Department S Reviews: 02: 'The Trojan Tanker'

Production order: 04 | ITC code: 5102 | Airdate order: 02 | DVD order: 02

Those Responsible

Writer: Philip Broadley

Director: Ray Austin

Where & When

Bedfordshire, England: July 3rd

The Inexplicable Mystery

A tanker truck is involved in an accident on a country road. But when someone goes to help, they find that its cargo isn't fuel - instead, it contains a secret compartment with an unconscious woman inside. When the emergency services arrive, however, she has vanished!

The Mystery Explained

The woman, Veronica Bray, had, er, woken up and left. So not much of a mystery there. But the truck itself is key to a plot to steal a shipment of gold bullion from a plane when it lands at a Paris airport. The villains plan to hide inside the secret compartment and enter the airport undetected in the guise of being a regular refuelling tanker, then drive right up to the plane and burst out to take the gold before escaping undetected the way they came in.

Review

Ah, Philip Broadley: a name in the opening credits that will be greeted with increasing dismay as the series goes on. Broadley wrote a whopping ten episodes of Department S, more than a third of the entire series. Having previously knocked out numerous scripts for the show's ITC stablemates Danger Man, The Saint, Man In A Suitcase and The Champions, it's clear that he was regarded by the company as a safe pair of hands who when given a brief, a typewriter and a deadline would produce something filmable on a TV schedule and budget - in other words, a television professional.

One more move, and their phones would form the Italian flag.

Or, less charitably, a hack. None of Broadley's Department S episodes are likely to trouble anybody's best-of lists, and he's undeniably responsible for most of the show's worst. The big problem with his scripts is that he generally only pays lip service to the premise of "cases too bizarre for the regular police to solve", instead writing very mundane tales of the lives of criminals and simply sticking a weird - yet frequently irrelevant - opening sequence upon them.

Zoom glasses: just £29.99 from the Sex Pest Store.

'The Trojan Tanker' is a case in point. The villains' ultimate aim is straightforward armed robbery, though with the admittedly neat gimmick of hiding inside an innocuous airport vehicle to get through security. But the mystery set up in the teaser is completely contrived (why was Veronica in the back of the tanker? For that matter, why was the tanker being driven around country lanes in Bedfordshire at all, nowhere near Paris?), and things get no better as the story lurches from plot point to plot point. Veronica just happens to leave a lighter with a distinctive crest in the tanker; Jason just happens to know the man in Rome who dishes out said lighters to his female acquaintances; said man's sole purpose in the story is to give Jason Veronica's name. And so on.

No, there's no gratuitous sexualisation of women in this episode. None at all.

Despite that, in fairness, the episode at least keeps moving quickly enough around Europe that it keeps viewers from looking too closely at the forced plotting. Stewart dons a tuxedo and looks dashing at a casino before getting into fisticuffs with criminal ringleader Mike Taylor, Jason is told to get a haircut by a stroppy witness and Annabelle gets naked for no particular reason, her modesty protected only by a sunlamp. It's all watchable enough. But there's nothing particularly clever or unusual about it either. It's an ITC show in a nutshell: undemanding brightly-coloured viewing with fights, murders and women in bikinis appearing at regular intervals, the kind of bread-and-butter product that Philip Broadley could churn out in his sleep.

"And while you're down there, Miss Hurst..."

Which is a shame, because Department S had the potential to go so much further than that. And this is pretty much Broadley at his best, so - as will be seen before too long - things can only go downhill.

Fancy Quotes

Jason: I'd offer you a glass of champagne, but it's very bad for you in small doses.

Cheers!

• Stewart has a mug of coffee as the team try to puzzle out the mystery of the lighter. Jason, however, has a glass of whisky. Of course.
• Jason drinks a glass of Stornoway with Paulo Cortelli.
• Stewart and Jason are in bed together (no, not like that) as they try to identify Veronica Bray. Jason, inevitably, has a whisky in hand.
• Two glasses of champagne as he leers at the sunbathing Veronica through binoculars (and this being Jason, it's unlikely that he wastes the rest of the bottle).

Fight!

Jason has a tussle with Taylor at Veronica's flat. He at first seems to have won - only to collapse unconscious after taking one step out of her door. KO!

Jason 2, Stewart 0.

Taylor challenges Stewart to a tux-clad fight on the beach. He does not come out the champion.

Jason and Stewart take down the tanker's drivers before they can escape with their haul.

Author! Author!

People In Glass Houses Should Not, in which Jason uses the case as the basis for his plot. The difference is that he has Mark Caine solve the whole thing single-handed, much to Annabelle's annoyance.

As a sidenote, this episode gives us the clearest look at Jason's biography on the back cover of one of his novels. For reference, here's what it says:

Jason King was born in Dangeeking, India. He was educated privately (after being expelled from his English public school after six months) in Switzerland, where he is now resident.

After embarking on the Mark Caine books - which he started writing at the age of twelve whilst interned in a Japanese camp during World War Two - he joined the Hong Kong police as a forensic advisor.

Various careers followed, rumour hints at gold smuggling and gun-running, but except for notoriety as a “Bon Vivant” he is now reasonably law-abiding.

A widower, his wife - the late Marion West - was tragically killed in the Chicago plane disaster.

Writing the Mark Caine books aside, the only part of this intriguing bio (based in part on the life of Peter Wyngarde himself) ever mentioned in an episode - 'A Fish Out Of Water', also written by Broadley - is that he was once married. It also allows Jason's age to be deduced; Wyngarde was interned by the Japanese in 1943, so if Jason was then 12, by 1969 (when Department S was first broadcast) he must be 38, making him three years younger than the actor playing him.