Jason King

1971
Jason King

Seasons & Episodes

  • 1

EP1 Wanna Buy a Television Series? Sep 15, 1971

EP2 A Page Before Dying Sep 22, 1971

EP3 Buried in the Cold, Cold Ground Oct 06, 1971

EP4 A Deadly Line in Digits Oct 13, 1971

On a visit back to England, Jason finds himself with income tax problems. However, it turns out to be a way of blackmailing him into helping the police solve a series of robberies where the police computer seems to be illegally accessed.

EP5 Variations On A Theme Oct 20, 1971

EP6 As Easy as A B C Nov 11, 1971

EP7 To Russia - with Panache Nov 17, 1971

Jason King is abducted to Moscow to unravel the mystery of three men who have been turned into three tidy piles of ashes. He creates his own Phoenix.

EP8 A Red, Red Rose Forever Dec 01, 1971

Jason is mistaken as a hit man when he is left holding a bunch of roses at a Swiss airport after coming to the aid of a seriously ill man. To Jason's horror, the roses are soon to be exchanged for a rifle!

EP9 All That Glisters (1) Dec 08, 1971

EP10 All That Glisters (2) Dec 15, 1971

EP11 Flamingoes Only Fly on Tuesdays Dec 29, 1971

EP12 Toki Jan 05, 1972

EP13 The Constance Missal Jan 12, 1972

EP14 Uneasy Lies the Head Jan 19, 1972

EP15 Nadine Feb 02, 1972

EP16 A Kiss for a Beautiful Killer Feb 09, 1972

EP17 If It's Got to Go - It's Got to Go Feb 16, 1972

EP18 A Thin Band of Air Mar 03, 1972

EP19 It's Too Bad about Auntie Mar 10, 1972

EP20 The Stones of Venice Mar 17, 1972

EP21 A Royal Flush Mar 24, 1972

EP22 Every Picture Tells a Story Mar 31, 1972

EP23 Chapter One: The Company I Keep Apr 07, 1972

EP24 Zenia Apr 14, 1972

EP25 An Author in Search of Two Characters Apr 21, 1972

EP26 That Isn't Me, It's Somebody Else Apr 28, 1972

6.9| 0h30m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 15 September 1971 Ended
Producted By: ITC Entertainment
Country: United Kingdom
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Synopsis

Jason King - a suavely sophisticated former secret agent turned novelist - travels the world searching for material to fill his books, encountering an endless parade of glamorous women, exotic locales, menacing villains and daring intrigue! Before Austin Powers swung into action, Jason King set the standard for the hip crime-fighting international playboy!

