Production order: 01 | ITC code: 5118 | Airdate order: 06 | DVD order: 06
Those Responsible
Writer: Terry Nation
Director: Cyril Frankel
Where & When
Islington, London, England: May 12th
The Inexplicable Mystery
A commercial estate agent takes a client to view a factory building. Inside, they find an unexpected feature: a wooden structure like a movie set that contains a mockup of an expensive living room. Trapped inside it are an unhinged young man – and a dead woman.
The Mystery Explained
Paul Trenton is a high-end narcotics dealer, who for security and anonymity interacts with his suppliers entirely through a series of contacts. The courier delivering the drugs is always brought blindfolded to his home, to keep its location a secret. However, Trenton's wife Selina has had an exact replica of their living room built so she could have the courier taken there instead and deal with him without Trenton's knowledge, her plan being to take over the business and write her husband out of her life, permanently. The man in the duplicate room, Danny, was supposed to burn it down to remove the evidence, but something went wrong and he ended up trapped inside.
Review
Terry Nation is a name that should be familiar to anyone with an interest in cult TV - ie, anyone keen enough to read some random person's ramblings about an obscure old detective show. However, for the benefit of anyone reading this who came looking for information on the punk band who sang 'Is Vic There?', he's the writer who created the Daleks (though Tony Hancock might have disagreed) and is therefore largely responsible for making Doctor Who into the global powerhouse brand it is today. He also devised his own shows, Blake's 7 and Survivors. So not a bad track record.
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| Jason's broom cupboard was as subtle and understated as its owner. |
Nation was also a prolific screenwriter for other people's shows. In addition to writing more stories for Doctor Who he hammered out numerous scripts for The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron, The Champions, The Persuaders and The Protectors - the only surprise is that he didn't come up with any stories for The Prisoner and The Adventurer just to complete the set of British spy-fi shows beginning with 'The'. Like Philip Broadley, he was regarded as a television professional, someone who could be relied upon to produce the goods on time and on budget.
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| Hair so lacquered it needs French polish rather than shampoo. |
However, also like Broadley, that didn't necessarily mean that the work was going to be of the highest quality. When Nation was motivated, he could be superb - the Doctor Who story 'Genesis Of The Daleks' came about when producer Barry Letts received Nation's latest Dalek script and told him "It's quite a good story, Terry. The only snag is, you've sold it to us three times already!" Letts challenged Nation to do something new by exploring the origin of the screeching space Nazis, and in return received one of the show's all-time best tales. Similarly, the first season of Blake's 7 (written solely by Nation, though with backup from script editor Chris Boucher) made for riveting viewing despite the show's legendarily cheap production values.
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| The new issue of Blank Page Monthly was particularly enthralling. |
But when he wasn't pushed to excel, he often did whatever it took to get the script out of the door as quickly as possible. The most notorious example was when he sold a script to the producers of The Baron that he had already sold to the producers of The Saint a few years earlier, changing little more than the character names. Both were ITC shows, but either nobody noticed or nobody cared - until both episodes were shown on the same weekend in the US!
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| "You may be smug now, young lady, but let's see which of us gets the spin-off." |
Nation's brace of scripts for Department S show clear signs of this just-get-it-done attitude. 'The Man In The Elegant Room' is by far the better of the two, but both have great ideas and striking images that end up being diminished by rushed, careless writing and loose ends. 'Elegant Room' has a teaser which stands out as one of the show's most memorable, but ultimately it raises key questions that are never answered. How did Danny get locked in the fake room? Did someone trap him in there, and if so, who? The room is only a set; why couldn't he just kick a hole in a wall or window? Who killed the woman, and why? Why was she there? How and why did Danny go mad? If we're meant to infer that the murderous Selina double-crossed Danny and killed his girlfriend after he planted a firebomb, there's nothing in the script to back it up. After all, why would she involve someone else in her plan whom she would then have to kill to silence, when she could have done the job herself with a can of lighter fluid and some matches after the courier left?
