Gerald Kelsey

9^th March 1969 (IMDb) or 9^th September 1969 (epguides.com)

17^th July 1969

A plane flying from Karachi to London is approaching London Airport. There are two VIPs aboard – one high ranking Foreign Office official and one whose role is a little more hazy. Air traffic control seem surprised that the plane is asking permission to land. They send a deputation to meet the passengers and crew. The captain emerges, half an hour early due to favourable winds, and is asked for an explanation. The plane is not thirty minutes early – it is six days overdue. But to those on board it has been a perfectly ordinary flight.

And none of them have any idea where the bruises on their arms have come from.

Nine and a half minutes into this debut episode we meet Jason King. He’s listening in to Stewart’s conversation from behind a newspaper.

The first familiar face we see is Bernard Horsfall as Captain Carter. He gives his usual performance. Think Gulliver flying a plane and you’re pretty much there.

Peter Bowles plays Borowitsch – the Albanian who might be a pilot. The only evidence that he’s a pilot is a plane crash Stewart has the file on and which involved a pilot called Borowitsch. Which suggests, at best, that Borowitsch isn’t a very good pilot.

Al Mancini plays Durres and has the strangest hair. It defies explanation so I’ll give you a photo.

See – explain that. It’s like he went into a barbers and came out with Ayres rock on his head.

Geraldine Moffatt played the stewardess Janet. Honest to goodness, I typed that as a "Terror of the Vervoids" joke and I was going to cross it out and replace it with the character’s real name. But her real name was in fact Janet. She isn’t as cute as Yolande Palfrey. Her CV has all the usual ITC suspects on it so you’ve probably seen her lots of times elsewhere.

The first time we meet Miss Hurst she has the Anita Harris hairdo. It suits her.

She then transforms into the Tara King before reverting back to Anita Harris. At one point she dons a long blonde wig.

She’s in scientist mode when she tests the aeroplane food for drugs and channels Dick Tracy when she finds traces of dust and concludes the plane must’ve been to Albania.

Annabelle can pick locks – a talent she employs twice on the same door – once to break in and gather evidence and once to save Jason’s life. She has a talent for telling whether a person is alive just by lightly brushing their tummy.

Annabelle is in the above mentioned apartment searching for clues when she hears the occupant’s bird coming home. Rushing into the bedroom, Annabelle emerges in her bra and knickers, gathers up her discarded clothes and puts her stockings on while sewing seeds of dissent in the other woman’s mind.

Jason says he has a "couple of chums" who are gossip columnists and plans to pump them for information. While waiting in his Bentley for Annabelle he reacts with surprise when a blonde woman gets in next to him. He thinks a strange woman is trying to pick him up but is disappointed to realise it is only Annabelle in disguise. With Annabelle having ruined the air stewardess’s relationship by pretending to be the other woman, Jason decides she’s vulnerable and may provide more information. To that end, he puts on an accent and pretends to be an Albanian. A camp, tanned Albanian who sounds like he’s from the poverty-stricken country’s Spanish quarter. He gets knocked out and almost gassed to death for his trouble. A rather harsh reaction to what was merely a bit of good natured deception.

When Annabelle saves Jason from the gas she quips "That never happened to Mark Caine". She would later recount the incident in what is obviously a pretty accurate pastiche of Jason King’s writing style. He is not amused. The episode’s final scene sees Jason begin to explain his latest plot as the music drowns him out and they walk away into the sunset. He’s off to Jamaica to write it.

He goes for a grey checked suit this week. But you won’t have to wait long for his trademark brown wardrobe. He states at one point that he "can get clearance" for any state secrets. We are informed early on that Sullivan is a maverick – to prove Borowitsch is a pilot, he takes him up in a plane and knocks out Bernard Horsefall’s character. With the aircraft spiralling to the ground it is up to Borowitsch to steady it and save their lives. But he doesn’t – he holds his nerve and Horsefall "wakes up" and takes the controls.

Sir Charles Hallet – top Foreign (and Commonwealth) Office bod was wanted by the other side and, rather than kidnap him directly, they kidnapped an entire plane load of people and kept them for the six days it took to brainwash Sir Charles.

The food on the plane was drugged, Borowitsch flew the plane the rest of the way from Rome to Albania. There they injected the passengers and crew with something to keep them unconscious for the duration and set about washing the brain of the soon to be Comrade Hallet. When that was done, the put everything back in its place and flew back to Blighty.

Durres’s weird weird weird hair is never explained.

It isn’t your typical ITC introductory episode – we don’t have to go through a painful process of assembling the team or explaining the set up in detail. It wasn’t the first episode made and there is no indication it was intended to be the first episode broadcast. There is no real explanation as to who Department S are (other than the opening titles which make it reasonably clear that they are specialists in bizarre crimes), who Mark Caine is (unless they read the publicity material) and why this diverse group of people are working together to battle evil. That said, it is a rattling good episode. The teaser is very strong, the explanation is clever and if anything the only weakness is that it sets the bar so high that the rest of the series would struggle the match it. As an odd little sidebar, this episode sort of skirts around suggesting Jason might be gay.