Philip Broadley

8th October 1969 (IMDb) or 11th November 1969 (epguides.com)

31^st July 1974

We open in Spain. A car is gliding through the Spanish countryside. Inside are two Americans on their way to a rendezvous. They have a treasure map which leads them to the beach. They burn the map upon arrival. One of the men is carrying a gun, the other is wearing a wetsuit. The diver swims about in the sea for a bit and emerges with a large plastic fish. The two men celebrate their haul but the man with the gun shoots the diver in the back. He makes away with the plastic fish but is himself shot by the diver. A policeman arrives on the scene and finds two dead bodies, one locket containing a girl’s photograph, one plastic fish and a large bundle of cash.

Just five and a half minutes into the episode we find Jason, wearing a gaudy neck scarf, examining the fish and drinking like one.

George Pastell plays sinister foreigner Camilo Garria. He is of course Klieg from Tomb of the Cybermen and had a thriving career playing sinister foreigners of all kinds - from Russians to Arabs - in all the usual shows. He would return to Department S, playing a different part, in the very next episode.

Isla Blair played Garria's girlfriend, Elaine. She's a fantastically busy actress who took time out of her busy schedule to appear in The King's Demons.

John Louis Mansi appears as Maxime - the midget servant who pre-dated Nick Nack by some years. He spent seven years playing von Smallhausen in Allo Allo.

She wears a strange pink and orange kilt. Her hair is a cross between the Anita and the Tara.

She wears a shiny gold top with a red leather waistcoat.

When she goes undercover she dons a long brown wig and a pair of thickly framed glasses. Her tight trousers display a hard to miss VPL but that could all be part of the distraction – her mission is to plant a listening device behind a painting and nothing is quite as distracting as a visible panty line.

Stock footage of girls in bikinis turns out not to be stock footage when Jason turns up to question one of the bikini girls. She’s certainly a cut above the normal ITC bikini girls.

Annabelle wears a see-through yellow dress which is rather lovely. Her hair is ruffled, almost post-coital.

One of the dead men had 51 girls names in his note book. "That’s almost one every… seven days" quips Jason.

Jason describes one of the murdered men as an "American cat".

He goes from the poolside with the blonde to dinner with a brunette. He apparently spent the previous evening with this one. He gets about he does. Him and his mahogany face.

We then get a montage of names and faces which implies he schmoozed all 51 names (or "birds" as Jason calls them during his progress report) in the note book.

Jason is a passable artist – he sketches Isla Blair while a flamenco dancer gives it her all in front of him. He sends the sketch to Isla with a note about the "non-vintage" champaign served in the restaurant. He’s observed flirting with her and a sinister cove in a frilly yellow shirt kidnaps him at the first opportunity.

Jason finds himself chased by a pack of dogs while snooping on the villa of Camilo Garria, the beau of Isla Blair’s character. He narrowly escapes and high tails it for Stewart’s bedroom. He is asleep in a pair of extremely brown trousers.

He gets a brainwave and explains the whole scheme to Stewart. In a bright green shirt. Jason not Stewart.

Doesn’t get a mention. Several people have heard of Jason – one asks for his autograph – but we don’t get the traditional product placement this week.

He’s just come back from Singapore on a mission which is vaguely described but unsuccessful. He brings Annabelle some purple material back so she can make herself something pretty.

He meets Sir Curtis in an alpine cable car. He’s given a fake $20 which is "the work of a genius". It can only be detected as a forgery by "micro-chemical analysis". Or by giving it to Annabelle for she susses it almost immediately.

He has a new suit – a light grey number which he wears with a brown tie. Mind you, he is undercover at the time so maybe the change of suit was all part of his gimmick.

The whole thing is a counterfeit money scam. The real money and the fake money are swapped in plastic fish with Camilo Garria running the show from his villa in Tangiers. Jason and Stewart break into the villa but it is left to a drunken John Louis Mancini (in a truly strange sequence where he wakes up from a drunken stupor, puts a flower in his mouth and dances around the villa) to show them where the machine is. They follow him down and watch him skip about the basement tossing fake money around.

Department S take over the final money drop, fill the fish with indelible dye and catch the criminals red… blue handed.

I was hoping Stewart would have an underwater fight while dropping off his plastic fish but it wasn’t to be. The final act relied upon tension rather than action.

A very ordinary stock ITC story which might as well have been picked from a communal pile and given a plastic fish to make it a bit wacky. There is a lot of pointless padding, John Louis Mancini’s character is just weird and serves no purpose at all and the whole thing is frankly boring. Thankfully I know there are a number of much more interesting episodes to come or I’d give up now. One quite nice girl in a bikini earns it a single point.