PODCAST 0 - DEPARTMENT S

My indistinguishable mutterings of the following text may be heard at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta031-episode-31


 - this is the hopefully more distinguishable text version...

Quite a few months before I finally made my first appearance on “ROUND THE ARCHIVES” I started work on a piece because Lisa and Andrew had invited me to give it a try. Initially, I thought that I might write a few notes and then try to spontaneously turn them into an audio article, and so that’s what I tried to do. Once I picked up my microphone, however, things started to go horribly wrong and I suffered all kinds of brain-freeze, all of which convinced me that I couldn’t do it, and it was about another eight months before I decided to try again, this time using a more structured, scripted essay format.

Nevertheless, those notes I made were still lurking around on a hard drive somewhere, so I thought it was about time I blew the dust off them and tried to turn them into the article they were always meant to be.

PODCAST 00

DEPARTMENT S by DENNIS SPOONER

Jason King – Peter Wyngarde

Stewart Sullivan – Joel Fabiani

Annabelle Hurst – Rosemary Nichols

Sir Curtis Seretse - Dennis Alaba Peters

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about a programme called “Department S” which was one of several filmed action series made by ITC Entertainment in the late nineteen sixties intended for the international market. This need to appeal to the world – and especially the USA where big the money was – explains why several of these series featured American or Canadian – if they were cheaper or more readily available - actors in a lead role, in order to appeal to an American demographic.

There was some logic to this, although the US success of The Avengers and The Saint also suggests that American audiences might have been finding an essential British quirkiness appealing too, and maybe found a faux-American setup far less appealing than their own genuine home-grown variety.

Anyway, whatever you might think of their reasoning, the creative minds at the Incorporated Television Company used to sit around trying to come up with new and exciting variations on the Action/Adventure format. By this time, The Champions had come and gone, but that notion of a European-based investigation team made up of an American man, a British man, and an exotic woman seems to have stuck, and so “Department S”, the mysterious section of Interpol where all the baffling and unexplained mysteries ended up going, was born.

Before we get going, however, I want to tell you a little story. It’s not a particularly interesting story, but I thought I’d share it anyway. On one of my DVD shelves I have a set called “The Best of ITC Entertainment” which contains one episode each of about sixteen ITC series; The Saint, The Prisoner, and so on. I picked it up in a sale at some point and it sat on the shelf gathering dust for several years once I’d watched the ones I’d fancied when I first bought it. So, anyway, one evening a couple of years ago now, I spotted this set sitting there and realised I’d all but forgotten that I’d ever bought it. So, because I was either bored or at a bit of a loose end, I thought I’d have a look at it, and, well, to be perfectly honest -

“That’ll be a bit of a laugh” I thought.

- because the reputation of these series had taken a bit of a battering over the years, not least because of the number of spoofs that appeared, a lot of which seemed to find the costumes and manner of those later nineteen-sixties folk worthy of mockery, despite the fact that such “far out” fashion was thought of as being “cool” – whatever that is.

Anyway, in the disc went and, because I’d sort of forgotten all about it really, I not quite randomly chose to watch the episode of “Department S” that was on the disc which was called “A Small War of Nerves” and settled down to mock and, do you know what, it turned out to be an absolutely marvellous hour of television and features one Anthony Hopkins, no less, in an absolutely cracking role about a scientist having a breakdown over the nerve agent he has developed, and his desire to release that same toxin to infect the general population as a warning.

And watching his TV somewhere in a gold-plated mansion, young Terry Nation had a notion…

Each episode would start with some kind of a mystery. Some were downright bonkers – A plane arriving at Heathrow perfectly normally, but five days late – A tailor’s dummy assassinated – spacesuits in the home counties - and some were far more mundane, but they always provided a terrific teaser that made you want more and, perhaps more importantly, keep watching.

Anyway, ITC made twenty-eight episodes of this hokum before they moved on, as they tended to, to making another idea instead.

Jason King may have been the breakout character, one who was so popular he was given his own show a couple of years later in which his old pals from the Department never showed up unfortunately, but the team in Department S was a very strong one despite him and, if the circumstances had been right – as they almost never were at ITC – a second series, or perhaps more, wouldn’t have been the worst idea in the world.

Because in many ways this is “The X Files” before there were any X Files; this was “Jonathan Creek” before he went to magic school; this was “Mission:  Impossible” but filmed in the home counties; This was “Torchwood” with its feet planted more firmly on the ground.

It was, of course, none of the above, and yet, in some small way, perhaps all of them. After all, setting up an intriguing mystery in a cold open and then allowing the audience to work out what exactly was going on alongside their heroes was – and is – a fine premise for a television series even now.

The thing we need to realise about all of these ITC series is that they remain eminently watchable despite their vintage. This may have something to do with them being made on film - so that the fast editing means that they appear slicker and far more pacey that a lot of the television surrounding them from similar times – but it’s also to do with the fact that they were made to be entertaining, and the hollow, empty, tragedy-beset personal lives of the main characters were, on the whole, left behind them when they went to work.

