Philip Broadley

15^th October 1969 (IMDb) or 25^th November 1969 (epguides.com)

16^th August

Cap D’Antibes, France. A man is watching a saucy movie in his bedroom. Outside the house his guards patrol the grounds. The man is given a sleeping pill by a pretty serving wench, unaware that a hoodlum is outside preparing to break in. The wealthy occupant is clearly scared of intruders and double checks the security measures in place. Convinced he is safe he has his milk, takes a pill and goes to sleep.

The burglar climbs up to his bedroom window and, using a chemical which seems to melt glass, affects a silent entrance. He pads over to the sleeping gentleman and dabs glue on his face. He then sticks a clown’s mask on and leaves.

The man wakes the next morning and, unable to get the mask off, suffers a fatal heart attack.

What a strange way to kill someone. They’d better call in the experts.

Eight minutes in, Jason is lounging around on a sofa wearing the mask. His chums tell him off for a lack of good taste.

Alexandra Bastedo plays Nicole, intitially a serving girl at the murdered man’s house and then a suspect who must be plied with booze and flirted with. Alexandra is most famous for "The Champions" and latterly a guest role in Ab Fab.

Adrienne Corri plays pretty young thing Monique. It’s a little disturbing that someone who looks that good in a bikini would play Pangol’s mother in the Leisure Hive a mere twelve years later.

Eric Pohlmann plays impresario Emilio Andre. Pohlmann played the voice of Blofeld in Thunderball as well as doing the rounds of ITC’s classics.

Stewart returns from his interview with Nicole and Annabelle greets him with a "Nicole?" which anyone watching today would have to reply to with "Papa?"

They receive a tape through the post and it takes Annabelle’s technical skill to work out how to use the tape player. She also knows what "tape player" is in French.

She spends the whole episode with the Tara King hair do. Her hair is definitely getting bigger too.

Alexandra Bastedo was really pretty in the late 1960s. Even if she did deliver most of her lines through clenched teeth.

Lots of bikinis as usual.

A chance remark from Jason gives Annabelle an idea – the murdered man recently fought a duel with someone and that someone might have been after vengeance. This idea is ridiculed and abandoned shortly afterwards.

Jason believes women stealing is a sign of sexual frustration. So naturally he’s right round to see the woman who steals.

Jason types by the side of the pool in nothing but a purple shirt and tiny shorts. He’s surrounded by bikini clad girls, one of whom soon drags his attention away from his type writer.

He tells Monique "The lobes of your ears are very attractive" which is as smooth a chat up line as you’ll ever hear.

He takes Annabelle out for dinner (scouting for potential killers obviously) and wears an enormous green tie. The knot alone is the size of a normal man’s head.

He gets bad news while wearing a vulgar purple shirt, open almost to the naval and displaying his manly chest. He tried to get furious and utterly fails to carry it off in that shirt.

Jason visits Monique and finds she is a fan of his. She’s reading his latest novel (we don’t see the title) and cites "Index Finger Left Hand" as her favourite book. Jason reciprocates by saying he’d wanted her to star in the film adaptation.

Emilio asks for Jason’s help after reading through one of his books. He concludes Jason has an ingenious mind and is just the man to help him with a spot of blackmail- with-menaces.

Stewart, dressed in a brown suit with dark blue tie and hankie gift set, meets with Sir Curtis at the Tower of London. The murdered man is one of Sir Curtis’s friends and he wants answers.

Alexandra Bastedo takes Stewart for a drive around the back projection lot.

He breaks from tradition by wearing a light grey suit as he goes off to meet someone and/or blunder into a trap. It turns out to be both as the phone call really was from Sir Curtis but someone was waiting for him and followed him to Sir Curtis’s yacht. They left another threatening tape message in his car and took a pot shot at him.

Stewart seems rather taken by the lovely Nicole. It might be a ruse but he’s never been this good an actor before. He tells her he’s been warned to stay off the case or he’ll come to a "sticky end". He puts an emphasis on "sticky end" which makes me think he’s flirting.

Nicole is working with the man who murdered Kolliatis with the mask. Their plan is to send threatening tapes to wealthy men and collect a fortune. Kolliatis refused to pay and so was warned (fatally) that his life was at stake. Emilio Andre is their latest victim and the pick up is to be by speed boat. Department S set up camp in a yacht moored in the same harbour and wait. They have planted a bug in the suitcase containing the money and are monitoring the case’s location using a one of those miscellaneous needle-on-a-dial contraptions that were all the rage before the invention of proper gadgets.

The speed boat is operated by remote control. The baddies are waiting to pick up the money when they guide the boat to shore. A car chase follows and they end up dying when their vehicle crashes. The crash effect is astonishingly cheap.

Another of those episodes where the teaser turns out not to mean anything. There is no significance in the mask or the macabre nature of the murder. What follows is a routine story of blackmail. There are a couple of pretty ladies in it and both Jason and Stewart get to do some heavy flirting but the plot is thin and run of the mill.

It feels like a cheap episode too. Every driving scene seems to have those weird orange headlights which usually mean they are doing day-for-night shooting – placing a filter over the camera lens to avoid the expense of a night’s filming. The final action scene is achieved by spinning the picture round and round and the script is probably one of those recycled ones which was left over from another show.

Two pretty ladies and a surprisingly down beat ending earn it a couple of points.