Harry W. Junkin

18 February 1970 (IMDb) or 6 January 1970 (epguides.com)

4^th January, London, England, Great Britain, Europe

The chimes of Big Ben resound across the capital. A nervous man calls for his gum chewing assassin friend. He’s sending the killer to a rendezvous with someone as yet unknown.

A well dressed man is ready to leave for a swanky do. He calls for his wife – Mary – and the two of them leave more or less on time.

The nervous man watches them leave. His assassin is lurking in the car park as they enter to fetch their vehicle of choice. He shoots Mary in the chest.

Mary is taken away in an ambulance and her husband spends an anxious evening in the hospital. A doctor brings him news – his wife is dead.

He returns home in a daze, pays the taxi driver and gives us some good stiff upper lip acting when the driver asks if he’s ok. He turns around and his late wife is standing in the door way, waving to him.

Do you believe in ghosts? Does Department S? Summon Sir Curtis – Department Spectre are required.

The nervous man seems to think Mr Burnham is the biggest threat to his as yet unknown plan. This despite Mr Burnham being utterly and completely unthreatening to anyone.

He is later sent some flowers – delivered I think by the gum chewing assassin – and the card inside says…

AND THEN THE PHONE RINGS. It’s Mary. Mary Burnham. Mrs Mary Burnham. His wife. His dead wife. The late Mrs Mary Burnham. It drives him nuts.

But he’s not imagining things – the bath starts running, his wife’s negligee and slippers are by the side of the tub. Either he’s being haunted by a dirty ghosts or someone is pranking him to the bring of insanity.

He wakes up the next morning and finds MARY~! standing in his bedroom. This is one un-dead dead woman.

At the end of the penultimate act they all look out of the window and see the ghost of Mary Burnham. Explain that, Department S.

He’s having his photograph taken (by a woman who claims the lighting makes him look like "an aging Dublin bricklayer"). It is TWENTY SIX minutes into the episode. I was worrying we were going to have an entirely Jason-free episode of Department S. Worse still, it was a very good twenty six minutes and I was beginning to think they’d made the wrong casting decision when it came to the sequel. Jason is being photographed for the cover of Time magazine. As if.

Donald Houston played Burnham - he may be best known for the starring role in "Moonbase 3" (playing a character called David Caulder, a fact which confused the heck out of me when the lead actor in "Star Cops" - considered a cousin of Moonbase 3 - was called David Calder).

Louis Maxwell played Mary Burnham - Miss Moneypenny herself and a big star so we knew that Mary Burnham would appear again despite being killed before the opening titles.

We first meet her in the grave yard and she has a rather attractive barnet (is that right? Am I learning the common touch, guv’nor?) She’d become rather bouffant of late and it’s nice to see something more natural.

She brings statistics – 22% of the people believe in ghosts. Stewart refutes this with a fact-filled "then 22% of people are fools". I’ve met people – more than 22% of people are fools.

The clothes are the same but her hair has grown by at least a cubic foot by the time they reach Burnham’s place. Department S must fit their cars with portable salons.

After Burnham has his near breakdown, Annabelle is on hand to explain everything. The card from his wife was written at least three months ago, the flowers – which died almost immediately – were sprayed with a delayed action chemical, the telephone call was almost certainly an actress and all future calls will be monitored. She’s either very reassuring or a huge bucket of water poured over the desperate hopes of a recently bereaved man. I’m not sure which.

They listen to the latest call from "Mary". She doesn’t answer any of his questions which makes me think it is a tape recording. Annabelle hasn’t suggested that yet so I’m one up on her. Department S don’t know it but as soon as I wrote that we cut to the nervous man and the gum-chewer and see their high tech drive-Burnham-mad lash up.

The photographer is rather nice. Fully clothed of course but in the sort of dress which doesn’t tax the imagination too much. She’s also got a spiky attitude. I think she’s the hottest woman to ever have appeared in the series. She is another one who should’ve had a spin-off series. It actually makes me sad we’ll never see her again.

We briefly see Annabelle’s bare feet which might excite some people.

There’s also a woman in a bath but Jason has other things on his mind. He wishes her good day and leaves.

Jason – once he turns up – explains the ghostly tap. While Burnham was out, someone broke in, turned off the water at the mains and went up to the bathroom to switch the tapes on. Then, when the moment is right, he simply turns the water on in the basement and voila – magical plumbing.

He goes on to explain how there came to be a cigarette with Mary’s lipstick on – someone put Mary’s lipstick on a cigarette. It’s not actually as impressive a deduction as he made it seem.

Jason quips that he quite often sees things that aren’t there but puts that down to quite a different sort of spirit.

He chats up Burnham’s nurse with the line "I shall be quite ill later". I suppose it’s less open to misunderstanding than "I shall be quite sick later". The latter involves things that are only legal in parts of Holland.

Jason cleverly spots the significance between "look out of your window" and "look out of your bedroom window". Someone must be watching Burnham’s every move. Someone with the equipment to fake phone calls and drive a man potty.

When one of his clever ruses goes astray he finds himself trapped on a narrow ledge, several storeys up and with the world’s press watching his every move. Plus he’s about to die wearing denim which he’d spent eternity regretting.

The photographer claimed not to have read any of Jason’s books. She later confesses she was lying – she’d read the imaginatively titled "The Return of Mark Caine" and it bored her rigid. She says "the return of Mark Caine makes the return of Sherlock Holmes long overdue" which either means in this universe, Holmes never returned from the Reichenbach Falls in the short story collection "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" and therefore Department S and its entire canon takes place in a parallel reality similar to – but not identical to – our own, or that the writer was desperate to pad the script a little and made up some not-very-good dialogue to fill time.

Another mention for "People in Glass Houses Shouldn’t" – this time to point out that Mark Caine disguised himself as a window cleaner. This is an excuse for some high comedy as Jason too goes undercover as the least convincing window cleaner in England. His body rebels at the idea of manual labour and he is extremely rude to a small boy who calls him "fish face".

Stewart meets Sir Curtis for the briefing in a ski lift. Sir Curtis says he could shoot anyone at any time and never be found because he has no motive. This is the police’s attitude in the Burnham case – since no one would want to murder Mary, they have no way of knowing who it was.

Stewart goes to see Mr Burnham and wears a dark brown suit while quizzing him about his average life, average career and average suit. Mr Burnham is an economist who doesn’t believe in anything but numbers. So why does he now believe in ghosts?

Stewart takes his interest in the case a little too far when he gate crashes the funeral.

He throws himself into things and solves one little bit of the mystery – the baddies were one step ahead because they’d put a bug in the telephone. He’s wearing the brown tie with the black spots on it again. That’s a good tie. Stewart explains that the baddies only have to ring Burnham’s number and hang up before it rings to hear every word said in the room. I didn’t understand it but I don’t really understand anything pre-internet.

Stewart goes to see the surgeon who operated on Mary Burnham and gets shouted at about how completely, totally, absolutely and utterly dead Mary Burnham – the late Mary Burnham – is.

This doesn’t deter him – he orders an exhumation.

Well it was all going very well for the first half. A series of hard-to-explain events leading to doubt and confusion all round. Is Mary dead? Is there really a ghost? What are those men doing? And why? Then it all goes a bit pear shaped when they come to explain everything. The simple mechanical questions are easy but motives and ultimate goals are much harder. There is a reasonable plan in there somewhere but it gets buried under the logic flaws and what was a 5/5 episode suddenly drops to a 3/5 episode. In many ways the conversation with the photographer encapsulated the episode – it seemed really good until you realised it was nonsense.