Cult TV Blog

My recent watching of Get Smart and the comments on the contemporary craze for all things to do with spies has caused my mind to turn towards Department S. This is an over-generalisation, of course, but it may be significant that as the sixties wore on and in the US the spy-craze turned more towards parody, in the UK it just turned bizarre. I'm thinking of all the ITC shows, distantly related to spycraft and espionage, whose characters became more and more flamboyant, peaking in Jason King. In the midst of the Cold War the actual espionage remained a serious matter and those who did it became the subject of the TV shows. I'm quite prepared for this little thought of mine to be blown out of the water, of course. This Department S episode is one which is a very good example of why I dislike familiar actors reappearing in all sorts of shows. Right at the beginning we see Patrick Mower appearing as a baddy. A few years later he was appearing as a goodie in Special Branch. Of course...

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...

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...