telly - it's one of the more obvious symbols! In this episode the fact the visuals are slightly overdone is no shame - the baddies look like baddies & ca...

In my own rather constrained world-view there are two opposing tendencies in the television of the 1960s & 70s, realism (Callan & Public Eye: this tendency came to the fore in the 1970s in The Professionals & The Sweeney) on the one hand, & on the other hand unreality (The Avengers & most of the shows I really like). Normally Department S would be in the unreality side of the divide, but for the first 11 minutes of this episode it has a creditable go at being a gritty tale of shady dealings in London's underworld. The episode gets off to an excellent Avengers-esque start with the image of the masked men arriving at the building site. I mean, this is so Avengers it is almost a pastiche. In fact it feels very much like the show is a pastiche of first The Avengers & then the gritty detective genre before coming to as a Department S episode. Fabiani does an excellent hard man/Bond role: it starts off Bond in an exotic location before becoming hard-man-using...

Probably the most iconic scene in an episode of The Prisoner in this one, the scene of the chess game with Villagers acting as the pieces. This iconic scene dominates the episode, which is a pity because you'd have to be hiding behind the sofa with a bag over you head not to notice the chess game/Village metaphor, but some of the other, more subtle things can be missed here. Ironically - I wouldn't like to speculate that this was done deliberately - this relates perfectly to what Drake learns in his investigation in this episode. The beguiling imagery & the languid foppishness of Peter Wynegarde playing Number 2 distract from the bleak key message here: *nothing* is what it seems. Things are always more complicated than they seem. The immediate message from Drake's point of view would have to be that the tentacles of The Village authority spread far & wide & you cannot really tell who is who. One of the key things he has set out to find out in his investiga...

Like A Small War of Nerves, this is another Department S episode that - to me at least - feels very like a late Avengers episode, in plot, underlying themes, dialogue, & even bizarreness. At first gasp, the name Marling Dale, the army base at which the events of the first scene of this episode happen, sounded extremely familiar. I was sure it was used as the name of a location in The Avengers, & am disappointed to discover that the research station in The Positive-Negative Man was called Risley Dale, but I'm still hoping to post in the future that Marling Dale is used elsewhere when I find it! Jason King starts off the episode in his usual playboy mode, but soon moves into all-knowing Steed mode. When he searches Blain's car, it fees very much like scenes in How to Succeed...At Murder, & The Fear Merchants, where Steed examines a car, only with the chauffeur in this case taking the role of Mrs Peel. If this were an episode of The Avengers it would be one of...

My take on this episode of Department S is that the plot is actually straight out of The Avengers stable, an opinion which doesn't seem to be shared by anyone else, since the general opinion on the internet seems to be that this is a straightforward 1960s ITC detective/spy story. I haven't made it explicit, but I've adopted a policy of not doing episode synopses on this blog: after all the reader who has managed to get here can also get to episode guides to most of the series I watch, elsewhere on the internet, so I'll content myself with commenting on how this episode strikes me. The basic premise is the very Avengers one of both fascination with modern technological and chemical developments, & fear of their possible repercussions if they get out of control. In this case the powers of order, the Establishment, are contrasted with Gregory Halliday, a lone scientist who has beome concerned at the safety of the chemical weapons his department is working at. He...