Production order: Unknown | ITC code: 5107 | Airdate order: 13 | DVD order: 12
Those Responsible
Writer: Philip Broadley
Director: Cyril Frankel
Where & When
Cap D'Antibes, France: August 16th
The Inexplicable Mystery
Wealthy movie producer Kolliatis takes a sleeping pill before settling down for the night in his villa. But as he sleeps, a man evades his security and breaks into his bedroom, glueing a rubber mask to his face. Waking the next morning, the mogul is so shocked by the sight in the mirror that he suffers a heart attack and dies.
The Mystery Explained
The ruthless Gerhard is extorting wealthy men using threats of violence, then killing someone close to them as a final warning if they fail to pay up. Kolliatis' assistant Nicole is actually Gerhard's lover.
Review
Earlier ITC shows like The Saint and The Baron had a general formula: the globetrotting hero would become involved in the lives of either people threatened by criminals, or the criminals themselves; the former would be helped and the latter foiled. This was emphatically not the formula of Department S... but the annoyingly prolific Philip Broadley kept using it, as if he had a stack of rejected Saint and Baron scripts in a drawer and Tippexed out the names of the leads to replace them with Jason or Stewart as appropriate before resubmitting them. Unfortunately for us, this time around they sold.
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| "You know, if they fixed the combover it'd actually be an improvement." |
'The Man Who Got A New Face' is, once again, another Broadley story where the mystery in the teaser turns out to be entirely irrelevant. There is no plausible reason why Gerhard would stick a mask to Kolliatis's face, the whole thing a wafer-thin excuse for a weird hook to catch the viewer's attention. Even then, there's barely any cause for Department S to be involved, a fact of which Broadley was clearly aware as he whitewashes it in the script!
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| "PAY NO ATTENTION TO US! WE ARE NOT DISCUSSING SECRET PLANS!" |
Only five episodes after criticising Stewart for using the Department to pursue his own investigations, Sir Curtis decides "what the hell" and assigns him a case for purely personal reasons: he was a friend of the dead man. To cover his tracks, he meets Stewart in the privacy of his own home and explains the situation carefully and discreetly - no, actually, he summons him to the Tower of London, whispering surreptitiously then loudly changing the subject whenever a member of the public wanders within earshot. Not suspicious at all.
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| Jason's conjoined twin made an unexpected appearance. |
So off our heroes go to the Mediterranean coast, for the third time in Broadley's five episodes to date. Maybe it was his preferred vacation spot and, like any sensible writer, he claimed the cost of his holidays back from the taxman as research. Once there, Jason romances a woman connected to Kolliatis, while Stewart, er, romances a different woman connected to Kolliatis. Both women end up dead by the end of the story, and both men express the same regret and grief as they would over losing a favoured golf ball. Along the way we get plenty of padding in the form of stock footage and a musical act, plus Sir Curtis deciding to take Stewart off the case for no particular reason only to be talked back around by the end of the scene. None of it adds anything to the episode except minutes of screen time.
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| "Some guy called Phelps chased after me when I took this." |
Our heroes don't even do any real detective work. They simply decide that the two women are key to the investigation, stick close to them - very close, as in an intimate distance - then (just like 'The Treasure Of The Costa Del Sol') have clues handed to them every so often. If the criminals had simply done nothing they would have got away scot-free, but because Nicole told Stewart an easily-checkable lie and Gerhard sent him a death threat, they ensured that Department S would stay on the case. Then at the end, Gerhard and Nicole die in an entirely avoidable car crash, Stewart glumly remarking, "Well, he was a gambler." What? How would he know that? At no point had we ever seen Gerhard doing anything remotely connected to gambling, and for that matter nor had Stewart known anything about him – the first time he'd seen him was when he found his dead body!
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| "Worst-dressed man of 1969, Jason Ki- HEY!" |
All in all, 'The Man Who Got A New Face' is a dull, pointless episode that doesn't even have any of the usual fisticuffs to liven it up; the only action scene is a perfunctory car chase in which the regulars aren't involved. The editing is below ITC's usual standards, too. Several scenes are abruptly truncated, such as Stewart's asking Annabelle what the French term is for a tape recorder; she only gets as far as replying “Magnetoph-” before the cut to the next scene. About the only entertaining moment is some more 'shipping, Jason smirking knowingly at a peeved Annabelle as Stewart dances with Nicole.
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| Annabelle looked really hard, but still couldn't spot anything interesting about the story. |
It's a low point for the show to date... but sadly, the worst is still to come.
Fancy Quotes
[Stewart receives a threat via tape recording. Annabelle analyses it for clues to the sender's identity]
Annabelle: All you have to do is find a Frenchman, in France, aged thirty.
Stewart: Nothing to it.
Annabelle: I tracked Jason down.
Stewart: What's he got?
Annabelle: A hangover.
Cheers!
• Jason visits Monique at the film studio. After an exchange of mutual admiration, she serves him with a glass of whisky.
• The scribe goes to the beach to work on his next masterwork in the sun, a tall glass of cool fruit juice by his typewriter. Hiding behind this, of course, is a shorter one of whisky.
• Annabelle and Jason watch Stewart's back as he has dinner with Nicole. Keeping their cover naturally requires that Jason crack open a bottle of champagne and have a glass with his partner.
• Jason visits the grieving Emilio Andre after Monique's death. Whisky is offered, and accepted.
Author! Author!
We find out that there's been a film adaptation of Jason's novel Index Finger Left Hand, with which the author was not particularly impressed.
Monique and later Emilio Andre read a copy of Jason's latest book, but the title is unfortunately obscured except for the word You.
This Looks Familiar
The corridor goes upmarket to serve as an exclusive restaurant in Monte Carlo.
Stewart goes to meet Seretse in glamorous Nice, or at least that part of it closely resembling the Borehamwood scenery docks.