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Director

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Reviews

prustage95 This is by way of a comment on one of the other reviews. The episode "All that Glisters..." was playing recently on a TV that I could hear but not see. "Thunderbirds!" I thought since I could clearly hear the voice of Scott Tracey. On going in to actually watch the TV I was amazed to see that it was Jason King rather than Thunderbirds and that bizarrely Clinton Greyn was speaking with Scott Tracey's voice. The lip-sync was excellent but it was clearly a dubbed voice since the acoustic was different. And of course, rather than Greyn's rounded Welsh tones we were getting the distinctive Canadian sound of Shane Rimmer. Cant understand why they did this - and then not credit it? Weird.
Installation_At_Orsk I enjoyed Department S when I discovered it on DVD, so decided to give its spin-off series a try, even knowing going in that it was not as well-regarded. I very quickly found out why!What made Jason King (the character) work in Department S was that he had two relatively normal sidekicks - who appear here only in the briefest of stock footage flashbacks in one single episode - to bounce off, making him seem like an eccentric in a more or less everyday world. Given his own series and shorn of anyone to keep him in check, however, Jason becomes absolutely ludicrous, a camp comic-book creation with barely even one toe in reality. That he's at all bearable to watch is entirely down to Peter Wyngarde's charm, as the scripts frequently make him casually sexist and even racist in a cringeworthy 1970s way. (One episode actually has him say "Ah so, dlagon rady" to a Chinese woman... a Chinese woman played by a British actress in yellowface and false eyelids. Horrible!)The stories are also bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Since he's no longer part of a law enforcement agency, every contrivance imaginable is needed to force Jason into the plots. He unwittingly uses a codeword meant to identify an arms dealer. He's hypnotised. He's mistaken for a hit-man because he's carrying a rose. He picks up a hitch-hiker involved in a crime. He's impersonated (twice). He's blackmailed by MI6 (several times). He's kidnapped (repeatedly). In the laziest example, he just so happens to know *three* different people - from different countries - who are trying to obtain a stolen statue, none of whom have any connection to each other.The scripts are not the only thing that were cheap. To pay for location shooting in Europe (Jason visits Paris, Hamburg, Vienna, Venice and other cities - mostly wandering around in front of famous landmarks just to prove that yes, they really sent their leading actor there for the day) the show was shot on 16mm film rather than ITC's usual 35mm, and it looks terrible. 16mm can be decent quality - look at the restored DVDs of the Jon Pertwee era of Doctor Who - but here everything is muddy and astonishingly grainy. The same sets appear over and over (every rich character seems to share a room with a blue domed ceiling), as do even cars. There's a silver Vauxhall Viva that follows Jason to almost every country he visits! Amazingly, a halfway-decent story does occasionally manage to force its way through the dross; 'As Easy As ABC' sees two criminals using the plot of one of Jason's own novels to carry out a robbery and frame him for it, 'To Russia With Panache' plays like a lost Department S script as Jason investigates a bizarre murder in the Kremlin, and 'Wanna Buy A Television Series?' amusingly bites the hand that feeds it by ridiculing the same US TV networks that ITC depended upon to fund its shows. But most of the episodes are empty, silly and, worst of all, *boring* nonsense that not even Wyngarde's charisma can save.
PHASEDK Having just read the write up on this site.. I'm not sure I agree. ITV4 has started showing a lot of old ITC progs, including Department S and Jason King. Watching it now at age 54.. I remember it when first shown.. but now.. I'm enjoying it all over again. I'm surprised they were hour long episodes... but find I have really enjoyed them. Many will compare them to modern series.. well, I view everything with the thought of, they were of their time. I've found what I've seen so far humorous.. and knowing what I know now of Peter Wyngarde, am STILL thoroughly enjoying them? Tongue in cheek.. STYLE.. charm with the ladies.. a laugh.Entertaining. Its a shame modern series with hi tech effects.. often overshadow characters. These shows HAVE characters. Now I know there were 26 episodes, I know a mate who told me there were only 6.. must have read a miss print.
John-367 "Jason King" was always an anticlimax after "Department S". Both were made at Elstree Film Studios with many of the same personnel, but "Jason King" was shot on 16 mm rather than the 35 mm of the earlier series and in 1971 the difference was jarringly obvious. Despite a few foreign location shots (mainly King crossing a road in Berlin or Paris) the whole thing looked decidedly cheap."Department S" had the great hook of a bizarre pre-credit incident and much of the interest was in discovering the rational cause. The Jason King character was a gadfly with unpredictable, often wrong, flashes of insight. Stewart Sullivan and Annabelle Hurst could be left to do, respectively, the gumshoe and the brain work. King was best taken in small doses which worked in "Department S" as he did not have to carry the plot. However, as the lead character in his own series he was in virtually every scene and had to be sensible and motivated enough to do the traditional detective stuff in order to progress the stories (which were themselves (unlike "Department S") little different to those of a dozen other series).The tension in the one character between the frivolous dilettante and the determined detective often willing to risk his life for others must have been difficult to reconcile and the tone of the scripts and the degree of King's flamboyance varied significantly from episode to episode. King also suffered from not having strong regular characters the equal of Sullivan and Hurst to bring him down to earth when necessary and balance his excesses. The more interesting episodes were those rare ones where King was angered by the real suffering of others and had to confront, if not the hypocrisy, at least the irony of, his usual moaning about the minor irritations of his luxurious lifestyle.Extracting King as a character from Department S was an example of an often repeated mistake in TV. Because a character is hugely popular in one situation it doesn't follow that they will work outside their complex support structure of setting, format, other characters, style, etc. (Having Inspector Morse star, in an Australian-set, pseudo-western rather than an whodunnit in Oxford is another example which fortunately only happened in one episode) King might have become even more of an unlikely heartthrob in his own series but the drama suffered badly.Having said all that, "Jason King" remains a far more interesting, entertaining and original series than most and Peter Wyngarde (view "Night of the Eagle" to see him at his very best) one of the more complex and electric performers let loose in the lead of a major TV series. It is just that coming at the tail end of the "golden era" of ITC filmed series it is difficult not to judge it by higher standards than usual.