Leslie Darbon

26 November 1969 (IMDb) or 20 January 1970 (epguides.com)

24^th of October at the City of Southwark Hospital in London, England.

A world famous surgeon is operating on a top government official. The press are hounding the hospital staff for news about this pioneering brain operation. Everything is terribly tense and the surgeon steps out for a breath of air. He’s promptly set upon by two gowned thugs who knock him out and bring in a replacement with a similar face who takes over the op.

He seems to know what he’s doing but from the look of the other surgeons he’s a trifle unorthodox. He does his dirty work and steps out for another breath of air. The hospital administrator sees what has been going on and the three impostors flee. The original surgeon wakes up and fears the worst – he examines his patient and finds… the job has been done superbly. It’s a perfect operation.

Why would anyone go to such lengths to perform brain surgery? There is only one thing to do – call for the experts. That’s ‘experts’ with a capital S.

The diplomat with the new hole in his head has never been to Istanbul. But Jason is convinced he has. Why should he hide it? Or is Jason wrong? And Jason is never wrong.

Peregrine – the patient – was very left wing at University. Overnight he became very conservative. Almost as if someone had been tinkering with his brain.

Why would an Istanbul hospital’s records have a chunk of pages torn out of them?

Seven and a half minutes into the shindig, Jason is in the operating theatre taking his blood pressure. I bet it comes out as groovy over fabulous.

It turns out to be a jocular scene as Jason is convinced he’s dying but Stewart tells him he’s got the thermometer upside down. Stewart laughs. He shouldn’t do that. It scares me.

Three huge Doctor Who guest stars ply their trade in this episode - Ronald Leigh-Hunt as Haslet-Wood, Cyril Luckham plays Walker and Jean Marsh plays Agatha.

She interviews the knocked out surgeon and can operate a tape recorder but that’s about it.

What would Istanbul be without a belly dancer?

Jason takes Stewart’s place in getting a briefing from Sir Curtis. They play croquet on a windy lawn. Jason loses – it isn’t his episode as he also loses at chess to a lady friend.

When all the facts stubbornly refuse to back up his theory that the patient was in Istanbul, Jason King gets on a plane and goes out there. He’s only been in the country a few minutes when he finds someone sleazy to bribe.

A few hours later and he is arrested for murder by the sleazy foreign police force. Luckily they let him go almost immediately. It got dangerously close to dramatic excitement.

When he realises the nurses have taken all his clothes, he fashions an ethnic disguise out of a night gown, a stolen fez and a piece of rope.

When he’s caught out of bed by his nurse, he sticks his arms out in front of him and pretends to be sleep walking. Because she’s foreign, she believes him.

Jason takes his old friend Agatha a copy of the very first Mark Caine novel – Istanbul Iliad – and implies she was with him when he wrote it. She considers Mark Caine to be tripe but admits he sells a lot more books than she does ("I measure my success by the IQ of the reader" she says haughtily).

It is suggested that the first Mark Caine novel came out 15 years ago. One wonders what Jason did for the first thirty… make that forty years of his life. He was inspired to write by her refusing to sleep with him and a trip to Istanbul on the rebound. She quips that she wishes she had slept with him – it might’ve saved the world from Mark Caine.

Stewart forgoes the usual discussion with Sir Curtis about the ins and outs of the case in favour of a chat with Annabelle on the way to the hospital. A wise choice methinks.

He’s wearing a fiercely brown overcoat and his reputation goes before him – they arrive and are spotted by the two men who knocked out the real surgeon. "Don’t you recognise him?" asks one of them. "That’s Stewart Sullivan of Department S". It’s almost like the opening of an episode of the Saint. You expect Stewart to look up and see a shining S above his head. He wishes.

When he tries to laugh during Jason’s bout of hypochondria it is the worst bit of acting in the entire series. One might almost think Joel Fabiani had a half suppressed fit of the giggles and they didn’t do a second take.

Not be outdone by Jason’s sudden jetting off to Istanbul, Stewart leads us into an advert break by announcing he’s decided to go to Moscow. On a whim. While there he embraces the old adage about when in Rome… wear a silly hat.

Twenty years ago, the patient had life saving brain surgery from a Russian surgeon while out in Istanbul. When he went under the knife in London, it was vital that the assigned doctor not complete the operation as it would reveal the earlier injury and questions would be asked about when he’d been, what he’d been up to and why he’d lied about it.

The Russian surgeon saved Peregrine’s life all those years ago because he was a Soviet spy. He’d continued passing secrets to Moscow ever since.

There then followed a relapse and he had to go into surgery for the second time. The surgeon was under Ministry orders to… well you can imagine it might be best if… saves a scandal and all that. Stewart figured this out almost immediately and started picking fights with people. He gets slapped down by everyone.

The trouble is, the mystery was cleared up in the first forty minutes and the last ten (given over to the operation) were unpardonably boring.

It has a brilliant teaser – a question so baffling that you have to watch it and find out why – and a completely logical resolution. It is just a twin shame that the middle bit is flat and relies entirely on people Jason knows, and the ending comes ten minutes before the episode finishes. It is followed by a lengthy operating theatre interlude in which nothing happens and then some political wrangling which probably seemed cutting edge in the late 60s but is very tame to modern eyes. All of which manages to drag a potentially very good episode into the solid middle of the road bracket.