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| Annabelle's career as an Uber driver was not off to the best start. |
At the other end of the episode, the story's resolution falls together by expediency rather than clever plotting. The investigators are at an impasse until Annabelle happens to see a magazine photo of Selina inside the (real) elegant room, then rushes off alone just in time to spot her suspect leaving to collect the drugs. Despite supposedly being a "four-star" agent, Annabelle doesn't know how to tail someone inconspicuously (staying glued to someone's rear bumper along empty country roads is not the best approach), so is immediately captured after arriving at a farmhouse. Maybe Interpol rates its agents out of ten. She escapes to phone Stewart and Jason, is promptly recaptured, then the police turn up with our heroes and the Trentons shoot each other. Er, case closed, I guess.
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| Ah, the classic 'silenced revolver'. Kept on top of the chocolate fireplace. |
It's never made clear exactly why Selina even needed the duplicate room, since Trenton keeps the documents vital to his operations in their house safe, to which she has full access, and she managed to intercept the telegram with the courier's arrival time without his realising it. The convoluted nature of Trenton's dealings with his supplier is also poorly explained - even though Selina practically makes him do so to the camera at gunpoint! His supposedly foolproof system feels ridiculously overcomplicated, Nation perhaps deliberately layering it on to camouflage that it really doesn't make much sense.
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| "Could you tone it down a bit, Clive? Like maybe to a 17 or so?" |
Another point against the show is the demented Danny. He's obviously meant to be a somewhat tragic character, but unfortunately Clive Colin Bowler opts to play him with a voice and mannerisms that anyone who went to a British school in the early Eighties will very unkindly know as a "Joey Deacon". Even if you didn't, it's still a grating and OTT piece of scenery-chewing, and the show only has room for one such set devourer. Hint: he has a moustache.
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| Not so much a collar as a neck brace. |
Seen as a whole, then, 'Elegant Room' starts off well with a suitably bizarre mystery, but then despite throwing in murders every so often to keep the viewer's attention it squanders its early promise. That might explain why, despite its being the first episode filmed, the producers held it back until later. It's certainly never boring - Nation keeps the investigation moving swiftly along, and Jason's unorthodox manners and methods make him a treat to watch - but by the end the confusion over exactly what the hell just happened leaves a bit of a sour taste, which isn't what you want at the end of your show's debut.
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| Spare parts for Tom Servo puppets were rare enough to fight over. |
Knowing that this was effectively the pilot episode lets you view it with a slightly different eye. How many of the character moments were Nation's and how many were put in at the script editing stage by the show's creators is a matter of conjecture, but the relationships between the leading trio are subtly different from the rest of the run. Stewart and Annabelle are always shown as close friends, but here they're even more so than usual, with little touches like Annabelle resting her arm on Stewart's shoulder as they drive through London. On the other hand she clearly hasn't warmed much to Jason yet, getting in several pointed jibes about his amateur status as a detective, but unusually (after what we've already seen) she's the one to instigate the put-downs rather than responding to Jason's own verbal sparring.
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| Television's top sex symbol of 1969. |
Jason himself is, of course, Jason, a unique creation right from the start. The original character concept was for a tweedy old Oxford don named Roger Cullingford, but once Wyngarde was cast he threw out pretty much every existing idea to play an exaggerated version of himself; as seen in the biography on the back of one of Jason's novels in 'The Trojan Tanker', actor and character even have similar backgrounds. The big difference, we now know, is that the former is gay and the latter straight, but it's easy to imagine that if the show had been created more recently, Jason wouldn't have batted an eye at pursuing anyone of either sex who took his - to coin a phrase - fancy.
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| "No, listen, this Jason King you sent is faulty. He's only two feet tall!" |
Stewart is actually somewhat under-served by this script. He's clearly in charge of the investigation, being the one who decides what to do at each stage (with a brief scene where he overrules a police inspector regarding one of the murders, showing that Department S has some sway over regular law enforcement), but it's Jason and Annabelle who actually find all the clues and track down the Trentons. He doesn't even get a fight scene, which is usually mandatory for any lead in an ITC show! It's another possible reason why the episode was held back, to give his character more time to make an impression. Not that it mattered in the end; Stewart is a likeable enough hero, but playing against Peter Wyngarde in full flow, poor Joel Fabiani was always going to end up as 'the other guy'.
