Tony Williamson

1^st October 1969 (IMDb) or 18^th November 1969 (epguides.com)

12^th September

A white car is driving through rural Spain. A policeman with nothing better to do hops on his motorbike and goes after the car. It is quite the frantic chase as the car weaves about the road in what looks like a deliberate attempt to force the bike to crash. Just as it looks as if the bike will plough off the road, the car smashes into a tree. The policeman gets out and checks to see if the driver is alive. He isn’t.

The driver is a dummy. Not a fool or a moron or a cretin – an actual dummy whose head comes away in the policeman’s hand.

And it looks a bit like Peter Davison.

3 and a half minutes into the episode he and Stewart arrive on the crime scene in Jason’s car. Jason is fanning himself with his hat. The policemen are appalled until they see Stewart’s ID and decide to fawn.

Alan MacNaughtan played smooth English baddie Gilford. MacNaughtan did the rounds of ITCs stable and kept his career going by appearing in The Professionals, CATS Eyes and all the other attempted throwbacks to a better age.

Kate O'Mara - whose famous triangle will not be forgotten by the thousands who have seen it - plays Pietra, the generic foreign female who serves no real purpose in the episode.

George Pastell makes his second appearance in as many weeks to play Sarrat, the worthy but ultimately untrustworthy foreign police officer.

She’s hard at work programming things into the computer, sporting the Tara King hairdo, when she gives Stewart the vital clue – a firm in Madrid which has been experimenting with radio controlled cars. Stewart looks as if he’s going to kiss her on the lips for this but instead gives her a peck on the forehead.

She saves the day at one point – bursting into a sticky situation, pretending to recognise the famous Jason King and claiming to be the advanced guard for a coach load of women in search of Madrid’s night life.

An interesting hair development comes after she’s had a rough time and the Tara King collapses under the strain, becoming a rather fetching bob.

Annabelle jumps from a speeding car in a very short skirt but that’s about all.

Jason says things like "Theoretically, the answer is quite simple" and then clams up until begged to explain. He then announces that the driver must be hiding in the car and drove it using a periscope. He is proved wrong and goes off in a huff.

In the car on their way to Madrid he speculates it must be aliens. But that is just a bluff – he recognised the tie the dummy was wearing and decides it must’ve been dressed by an Englishman. Which is exactly the sort of thing Jason King should be saying.

Stewart goes to a race track to speak to the people who were working on the radio controlled car. Their chap says they tried but failed – the thing didn’t work. So now they build race cars instead. One of them pulls in and Jason is inside giving it a test drive. He points out that the chap is wearing the same tie as the dummy.

He puts on his telescopic glasses again and sits watching racing cars, sat on a shooting stick and looking strangely pissed off for a man who has already found an awful lot of clues and done more than the average amount of deducting this week.

He doesn’t want to go on a scouting mission to the race track at 10.30pm because it isn’t long enough to have a decent dinner. He suggests midnight instead… until the girl he was hoping to chat up went off with her husband and he reluctantly agrees to 10.30.

During a fight in a garage, Jason is shot in the leg. "Are you all right?" asks Stewart. "Agony… and it’s ruined my trousers" replies Jason.

Undercover as a Spanish peasant, Jason tries (and fails) to chat up Kate O’Mara. She would later track him down when he is dressed as himself and have a drink with him. She has massive hair. She turns out to be dating the man who owned the race track and who developed the radio controlled car. It really is a small world. Especially when seen next to her massive hair.

During the exciting final reel, he’s wearing a garish yellow patterned shirt and matching (ultimately ripped) trousers. The switch from location to studio causes the shirt to look white rather than yellow. His face remains its strange otherworldly colour though.

He wears something around his neck (just about visible through his manly chest fur) which looks like a solid gold PGA logo.

Not a literary sausage.

It’s obviously a hot climate as Stewart isn’t wearing a jacket. You can almost smell the musk. But as soon as he’s back in Paris, Stewart dons his trusty brown suit, brown tie and brown hankie.

He goes undercover as a journalist at one point but it doesn’t really get him anywhere.

He gets to put on his dinner jacket, bow tie and frilly shirt to attend a swanky cocktail party. He tells Sir Curtis all about the case and how the Spanish won’t give them clearance to do something. Sir Curtis introduces him to a military chap who knows all about the NATO business in Spain. Something big is going down and it involves someone being driven somewhere. Hmm….

He goes to see the Spanish police inspector they met when they found the crashed car and asks how they manage to work in such heat. This from a man wearing a beige polo neck jumper and a suede jacket. The police inspector – being foreign (as is the way on the continent) – drugs him, probes him for what he knows and turns out to be working for the bad guys. We get all the usual ITC drugged effects.

My first thought after watching the trailer was "two dummies in three stories?" This is a much better story than the one with the melted wax work. The technology may be a little far fetched (and there are WAY too many close-ups of circular aerials going round and round) but it is logical, consistent and relevant to what is going on. Despite the similarity of the pre-titles sequence, the two dummy stories were very different (thankfully).