Production order: 14 | ITC code: 5105 | Airdate order: 26 | DVD order: 18
Those Responsible
Writer: Harry W Junkin
Director: Cyril Frankel
Where & When
London: January 4th (What, not London, England? How do we know it's not London, Kentucky?)
The Inexplicable Mystery
Economics professor John Burnham and his wife Mary (played by Lois Maxwell, aka Miss Moneypenny) are going out to dinner when Mary is suddenly gunned down by an assassin. The grief-stricken husband returns home from the hospital after being told that she died on the operating table... only to see her waving at him from their front door.
The Mystery Explained
The International Monetary Fund has selected Burnham as its next head - but hasn't actually told him yet. His radical approach to international economics stands to strengthen the Western capitalist nations, so the Eastern Bloc has sent agents to pre-emptively discredit him, trying to drive the academic into a public display of madness that will cost him the job before it's even offered. The 'ghost' of Mary Burnham is actually an impersonator, and the seemingly supernatural events surrounding her simply tricks and tape recordings.
Review
The previous episode, 'Last Train To Redbridge', treated Jason King as just another cop. 'The Ghost Of Mary Burnham' pulls out all the stops to show him as he actually is: an egotistical dilettante whose wild imagination sometimes brings him the right answers - and other times makes him look an absolute prat.
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| "An absolute what did you say?" |
Jason doesn't even turn up until well over halfway through the episode, but from the moment he appears he dominates proceedings. He immediately figures out all the very down-to-earth ways in which the 'ghost' has manifested to Burnham, as well as picking up on the wording of a phone call that suggests it was made by someone with a direct view into the economist's flat. That's the part with the right answers.
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| James Bond finally snapped after yet another rejection. |
The prat part is pretty much everything else. Before Jason arrives, the episode focuses on a grief-stricken widower suffering as unseen forces try to drive him to the breaking point - then once he appears on screen it switches to straight-up comedy! Jason first engages in a verbal jousting session with a young female photographer who clearly loathes every atom of his being, then goes undercover as a window cleaner as convincingly as you'd expect from a man whose idea of manual labour is opening his own oysters. His ill-advised mission ends with him trapped on a window ledge several floors up in front of a bunch of reporters while being browbeaten by a young child as wacky trombone music plays.
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| "Okay, forget the tip." |
Surprisingly, it works. Jason gets some sizzlingly bitchy dialogue and amusing physical comedy, like straining his shoulder from carrying a small ladder about twenty feet. As in 'The Man From X' he also gets to show off another less-than-convincing accent, this time Irish. Shure an' begorrah! It's enough to make you wonder if his being made the butt of all the jokes is somebody's response to Peter Wyngarde's on-set behaviour, which according to all reports started off at prima donna and quickly ramped up to full-on diva. (Or it could equally be that Wyngarde was game for anything by the halfway point of the show's production; Jason was certainly made to look an idiot often enough in his own spin-off series.)
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| "That's not your wife's ghost - it's an Indian call centre!" |
The comedy goes a long way to cover that the story itself doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There must surely have been simpler ways to discredit Burnham than a plot three months in the making to murder his wife and then have a transvestite in a Mission: Impossible mask impersonate her to make him think he was seeing a ghost. Hell, why not just kill him and be done with it? The IMF - no, not the one from Mission: Impossible! - has never exactly been an organisation motivated by martyrdom, so with the radical choice for its leader dead, they would just have gone for whoever was next on the list. (For that matter, why wouldn't they tell the man at the top of their leadership shortlist that the job's in the bag for him? What if he turns it down?) And we never do find out what happened to Mary's body or why it wasn't in the coffin. Up until Jason appears the episode is quite intriguing, but once we start getting answers to the questions it rather falls apart.
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| The team tore off Margaret Thatcher's face, revealing the evil robot beneath. |
A couple of interesting notes: Seretse, in another of his 'summon Stewart to a strange place to assign the case' meetings, for the first time calls his chief investigator by his Christian name. He's still not exactly all hugs and backslapping, but it's a slight softening of the Department's very formal boss. And Burnham's radical plan, what we hear of it from Sir Curtis, sounds an awful lot like monetarism - deregulate the financial system and let those nice trustworthy bankers do whatever they want without rules or oversight. So ironically, if they'd just left him alone his enemies would have got the economic collapse they wanted, albeit a few decades later...
Fancy Quotes
Annabelle: 22 percent of the people in this country believe that ghosts exist.
Stewart: You must be joking.
Annabelle: I'm not! There were a hundred and six recorded apparitions in England last year; I couldn't get the figures for America, it's probably higher.
Stewart: What have you been reading, Hamlet?
Doctor: Do your best to get some sleep. Try and put everything out of your mind.
Burnham: Much more of this and I won't have any mind left.
Stewart: Annabelle, just where is the Charles Dickens of the paperbacks?
Jason: The way you're lighting me, I should look like one of the Smith brothers* at the Vatican.
Miss Bronson: Oh, I'd say more like an ageing Dublin bricklayer.
[*That's what it sounds like! No idea who he means, though...]
Jason: At long last, the distinguished creator of Mark Caine is to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. With or without the aid of Miss Bronson here, who will never do for photography what Bach did for music. But that will not deter her; she will carry on regardless.
Miss Bronson: You're very funny! In a grotesque sort of way.
Jason: I presume your photographs, like yourself, will be overdeveloped?
Miss Bronson: You've presumed ever since I arrived. And in spite of your lousy manners, I'll thank you for your charm, courtesy and... charity.
Jason: Oh charity, fiddlesticks. I'd wolf caviare in front of starving children.
Miss Bronson: I did read one of your books, The Return Of Mark Caine. I found it rather difficult.
Jason: Well next time, try moving your lips.
Burnham: You mean I was seeing things?
Jason: Oh, I do quite often. Usually with a more tangible spirit.
[Jason chats up Burnham's nurse]
Jason: I shall be very ill about... eight o'clock?
Cheers!
• While trading barbs with Miss Bronson, a smirking Jason uses a glass of whisky to cool his sharpened tongue.
Fight!
The working class machismo of Jason's window-cleaner disguise gives him the strength to overpower and punch out a psychopathic international assassin.
However, he fails miserably at stopping the fake Mary Burnham, who is finally brought down by Stewart.
Author! Author!
Miss Bronson was not at all impressed by The Return Of Mark Caine.
Jason uses a scene from People In Glass Houses Should Not as inspiration for disguising himself as a window cleaner. It went better in fiction.
This Looks Familiar
The corridor gets the honour of appearing in the teaser as part of a hospital.
Later on, a quick change of carpet turns it into the hallway of an apartment building.