Which is another thing the angsty, melancholy, and sometimes downright depressing modern day action series might want to think about from time to time.

Do we really need to know about their broken homes, estrangement from their kids, money problems, or substance abuse temptations when they’re jet-setting around the world and giving the bad guys a jolly good sock to the jaw?

Perhaps nowadays we do, especially if shiny BAFTAs are to be grabbed and Twitter trends are the currency of popular drama series, but back then we really didn’t, and few of these kinds of shows would have benefitted from such things.

One of Jason King’s ex-lovers suing him for paternity, or Stuart Sullivan having shouting matches over the morning ham and eggs with a partner who worries about his close relationship with Annabelle Hurst, who herself is being plagued by an alcoholic hippy of a younger sister whilst dealing with inappropriate  behaviour in the workplace would not have made “Department S” a better series at all, but you’d struggle to get away from all that stuff now.

And that’s what they were.

Getaways.

A bit of escapist fun all set in a world that the armchair travellers of the late 1960s could really only dream of, and one which ultimately fed the boom in the package holiday industry just a few short years later.

It’s a relatively progressive series, too. Featuring a black character in a leading role – the boss of the outfit indeed - in 1968 when such things were rare in television, if not the world in general. It is never, ever questioned that Sir Curtis Seretse is in charge, which must have upset various of the more unpleasant factions of the viewing public in those less enlightened times, but we really ought to applaud ITC in general for developing a far more diverse casting strategy in certain of its shows – “UFO” and “Danger Man” to name but two - far earlier than some other production companies of the era, and applaud them for this piece of casting in particular.

But you win some and you lose some.

Sadly there is still an overdependence on what might only be thought of now as attractive “Totty” (or whatever derogatory term was in fashion at the time) amongst the female characters, but at least with Annabelle, she was CLEVER totty, and they very swiftly dispensed with the notion of her having to appear in her underwear or a bikini at every opportunity once they realised that it wasn’t strictly necessary and that requirement was serviced fairly well by Jason’s various playmates whenever we got a brief glimpse of his extraordinary lifestyle.

It is, of course, disappointing that the scriptwriters made Annabelle get immediately into an “only wearing her underwear” ploy in an early episode having established her cleverness credentials in an era of growing enlightenment, especially as the gentlemen of the team did not have to resort to similar measures whenever they had made an illegal covert entry into a suspect’s apartment, and it did cause a certain amount of eye-rolling at Holmes Towers when I was trying to extol the virtues of the series, but happily, this aspect of the show seemed to vanish fairly swiftly.

Happily, the show’s other assets made it a far more enjoyable prospect and we persisted past this particular display of late-1960s idiocy to find a good, solid, and very enjoyable set of episodes to be entertained by.

And the show is funny too… Witty…

Whether or not that is down to the influence of the stars finding the humour in it, or the scriptwriters finding aspects of the stars’ personalities to play up to will no doubt have caused endless debate through the years, but Stuart, Annabelle and Jason make a winning team who seem to play off each other rather well and have a delightful on-screen chemistry that simply works, all with a knowing twinkle and a great sense of fun being had.

Who knows? Maybe they were all perfectly beastly to each other, but it all seems like a lot of larks and fun were being enjoyed over at Pinewood in those days.

“Department S” was actually in production at the same time as another ITC series, the original version of “Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)” – accept no imitations - which was a show that I have very fond memories of watching as a child.

It’s one of the few that I would make a point of watching and, in later years, I almost jumped for joy – not something I even think about doing very often – when a repeat season was announced on some channel or other, giving me my first opportunity in several decades to see those shows that once made me so very happy.

Such a strange childhood in which ghosts and down-at-heel detectives would bring me some joy, but there you are.

Interestingly, Stewart Sullivan’s car in “Department S” is usually the other white Vauxhall Victor that wasn’t Jeff Randall’s one in “Randall and Hopkirk” – the one with the black vinyl roof – and even has a consecutive number plate with it, suggesting that they were bought as a job lot on the same day.

Given that the red mini that Jeannie Hopkirk drove in the other show also turns up from time to time in “Department S”, you do get the impression that one crew was filming on the opposite side of the road as the Department S crew were filming on the other.

In fact some scenes even have that air, as if both crews were out on the same street on the same day or, as is more likely I suppose, one crew were doing the second unit stuff for both shows at the same time.

Although I do find myself occasionally looking for their reflections, or trying to catch a glimpse of some hairy-backed grip disappearing around a corner in search of the next set-up, or hoping for a swift pan to accidentally catch another film crew unawares.

Of course for contemporary viewers at least, one of the things that “Department S” and several other ITC series of the times offered was a slight taste of the lifestyles of what we once called the “Jet Set” at a time when most British people’s annual holidays might involve a week at their preferred seaside resort and ideas of faraway places might only be the stuff of dreams involving “Spend, spend, spend” style pools wins.

