Harry W. Junkin

11th February 1970 (IMDb) or 17th February 1970 (epguides.com)

8th May in London England (to prove it there are seven red buses in the opening shot).

A man in his twenties is taking breakfast when he’s attacked by the waiter. The waiter searches his room and takes a black wooden box. He leaves the young man (and his mysterious tattoo) and makes good his escape.

He gives the box to a woman waiting in a car outside the hotel. She is extremely grateful. The young man awakes and realises with horror that his box has gone. He grimaces and takes two dice from his pocket.

He goes out for a walk and looks mournfully at a statue of a small cherubic boy. He drops a passport in the river. And his watch. And his wallet. He is not a happy bunny. He walks on until he finds a tree he likes. There he shoots himself off camera.

On the mortician’s slab he is autopsied by experts. They can’t believe what they’ve found. There is no possibility of error. "This man was born in nineteen hundred and nine".

While the pathologist and a pathological chum are out for lunch, two men sneak into the lab and steal the corpse. Also on their to-do list for today are bolting a stable door after the horse has gone.

The international implications of this case mean it is being dealt with by the World Health Organisation.

Later we meet these three – the two sitting down sound like brats and the man with the beard acts like their dad. The two child like men were apparently comrades of Spencer but that he’d recently started to get on their nerves.

A cleaning woman is going over Spencer’s room and finds this message. Who is the woman with the needlessly foreign name? Well, Jason knows her but Jason knows everyone.

"Where is the poor man’s Ian Fleming?" asks Stewart after twenty minutes. Annabelle tells him the only address Jason left is "Jason King, Egypt". Which is true – look – there he is.

He’s driving through the desert with a pretty young thing. They are lost. But luckily there is someone shooting at them so they aren’t alone. It might be a subplot but I don’t think subplots had been invented when ITC made their catalogue so it can be nothing more than an interlude. He appeals to the local chieftain who has apparently taken them prisoner. Jason stresses that they are both British. He sings the national anthem (using the word "bum" in place of the real lyrics). I was right – it was an interlude. The chieftain has a telegram for Jason asking him to come back to Paris.

Spencer Bodily was played by Gavin Campbell - future bland co-host of "That's Life".

It takes a good quarter hour before we meet Miss Hurst. She’s been given the girlie job – going through Spencer Bodily’s clothes. She’s thrilled.

More exciting (to her at least) is some factual information – no one called Spencer Bodily ever had a driving licence, paid income tax or was a customer of the gas board. The only slight lead they have is that his mother’s last known address was in Montréal. Though that is now a petrol station.

Annabelle has a strange way of saying "Canadian". We’ve heard her attempt at a French accent in an earlier episode so maybe that explains it.

Her ring and earring match quite alarmingly. But she’s pleased because she and Stewart have – after 33 minutes – finally thought to ask whether Spencer Bodily had a passport.

There was nothing sexy in this episode unless you like the idea of OAPs in young men's bodies. Not in a DILF way.

While Stewart interrogates the real waiter (the man clonked on the head and replaced by the one who clonked Spencer on the head and so on), Jason inspects the kitchen. He’s furious to find tinned pâté and storms out eating an angry carrot.

He takes one look at the strange dice like things and gives the whole story about Red Mexican Wheat. Stewart thanks him. He might still be angry though.

He seems to think that to be mentally sixty years old but physically twenty years old would result in "absolute mental schizophrenia". Or people might just like it. One or the other. Stewart takes Jason’s hypothesis and concludes that Spencer was mentally controlled – not brain washed but brain dry cleaned – and that the red Mexican wheat was the key to it.

Jason declares that he loathes horoscopes. He says he knows his future – he shall die of overindulgence and enjoy every moment of it.

Mark Caine has no exploits this week.

Stewart endears himself to the doctor almost immediately by insisting he has to be wrong. The good doctor stands his ground. The tattoo on the corpse’s arm shows he was a prisoner of war. Stewart isn’t convinced so the doctor goes one further and plays his ace – he’s had the man’s fingerprints checked with the RAF and found a match.

"If you did more than you’re paid for you might find you start being paid more for what you do" he tells the doctor. Winning friends the Sullivan way. The fact that the doctor is right and Stewart is wrong hardly need come into it and mentioning it might be seen as slightly vulgar.

He leaves the doctor but not before making several more demands for reports and files and photographs in triplicate. The doctor is overjoyed to see the back of him.

Sir Curtis tells Stewart that the case has international ramifications but that even he – Sir Curtis – isn’t given security clearance to know what they are. Stewart takes this news well. He’s really grumpy this week. Luckily Sir Curtis can give him one lead – there are two more old-slash-young men in London and each will be carrying weird dice things.

Stewart gets the last laugh in his feud with the pathologist – not only is the man now clearly emulating Stewart's dress sense but he has to humbly phone his new hero and confess that he’s lost a corpse. Stewart snaps at him. He really hates that man.

He asks Sir Curtis "Are you holding out on me?" to which Sir replies "If I was I would tell you."

After hearing Stewart's story about the pathologist and the corpse he weighs everything up and announces they have inherited a most unusual case. Which is sort of the point of his department, no?

It is one of the great teaser sequences and they don’t try to weasel out of it – Spencer Bodily really is sixty years old. But as is so often the way, the middle of the episode drags so. Once they’ve proved beyond any doubt that Spencer is as old as the pathologist claims, they don’t really have anything to do but muddle around in the dark until the cleaning lady stumbles across the all important clue. And then they would be stranded if it wasn’t for her being a personal friend of Jason’s. There is a bit of an extra dimension with the World Health Organisation’s involvement but they are really just two generic government agents who make Department S look like pieces of cheese because our heroes don’t know what’s going on until the very end. So credit to them for not only avoiding a cop out explanation for the teaser but offering some reasonable (if nonsensical) science to back it up. But the central premise is absurd – a sixty year old in a twenty year old body wouldn’t really go nuts would he? A two hundred year old perhaps but to be sixty with the body of twenty would be most sixty year olds’ dream. So they lose points for that.