Philip Broadley

22 October 1969 (IMDb) or 02 December 1969 (epguides.com)

26^th September, Rome in Italy

A plane lands at Rome airport. On board are "the brothers" – two sinister gangster types who scare all and sundry. Meanwhile, a man-with-a-beard gives a package to his associate and sends him to Paris forthwith. The two brothers enjoy a little jukebox music and some small glasses of alcohol before going off to kill someone. The someone being the man-with-a-beard. But he’s one step ahead of them and puts a pillow and a melon in his bed as a decoy. They are fooled and a gun battle breaks out. One of the brothers and the man-with-a-beard are killed.

The one remaining brother begins to search the man-with-a-beard’s flat. Presumably the thing he’s looking for was the thing given to the little chap we met earlier. The little man opens the package he was given and finds a small bunch of flowers inside.

Who would kill for a small bunch of flowers? Who would kill for a bunch of small flowers?

The flowers turn out to have a message hidden within. The paper wrapping them has

"AIDE-TOI
LE CIEL
T’AIDERA"

written on it in big letters. This turns out to be a line in a poem. The terrified little man – who has been drunk ever since his friends started getting killed – seems to have found the quote remarkably quickly.

A massive eleven and a half minutes into the episode. He’s skiing down a mountain before he narrowly avoids a tree which came out of nowhere and falls into a drift. He sounds in some pain – methinks he’ll be using a cane (or a caine) this week. Either that or an enormous comedy cast. Like Allo Allo but more lifelike.

Donal Donnelly plays Stacey – the little man with the package. I was sure it was Terry "Fusham" Scully but it wasn’t. His accent is rather cosmopolitan and he keeps a little golden pistol in his hat.

Michael Gothard is Weber – he had a leading role in James Bond’s "For Your Eyes Only" as a silent henchman.

Joanna Marie Jones plays the sinister Gina whose short hair singles her out for villainy. Her CV only has five entries on it – two Avengers, one Department S and a couple of bits in the mid-70s. She was very much the sort of girl they had in kooky parts in the Avengers.

A massive Tara King during her opening scene at HQ. She’s sat at a huge electric typewriter (she’s the woman of the team so has to do the correspondence as well as the detecting) and using the reddest phone you ever did see.

Aside from that she’s not in it much until the half way mark when she flies in from Paris to wherever they are in France and lends a knee-length-booted hand.

When the action gets rough Stewart insists she stay behind and read. Jason makes it all right though – he gives her one of the flowers from her desk and puts it on top of the book she’s reading. Awwww. Though it was actually quite annoying as she had to move it so she could carry on reading.

Three minutes of the exciting final act are given over to alternating shots of Annabelle and Weber reading books of French poetry. I know that isn’t terribly sexy (unless you like French poetry) but this has been an extremely unsexy episode and I wanted to fill the space. I could’ve made a cheap innuendo about the Eiffel Tower but I didn’t. Even though it is a massive erection. Et cetera.

Yup – I was right – Jason is using a cane. And he’s got a cast on. Two for the price of one. I wonder what Mr Wingarde was doing to get that little bump.

He explains that he took the nurse who plastered his foot out to dinner. He really is remarkable – he can take a dinner he had with a woman he’d just met a couple of days earlier and use the tale to flirt with another woman he’s only just met.

Jason and Stewart meet for a catch-up at an art gallery. Jason points out the best painting in the collection but we are too distracted by the sheer awfulness of his cravat to notice.

"I wonder what went on in there" says Annabelle.
"I don’t know – let’s theorise" replies Jason, presumably unwilling to say "flounder about in the dark and guess".

During the epic final battle, Jason somehow suffers a blow to the back of the head. This means he gets to wear a bandage during the joke at the end.

"If we solve this there will be a book in it for you" notes Annabelle when they are looking at the quotation from every angle. Thirteen episodes into the series and she’s only just worked this out? I don’t fancy her much as a detective. I still fancy her though.

Stewart – in a gay festival of brown – meets Sir Curtis on board a boat. It is a charity do and Stewart asks if he’ll be expected to make a contribution if he has a glass of something. Luckily for the stingy American git Sir Curtis assures him he won’t. The trip isn’t in vain however as the man with beard is revealed to be a bank robber who has apparently taken the secret of his biggest raid to the grave.

The brother who survives is determined to give Stewart a run for his money in the brown stakes. He’s even got a brown overcoat. If you ask me he’s winning. Even in this brown-heavy episode where Gina – pretty foreign girl who was doing the deed with the murdered man with beard – sports an extremely brown dress for most of her scenes. But the winner is obviously Jason who looks like a Cadbury’s Mini Roll in this outfit.

He plays table football with a small French boy in a small French café populated by the sort of well rounded characters who wear berets.

He meets a woman on top of the Eiffel Tower and the scene is enhanced by some of the least convincing back projection ever seen in an ITC drama.

He meets up with the woman again in the same clichéd café and the following exchange takes place.

Stewart: "Only the English are interested in the weather."
Woman: "What are you interested in?"
Stewart: "How innocent you are."

It turns out she isn’t as innocent as he thought she was as she drugs him and pumps him for information in the car before he passes out.

Weber comments that Stewart travels light "Like a man who knows he is going to be searched." Either that or he’s the sort of stingy bastard who doesn’t like paying for things, even at charity dos.

Weber’s apartment seems to have a diagram of someone's intestines on the wall.

A good episode. The obligatory mystery is used well, we know who everyone is and why they are doing what they are doing. There aren't too many implausible leaps of logic and even though it could've been an episode of any other series it would at least have been a good episode of any other series.