After all, despite the fact that the late 1960s was an exotic era, all kaftans, flowery shirts, strange cigarettes, and the Beatles heading off to faraway places, most people’s lives were fairly grim and unexciting, knitted tank tops and the daily grind, and those Olympian celebrities from the newsreels heading off to the sunshine and beaches covered in bikini-clad exotic (ie foreign) women, and millionaire playboys gambling in the casinos of the south of France were such stuff as your average Joe from Doncaster could only dream of.

And so, the international best-selling novelist Jason King having supermodels fling themselves at him as he fought off desperate ne’er-do-wells whilst sipping champagne at eight o’clock in the morning with his cornflakes and caviar must have been exciting to anyone living a life that more closely resembled the hapless hopes of a couple of donkey-jacket wearing Likely Lads.

Okay, okay… Perhaps fewer of us might dream of being shot at and coshed by desperados each and every week of our lives, but in the era when James Bond was often king of the box office, being swept off your feet by a brave, smart and clever fellow, or being such a fellow, must have been the fantasy of many a young – and not-quite-so-young – viewer.

Especially as you always knew that with their names on the credits, no real harm was ever going to come to them, despite the occasional walking cane, bandage, or make-up induced black eye.

In many ways, “Department S” - with its weekly mystery which needed resolving through the cleverness of its protagonists - was something of a prototype for “The X Files” (although that in itself is now a pretty old show) which became a massive hit in the 1990s, so maybe it was just ahead of its time?

One thing that we did find enjoyable from working our way through the series were the preposterous fight scenes. They just wouldn’t make them like that any more. One thing to keep a particular eye out for is the regular “Jason Fling” as he would hurl himself into the fray from the top of any flight of stairs which happened to be available.

Magnificent stuff!

The stuff of legend!

And precisely the sort of stuff that made Peter Wyngarde an international star – especially (apparently) amongst the housewives of Australia – for a time at least, until he got caught by the tabloids. It is he, however, who is behind the shiny gold mask of Klytus in the Dino de Laurentis “Flash Gordon” movie, and he carried on working steadily if not spectacularly, until his death in early 2018.

His co-stars didn’t fare quite so well in their acting careers, it seems, and whilst Jason King would get his own series several years later, not least because of those Australian housewives, the rest of the Department were transferred to over to the Bureaux des TV Heaven and hardly ever heard from again – although several similar Departments would turn up on TV from time-to-time.

For Dennis Alaba Peters, “Department S” seems to mark both the high point and the end of his acting career, and he died in 1996.

Like generally seems to been the fate of several glamorous female actors in adventure series, Rosemary Nichols didn’t go on to enjoy international superstardom, but left acting to pursue other career opportunities, although it was with some satisfaction that I realised that she had once had a very small role as one of the street kids in “The Blue Lamp” which made me feel suitably happy anyway.

Joel Fabiani had a pretty successful career playing similar characters to Stewart Sullivan in several high-profile TV series and movies, although I didn’t think that I’d seen all that many of them.

Happily, a few weeks ago, just after we’d worked our way through the entire run of “Department S”, we were watching a movie we’d recorded off the TV which was called “Snake Eyes” and who should we spot in it playing the senator who is the target of the assassination plot that provides the main thrust of the plot of the movie? Joel Fabiani! Only Stewart Sullivan himself! Just after I’d really begun to suspect that he’d never been heard of since.

On occasions, especially towards the end of the show when a streak of cynicism towards the Establishment was creeping in, the endings to the episodes were left deliberately oblique or ambiguous and it would sometimes finish on a very poignant or poetic note, but seemed to indicate – even in a slice of hokum such as this – that the darker, anti-establishment, and more  distrustful side of the 1960s was beginning to creep into the mainstream, much as it would with “Mission: Impossible” on the other side of the Atlantic at around the same time, when government intervention into the affairs of foreign states was starting to leave a far more bitter taste when it couldn’t even solve its own problems.

Perhaps this is why “Department S” was disbanded? Because it was no longer fashionable? Okay, Sir Lew always wanted a new idea to try out in the American market for the next new season, so it was more likely that, but both this series, and the slightly shabbier world of “Randall & Hopkirk” deserved a longer run, but it was not to be.

Which is something of a shame, really.

Now I’ll accept that nowadays, a lot of “Department S” can look a little cheesy (if not the full gorgonzola) and cheap in comparison to what’s on now - although in terms of a lot of the TV at the time it actually looked gloriously and  outrageously expensive – and, like in a lot of other ITC stuff constructed out of the stores at Pinewood, there’s a lot of recycling of sets, and the directorial style can now seem somewhat old-fashioned, all though it still makes for some really watchable entertainment on the whole, despite its vintage.

I also accept that the fashions and the attitudes can veer from the outrageously camp to the downright sexist, and that some of the shows probably don’t look all that great in modern terms…

And yet… and yet…

I maintain that, of all the ITC Adventure series that were created during those golden years, “Department S” is the one format that could be dusted down and polished up to be remade for modern audiences if a modern Writer’s Room could conjure up enough impossible scenarios that needed resolving.

And – because it was, is, and remains utterly fabulous - they wouldn’t even have to change the theme tune.