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| And now, time for a special feature... |
The Curtis Conundrum
The fourth lead, Sir Curtis Seretse, does his now-familiar routine of showing up briefly to act as an exposition fountain, then disappearing again. Since Dennis Alaba Peters was a late addition to the cast, the relatively long and complex Seretse scene in 'Elegant Room' would have had to be shot after the rest of the pilot episode, giving viewers (well, the more anal ones) the chance to speculate about when he was brought on board.
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| These chain resorts are getting ridiculous! |
'Hambledown', the second episode shot, sees Seretse interacting only with Stewart in a small ship's cabin set. 'A Cellar Full Of Silence' (the third filmed) has him on the same beach set that featured in 'The Trojan Tanker' (fourth before the cameras), with a few extras in the background. It's not until 'Tanker' that Seretse has more than a single scene in an episode, one of them actually involved directly with the investigation, so this was probably the first time his character was included in the story from the start, and the additional scenes for the earlier episodes would have been filmed at this time.
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| If only he'd used Just For Men, he might never have been spotted. |
How can this be proven? Easily, if, like I said, you're anal about such trivia! One of the extras in the casino in 'Tanker' is a middle-aged man with a distinctive sweep of lighter hair. The same man - in the same outfit - can also be seen at the diplomatic function in 'Elegant Room'. It's harder to be certain of their identity, but other extras (a long-haired young woman, an elderly lady, a balding man) from the casino also seem to appear at the function or behind Stewart and Seretse at the beach bar in 'Cellar'. Given ITC's reputation for economy, it seems likely that the extras hired for 'Tanker' were also used in the Seretse scenes inserted into 'Cellar' and 'Elegant Room' rather than being brought in specially for brief additional shooting.
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| "Please don't make me watch that scene again, please!" |
And no, it didn't take ages going through scenes frame by frame searching for matching faces, honest...
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| Also spotted while going frame by frame: moving knives and bloodstains! |
Fancy Quotes
[Stewart and Annabelle enter the elegant room to find Jason already there]
Annabelle: While we've been wasting our time, the Edgar Allan Poe of the paperbacks has solved the whole thing.
[Jason mentions that after he used a real London oyster bar as a location in one of his novels, the owner lets him eat there for nothing]
Annabelle: King of the freeloaders.
Annabelle: If you want wild guesses, why don't you try Jason? That's his department.
[Selina pulls a gun on her husband]
Paul Trenton: Why, Selina? You're my wife!
Selina: A formality. Just like being your widow will be a formality.
Cheers!
• Jason has a whisky at the office after returning from the Trentons' house. Stewart refuses a second glass, so Jason adds its contents to his own!
• Stewart gets word on Annabelle's location, so Jason quickly finishes off what by this time is doubtless another glass.
• He has a nip from a hip flask as he and Stewart drive to the Trentons' farmhouse. Don't worry, he's not driving – this time.
• Finally, Jason shares a bottle of champagne with his fellow Departmentarians as the copy of the elegant room is dismantled.
Fight!
Jason is attacked by Doug Martin, the builder of the duplicate room. It's somewhat justifiable, seeing as the author just broke into his flat! Jason takes a poker to the arm, a punch to the groin, and ends up being kicked in the head and knocked out. KO!
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| Jason 4, Stewart 1. |
Author! Author!
The woman from whom Jason gets Doug's address is reading Index Finger Left Hand. Amusingly, she finds the author familiar but doesn't know why; it turns out that his photo is on the back cover!
That Looks Familiar
Crazy Danny takes a good look at the corridor's ceiling as he's carted through the mental hospital where he's been taken.
The first of several appearances for a certain black Ford Zephyr, here acting as a police car.
