Jason King

1971

Jason King

6.9 | NR | en | Action & Adventure

Jason King - a suavely sophisticated former secret agent turned novelist - travels the world searching for material to fill his books, encountering an endless parade of glamorous women, exotic locales, menacing villains and daring intrigue! Before Austin Powers swung into action, Jason King set the standard for the hip crime-fighting international playboy!

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Seasons & Episodes

EP26 That Isn't Me, It's Somebody Else

Apr. 28,1972

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EP25 An Author in Search of Two Characters

Apr. 21,1972

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EP24 Zenia

Apr. 14,1972

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EP23 Chapter One: The Company I Keep

Apr. 07,1972

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EP22 Every Picture Tells a Story

Mar. 31,1972

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EP21 A Royal Flush

Mar. 24,1972

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EP20 Stones of Venice

Mar. 17,1972

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EP19 it's Too Bad about Auntie

Mar. 10,1972

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EP18 Thin Band of Air

Mar. 03,1972

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EP17 If It's Got to Go - It's Got to Go

Feb. 16,1972

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EP16 A Kiss for a Beautiful Killer

Feb. 09,1972

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EP15 Nadine

Feb. 02,1972

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EP14 Uneasy Lies the Head

Jan. 19,1972

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EP13 Constance Missal

Jan. 12,1972

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EP12 Toki

Jan. 05,1972

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EP11 Flamingoes Only Fly on Tuesdays

Dec. 29,1971

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EP10 All That Glisters (2)

Dec. 15,1971

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EP9 All That Glisters (1)

Dec. 08,1971

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EP8 A Red, Red Rose Forever

Dec. 01,1971

Jason is mistaken as a hit man when he is left holding a bunch of roses at a Swiss airport after coming to the aid of a seriously ill man. To Jason's horror, the roses are soon to be exchanged for a rifle!

EP7 To Russia - with Panache

Nov. 17,1971

Jason King is abducted to Moscow to unravel the mystery of three men who have been turned into three tidy piles of ashes. He creates his own Phoenix.

EP6 As Easy as A B C

Nov. 11,1971

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EP5 Variations On A Theme

Oct. 20,1971

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EP4 Deadly Line in Digits

Oct. 13,1971

On a visit back to England, Jason finds himself with income tax problems. However, it turns out to be a way of blackmailing him into helping the police solve a series of robberies where the police computer seems to be illegally accessed.

EP3 Buried in the Cold, Cold Ground

Oct. 06,1971

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EP2 A Page Before Dying

Sep. 22,1971

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EP1 Wanna Buy a Television Series

Sep. 15,1971

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6.9 | NR | en | Action & Adventure | More Info

Released: 1971-09-15 | Released Producted By: ITC Entertainment , Scoton Country: United Kingdom Budget: 0 Revenue: 0 Official Website:

Synopsis

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Cast

Peter Wyngarde

Director

Monty Berman

Producted By

ITC Entertainment , Scoton

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Cast

Peter Wyngarde

as Jason King

Flash Gordon Jason King Department S Night of the Eagle The Innocents

Reviews

Installation_At_Orsk I enjoyed Department S when I discovered it on DVD, so decided to give its spin-off series a try, even knowing going in that it was not as well-regarded. I very quickly found out why!What made Jason King (the character) work in Department S was that he had two relatively normal sidekicks - who appear here only in the briefest of stock footage flashbacks in one single episode - to bounce off, making him seem like an eccentric in a more or less everyday world. Given his own series and shorn of anyone to keep him in check, however, Jason becomes absolutely ludicrous, a camp comic-book creation with barely even one toe in reality. That he's at all bearable to watch is entirely down to Peter Wyngarde's charm, as the scripts frequently make him casually sexist and even racist in a cringeworthy 1970s way. (One episode actually has him say "Ah so, dlagon rady" to a Chinese woman... a Chinese woman played by a British actress in yellowface and false eyelids. Horrible!)The stories are also bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Since he's no longer part of a law enforcement agency, every contrivance imaginable is needed to force Jason into the plots. He unwittingly uses a codeword meant to identify an arms dealer. He's hypnotised. He's mistaken for a hit-man because he's carrying a rose. He picks up a hitch-hiker involved in a crime. He's impersonated (twice). He's blackmailed by MI6 (several times). He's kidnapped (repeatedly). In the laziest example, he just so happens to know *three* different people - from different countries - who are trying to obtain a stolen statue, none of whom have any connection to each other.The scripts are not the only thing that were cheap. To pay for location shooting in Europe (Jason visits Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, Venice and other cities - mostly wandering around in front of famous landmarks just to prove that yes, they really sent their leading actor there for the day) the show was shot on 16mm film rather than ITC's usual 35mm, and it looks terrible. 16mm can be decent quality - look at the restored DVDs of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who - but here everything is muddy and astonishingly grainy. The same sets appear over and over (every rich character seems to share a room with a blue domed ceiling), as do even cars. There's a silver Vauxhall Viva that follows Jason to almost every country he visits! Amazingly, a halfway-decent story does occasionally manage to force its way through the dross; 'As Easy As ABC' sees two criminals using the plot of one of Jason's own novels to carry out a robbery and frame him for it, 'To Russia With Panache' plays like a lost Department S script as Jason investigates a bizarre murder in the Kremlin, and 'Wanna Buy A Television Series?' amusingly bites the hand that feeds it by ridiculing the same US TV networks that ITC depended upon to fund its shows. But most of the episodes are empty, silly and, worst of all, *boring* nonsense that not even Wyngarde's charisma can save.

