Jason King 1.23 – Chapter One: The Company I Keep

Well, that had some amusing moments, but it was borderline incoherent. I think it was filmed earlier in the batch and held back, possibly because it just wasn’t very good. One possible clue is that this has a lot more of Anne Sharp’s character of Nicola, Jason’s publisher, pestering him every six minutes for updates on his next book, than we typically see, as though this was introducing her. Anyway, it was written by Donald James, and features familiar guest stars Stephanie Beacham and Paul Whitsun-Jones. I thought, incorrectly, that it also featured a familiar location, but I had a quick look through the delightful Avengerland and Shardeloes House doesn’t seem to have been used in anything else I’ve seen.

But the giveaway is that Paul Stassino’s character of Captain Rizio is in this one. We met the character much earlier, toward the end of episode six, but this is actually the character’s introduction. It takes Jason a minute to realize that Rizio models his personal style on Jason, and gets his suits from Savile Row. Jason gives him a little hint about how he should fold his cuffs, which is delightful.

Fans haven’t unearthed and published – online, anyway – anywhere near the level of detail about Jason King‘s production as they have other, more popular shows from the era. The running order of these DVDs matches everybody else’s listed running order, which seems to be the sequence in which they were shown in the ATV region in 1971-72. As continuity errors go, this one wasn’t too egregious, but I would like to read more about the production order one of these days.

The other thing about this one is that Shardeloes House, doubling as a villa not far from Rome, is home to a periodic naughty party, where lots of government types with secrets to hide dance and frolic with cute girls. This is shown as quite a lot more risque than the family-friendly ITC usually went with, including topless-but-covered women in the villa, and several other ladies in their underwear throughout the episode. It was enough to make this dad blush a little, watching this with his kid. In a neat coincidence, though, we had a conversation last week about Inara’s job as a companion in Firefly, so we could explain things quickly as “sorta like that” and hopefully this odd world of adults made a hair more sense.

Jason King 1.15 – Nadine

This hasn’t been our son’s favorite day of watching old TV with his old parents. Following this morning’s Stargate, which he found disastrously dull, he had a great day of food and Xbox and pinball and pizza, and then we watched this unbelievably slow and subtle Jason King. It’s so subtle that he may not have even realized until the finale that there was a criminal scheme anywhere at all. Ingrid Pitt and Patrick Mower are among the criminals who have targeted our hero for reasons not divulged until the very end. Jason’s aware that something is up and plays along, but I think the storytelling and the acting were so underplayed that it just looked like an hour of romance and sightseeing and driving around Greece and Italy. He’s much more interested in what I’ve told him we are watching tomorrow.

Jason King 1.14 – Uneasy Lies the Head

Watch closely, unlike our son, or you’ll miss a thing or two, just like he did. So Jason is laid up in Paris with a broken leg, and somebody who claims to be him shows up in Istanbul. He’s been summoned by the local police to assist with their inquiries. The real Jason has already turned down this assignment after the slimy Rowland tried to get him to help. But we’ve seen this guy before, haven’t we? Well, if we just blank out on faces like our kid does, we haven’t, but those of us who pay a little attention have seen him. He drove Jason to the airport in London*, and he posed as a telephone repairman in Paris, and he actually arranged for Jason’s accident. So who is this guy?

Unfortunately, the kid was lost, but I thought this was terrific. I was starting to question it a little in the middle. We’ve seen a few cases where Ronald Lacey’s character whines and prods and tries to get Jason to help, but this episode appeared to be all prodding until the big switcheroo in Istanbul. The story’s by Donald James, and it won me over completely once things got moving. Lance Percival plays the fake Jason, and Juliet Harmer seems to be in on the scam as well. I like a story that keeps you guessing.

*After this sequence, I wound back and watched it again, pausing a couple of times and tried pointing out a little of how TV is made to the kid. The Heathrow sequence was a good opportunity to show how one film crew would film Percival and Peter Wyngarde in a mocked-up cab with the familiar brown brickwork of the Elstree Studios behind them, and mixed it in with footage of a black cab arriving at Heathrow. There’s not much of it, but there’s a little bit here of interest to people curious how Heathrow’s terminals looked in the late 1960s or whenever it was originally shot, with the old names of the Oceanic and Europa Terminals on the buildings.

Jason King 1.13 – The Constance Missal

Super-hypnosis was a standard of action-adventure shows from the sixties and seventies, and we’ve certainly seen some silly examples from ITC already, but this one’s got an amusing little twist. The criminals who are using super-hypnosis, including Geraldine Moffat, to arrange the theft of a very old book run into a fun obstacle: the owner of the very old book is planning on running a con of his own to double-cross them. Naturally, Jason gets caught in the middle. Clive Revill plays the book’s shifty owner, Anne Sharp, Charles Lloyd-Pack, and Richard Hurndall have small roles. Our son enjoyed this one a lot; it’s a fanciful story with an outlandish premise and lots of complications.

Jason King 1.12 – Toki

“Uh-oh,” I said, and Marie asked our son “Can you see why he said ‘uh-oh’?” and our son said “Ohhhhhh, yeah, it’s a white Jaguar!” And within a couple of minutes, it goes over the cliff for the fifth time in two years of this blog. That’s not the only bit of recycled footage in this one. At one point, a character played by Felicity Kendal is watching an old gangster movie on TV, and it’s the 1930s Chicago shootout scene from the Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) episode “Murder Ain’t What it Used to Be”. Or maybe she was watching Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Anyway, this episode introduces Anne Sharp as Nicola Harvester, Jason’s publisher. She appears in seven episodes. She tries to be sympathetic as Jason falls for a (modern day) gangster’s girlfriend. Peter Wyngarde gets to stretch and be a little sad, and Kieron Moore gets to throw his weight around his gang, one of whom is played by Tony Beckley. But any story where the Jaguar going over the cliff is the high point isn’t going to be a favorite of mine. My heart has started to sink when I see that Philip Broadley has written today’s episode.

The other day, I noticed that a film crew had followed several guest actors in “All That Glisters” around Paris, but not Wyngarde, and wondered whether they scheduled the shoot for the same time he had a smaller crew following him around Vienna. I think I might be slightly wrong, because in this episode, we see Wyngarde doing some shopping, without any guest stars, at some fashionable Parisian shops like Hermes, Cartier, and Christian Dior.