Département S

Department S was one of the first TV programmes I can remember watching and loved it for it's strange plots and interesting characters. I waited for years to see it again and I am delighted to say it has just started a re-run on a UK satellite channel and it's just as good as I remember it. The character of Jason King is fantastic and the two straight-playing members of the trio are also very good. The whole thing looks fantastic, there are some wonderfully corny lines, excellent clothes, theme music that ranks among the very best and it all comes together to present us with something camper than a hut full of cub scouts (and if you ever wondered where many of the ideas for the X Files came from - look no further than Department S). Simply brilliant.

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.

I think that in all the imagination of the ITC writers, Department S was ahead of it's time. First of all, although it was set in the cold war world years,the series really thought of a global society,the crimes were no longer the responsibility of local police but of a higher authority that had to be involved ( thus the chief Sir Seretse, which shows his position seems to be a sort of a U.N appointment). Then the crimes were not only state secrets but industrial and financial. I can't think of too many shows that would involve themselves with the work of Interpol ever since. In addition the mysteries are so bizarre that all the computer and imaginative efforts have to be thrown into the case to solve it. The Lone Ranger theory would be no longer feasible, it would seem we live in a society that has to pull resources together in order to figure out what is going on.

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?.

Another of my most fondly remembered shows from my pre-teen years was this stablemate of other favourites like The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk Deceased and others.

With a premise, as the DVD box-set claims, not a million miles away from the much later "X-Files" or "Jonathan Creek", only without the creepiness, the intrepid trio of flamboyant ladies-man novelist Jason King (archly played by Peter Wyngarde), straight-arrow Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and attractive computer geek Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nicols) get called in to solve the cases that MI5, the FBI or Surete reject.

Cue a series of well-crafted 50 minute adventures, often populated by the usual roster of ITC-series supporting actors, top and tailed with another superb theme-tune.

My brother has just bought me the DVD box-set of this show and unlike most DVD box-sets, this won't sit buried away in the cupboard but will certainly be watched, each and every one, critical judgement suspended as I transport myself back to my eight-year-old self lying in front of our family television, raptly gazing up at shows such as this.