Philip Broadley

17 December 1969 (IMDb) or 13 January 1970 (epguides.com)

18 January – Bond Street, London, England

At an auction in London a man with a silly beard looks at a mirror. Then a man in raincoat looks at the same mirror. Then – if you’ll credit it, Sir Curtis Seretse looks at the mirror with his lady friend. Sir Curt values the mirror at two and a half thousand pounds. No more.

Sir Curtis is surprised when the bidding goes beyond two and a half… three… five… six…

He doesn’t understand.

Three parties – the beard, a thin man and someone behind a pillar are bidding madly against each other.

…nine thousand pounds. This two grand mirror sells for nine thousand to the man in the raincoat. Beard man is appalled.

Raincoat man gets the mirror home – look, now he’s got two of them – and is showing off to a friend when the friend shoots him in the chest with his walking stick.

Why would anyone pay so much for a mirror? And why would anyone who had paid so much for a mirror be murdered as a result?

Sir Curtis wants to know. So he calls for Department S. Because he can.

Nothing. The teaser wasn’t especially baffling to begin with and nothing even remotely inexplicable happens in the rest of the episode.

Eight minutes in – he’s working for the CIA in the Caribbean and playing chess with a pretty girl. She doesn’t know how to play chess but is wearing a bikini. I know I wouldn’t mind. But Jason does. He gets quite rattled.

The pretty girl turns out to be twins. Yipes. He claims it’ll take him a couple of days to "tie them up". He means the loose ends of the case, obviously, not the girls. Jason King doesn’t do innuendo.

Paul Whitsun-Jones returns (see "A Cellar Full of Silence") as the man with the strange beard.

Michael Barrington - the governor in Porridge and Sir Colin in "The Seeds of Doom" - makes a brief appearance.

Jennifer Hilary plays the Countess. She has been in various bits and pieces. Nothing of note but it has been a star-lite episode.

Jason describes Annabelle to the twins as "incredibly dull". Compared with bikini clad twins who have their hands on his pawns I suppose she is.

For the first time in twenty episodes, Sir Curtis actually gets involved in the action – he goes to a mirror shop run by a someone suspected of being involved in the affair and tries to buy this mirror.

She says it is not for sale. Which is highly suspicious behaviour for someone running a mirror shop I think you’ll agree. The question is, which of the regular cast was unavailable to do this scene necessitating the hasty use of Dennis Alba Peters?

There aren’t any clues. None at all. I don’t think we’ll ever know.

He later takes it upon himself to go to another auction where the same gang are selling another mirror and bid against the syndicate himself.

A glass of wine reminds Sir Curtis of a pretty a girl in a short skirt. I wouldn’t have put him down in the Jason King class.

This is not the pose of an incredibly dull woman.

"I’ve just saved America. Now, what’s next?" Damn the man can make an entrance.

Jason claims "my French only becomes fluent after the first drink." Odd for a man who works in Paris. The line works though – he gets a lunch date with the woman he’s talking to.

He introduces himself to Corinne and she says "I know – I recognised you." I bet he enjoyed that. Even when he was meant to be undercover.

Jason is not averse to splashing the cash around when he wants some information. In this case, cash for the address of the Countess Corrine.

And when he gets there he’s not averse to snogging for information. He’s basically a tart. You wouldn’t know it to look at him.

He gets into a fight with the murderer at her apartment. You’ll notice his knuckles are bright red from punching his opponent in the face so many times. Other than that he is unharmed. Well, "nothing a good stiff drink won’t cure" at any rate.

Only the briefest of mentions – he picks up the walking stick with a gun in it and quips that Mark Caine wouldn’t approve.

He and Sir Curtis meet at a wine tasting to discuss the case. Stewart impresses him by identifying it as a 1957. "At least that’s what the label says" he adds. The wag.

He takes two lumps (or one spoonful) of sugar in his tea. That’s the sort of thing episode guides are meant to include.

He notices charts of numbers on the beard man’s desk – he recognises them as the charts of a man who thinks he has a roulette system. A gambler by Jove. And probably a not-very-good one who needs money.

Stewart has a set of skeleton keys and is pretty damn good with them – he opens a door in roughly half the amount of time it would take to stick a skeleton key in the lock.

Later, when his plan has come to nothing, he gets very tetchy with Annabelle. He snaps at her, the fiend.

A very silly plot and not in a good way. The use of the auctions to distribute the mirrors was an obviously flawed plan, especially as they already had a woman who owned a mirror shop in their inner circle. It would’ve been just as effective for her to have sold the clients the mirrors directly. Only that wouldn’t have drawn Department S’s attention to the plot and thus we wouldn’t have had an episode.

The teaser was weak – the mirror obvious contained something of value – and the explanation was that (shock) it contained something of value. Between the beginning and the end we had some running around and flirting. All very standard fare. Sir Curtis taking a more hands on roll made a bit unusual but for the most part it was extremely average ITC material. Another episode which is Department S in name only.