ian_c_c Finally we have a digital channel that is not afraid to run the old ITC pulp series from the late 60's and early 70's. These are the ones we 50-year-olds grew up with! They were, of course, formulaic having the two-man/one girl teams (almost always with the Canadian/American Hero in order to sell over the pond). With the popularity of the formula it was surprising that 'Department S' spawned an untypical offshoot - Solo British Hero with very few Transatlantic guest parts. This was harking back to the glory days of 'Simon Templar'.ITV4 has now re-run a number of these old 'Jason King' episodes most recently a two-parter entitled "All That Glisters.." I am absolutely convinced that Clinton Greyn's character of 'John Mallen' was voiced-over by Shane Rimmer, although no mention of this occurs in the credits. Anyone familiar with these stock actors would surely recognise the substitution instantly, unless Greyn had cultivated a mid-Atlantic accent of remarkable similarity during his time in the USA.If true it is a shame that Rimmer (who, I believe has been unwell recently) received no accolade for the performance. Such 'Lip-Sync' on live actors must be far more demanding than marionettes and is to be admired!Can anyone out there shed any light on this?

John-367 "Jason King" was always an anticlimax after "Department S". Both were made at Elstree Film Studios with many of the same personnel, but "Jason King" was shot on 16 mm rather than the 35 mm of the earlier series and in 1971 the difference was jarringly obvious. Despite a few foreign location shots (mainly King crossing a road in Berlin or Paris) the whole thing looked decidedly cheap."Department S" had the great hook of a bizarre pre-credit incident and much of the interest was in discovering the rational cause. The Jason King character was a gadfly with unpredictable, often wrong, flashes of insight. Stewart Sullivan and Annabelle Hurst could be left to do, respectively, the gumshoe and the brain work. King was best taken in small doses which worked in "Department S" as he did not have to carry the plot. However, as the lead character in his own series he was in virtually every scene and had to be sensible and motivated enough to do the traditional detective stuff in order to progress the stories (which were themselves (unlike "Department S") little different to those of a dozen other series).The tension in the one character between the frivolous dilettante and the determined detective often willing to risk his life for others must have been difficult to reconcile and the tone of the scripts and the degree of King's flamboyance varied significantly from episode to episode. King also suffered from not having strong regular characters the equal of Sullivan and Hurst to bring him down to earth when necessary and balance his excesses. The more interesting episodes were those rare ones where King was angered by the real suffering of others and had to confront, if not the hypocrisy, at least the irony of, his usual moaning about the minor irritations of his luxurious lifestyle.Extracting King as a character from Department S was an example of an often repeated mistake in TV. Because a character is hugely popular in one situation it doesn't follow that they will work outside their complex support structure of setting, format, other characters, style, etc. (Having Inspector Morse star, in an Australian-set, pseudo-western rather than an whodunnit in Oxford is another example which fortunately only happened in one episode) King might have become even more of an unlikely heartthrob in his own series but the drama suffered badly.Having said all that, "Jason King" remains a far more interesting, entertaining and original series than most and Peter Wyngarde (view "Night of the Eagle" to see him at his very best) one of the more complex and electric performers let loose in the lead of a major TV series. It is just that coming at the tail end of the "golden era" of ITC filmed series it is difficult not to judge it by higher standards than usual.

SlackBoy-2 After the huge success of 'Department S', in which the character of Jason King had quickly become dominant, a spin-off series was developed called (not surprisingly) 'Jason King'.King had left Department S and was working on his novels - the 'Mark Cain' stories. The rest of the cast of Department S did not appear at all, and were never mentioned.The general premise for the show was that King wandered around the world living a playboy lifestyle and each week was somehow drawn into a crime which he neatly solved in time for the end credits. British Intelligence were often hounding him to work for them as a freelance which he generally resisted until they reminded him of his back-taxes. The series was made on location around Europe, in contrast to Department S which never left the back-lot at Pinewood.Overall the series lacked much of the original sparkle and zest of Department S, the plots were much thinner and less original, and Wyngarde was becoming to old to play the part of a trend-setting playboy convincingly.