Production order: 19 | ITC code: 5114 | Airdate order: 27 | DVD order: 26
Those Responsible
Writer: Philip Broadley
Director: Cyril Frankel
Where & When
Beirut, Lebanon: March 22nd
The Inexplicable Mystery
A man named Volnay arrives in Beirut, drawing the attention of some shifty customs officers. Soon after, he is found dead in the sea. That's it; that's your supposedly bizarre mystery.
The Mystery Explained
Volnay was an Interpol agent (and friend of Stewart's) investigating a drugs ring. The bad guys realised he was on their tail and killed him. That's it; that's your supposedly interesting answer.
Review
And so we thankfully reach the last of Philip Broadley's Department S efforts, an increasingly wretched parade of time-wasting borefests about dull villains committing mundane crimes. 'A Fish Out Of Water' is his nadir, about which the only positive is that it at least means the last two remaining episodes have to be an improvement.
 |
| Huzzah! A toast to that! |
A quick summary: a very angry Stewart wants to fly to Beirut to investigate Volnay's death, but Seretse refuses on the grounds that he's too emotionally involved. Instead, he sends Department S's four-star agent Annabelle - no, actually, he despatches the dipsomaniac libertine who's been hanging around Interpol to plunder story ideas for his novels. (Given what's recently been revealed about Frederick Forsyth's work for MI6 perhaps that part isn't so far-fetched, but still.) Jason is immediately clocked as an Interpol agent on landing, so drug lord Rafic orders him killed. To do so, he sends his own girlfriend Michelle to draw Jason to her apartment where she can drug him before two of his goons take him away for disposal. However, Michelle has fallen in love with Jason over the course of this single evening and has a change of heart to save his life. Meanwhile, Stewart threatens to resign if Seretse doesn't allow him on the case, so the diplomat caves and lets both Stewart and Annabelle sneak into Lebanon via stock footage while he flies in to divert Rafic's attention. Once in Beirut, Stewart uncovers Rafic's drug lab while Jason - who has fallen in love with Michelle - confronts her about the whole 'girlfriend of a drug lord who tried to have me killed' thing. It seems that she's going to shoot him, but instead she kills Rafic. All four members of Department S have a glum reunion in a lift as she weeps over her dead lover. Roll credits.
 |
| "Well, thank God that's over. Drinks?" |
You might have noticed that there's nothing remotely mysterious about any of that. We don't even get the fake courtesy of a mask glued to someone's face or any other dumb 'bizarre' gimmick; a man is dead, and that's it. The show's format is completely ignored, with nobody in the production team willing (or bothered enough) to demand even lip-service be paid to it at this late stage of its run. The result is a generic crime drama into which the regulars have been cut-and-pasted to fill the roles of Hero and Hero's Sidekick. (Female Sidekick evidently wasn't a planned character, so Annabelle has nothing to do other than answer phones and peer with concern through squitty little binoculars.)
 |
| Booking an advance appointment at the Job Centre. |
As well as there being no reason for this to be a case for Department S in meta terms, there's no reason within the show's own universe either. The dead man wasn't working for Department S, so why have the weird crimes unit investigating his death at all? Friend of Stewart's or not, there would surely be others who could handle it. Interpol as a whole has considerably more resources than the patron saint of the brown suit trade, a brainy young nerd in short skirts and a walnut-skinned drunkard.
 |
| "...and Mr Grade said that of course the show would focus on us as much as Jason." |
But wait! Broadley is ahead of us! The bad guy is already known to our heroes, supposedly justifying their interest! "So we've finally uncovered the head of the octopus," says Jason portentously - or at least it might be if we had any idea who or what he was talking about. The problem with shows in which all the episodes are completely stand-alone, as favoured by ITC in an era when serialisation was actively discouraged so as not to confuse casual viewers, is that it makes it impossible to have recurring villains or ongoing storylines. If the "octopus", or head thereof, were someone Department S had pursued before, it might have had some - or any - impact. As it is, the characters know who they're after, but we don't, and there's no effort made to fill us in.
 |
| "Wait, we all came dressed as Bananaman?" |
There's little effort made to hold our attention, either. This being a stock Broadley script (it even takes place on the Mediterranean coast!), we spend far too much time watching the personal lives of the villains, like a criminal version of Big Brother. The main characters disappear entirely for long stretches while we're forced to follow Michelle, Rafic and various minor creeps, to the point where you could boil a couple of eggs between sightings of the heroes during the middle of the episode. As for big boss Rafic, he manages to fall below the low bar of previous Broadley bad guys like Lomax or le Beau, being a one-note unpleasant jerk.
 |
| The situation in Beirut was so bad that they were even running out of sky. |
What really torpedoes the episode, however, is something that became a cliche to the point of ridicule in older TV shows: the 'instant romance', where a main character falls in love with a woman he's never met before, only to have her die (usually in his arms) at the end, after which she is never mentioned again. Harry Enfield's 'The Playboys' skit parodied this perfectly - along with all the standard tropes of ITC's adventure shows.
 |
| The 'biggest hair' contest was a dead heat. |
In this episode, it's Jason who draws the instant romance card, so he goes all moony over Michelle before losing her at the end. The only slight break with cliche is that she doesn't die, instead being the one to kill Rafic. It's a weirdly-directed scene, though; he walks in midway through one of Jason's lines and is instantly shot, expiring in front of the clearly distraught Michelle. We're supposed to gather that Rafic had been about to kill Jason, but there's no set-up - he's suddenly just there, only to be plugged by his girlfriend. She then decides she'd rather stay with a dead man than leave with Jason, which had to be rather a blow to the author's ego.
 |
| The belt would hold up his trousers. If they had been made for Mr Creosote. |
Yet in this pointless drudge of an episode, of all places, we finally find out something important about Jason's past. He was once married! Gasp! To an actress named Marion, who died in a plane crash! This had actually been revealed earlier in the series, in 'The Trojan Tanker', but unless a viewer was possessed of an eidetic memory and the ability to read really small print on an old tube television (possibly only 405-line resolution at that, since the higher-definition PAL format was still fairly new in 1969/70), there was basically zero chance of their knowing about it.
 |
| Ah, the famous semi-detached houses of the Lebanon. |
So what comes of this momentous revelation? Absolutely nothing. This chance to explain why Jason King is who he is and does what he does, why he gets through women and whisky as if this is the last day of his life, why he regularly puts himself in harm's way when he's not even a real cop, is utterly squandered in order to tell us that he's fallen for Michelle because she, er... looks a bit like Marion. That's it? That's the best you've got? Philip Broadley, you worthless bloody hack.
 |
| Two drooping swords in one moment. |
It's not just a lousy episode, it's a frustrating one because it wastes the only time the show ever tried to delve into the background of our heroes as people rather than detectives. Worse yet, it makes everyone act wildly out of character to do so. Eternal professional Stewart is a petulant whiner, Annabelle spends most of her limited screentime fretting over Jason's safety, and Jason himself is stuck delivering quavery-voiced lines like "At the risk of being sentimental... I do care what happens to her." Pass the sickbag.
 |
| How much cocaine you would need to enjoy this episode. |
As if that wasn't bad enough, Broadley liked this story so much he used it as the blueprint for two of his scripts for Jason King: 'Toki' (in which Jason falls in love with a gangster's girlfriend) and 'Nadine' (in which a drug lord secretly sets Jason up with a beautiful woman for nefarious ends). Neither is any better than 'A Fish Out Of Water' - which should give you a good idea why I won't be reviewing the spin-off series. Eight more Philip Broadley episodes is too much to bear thinking about. But that means I've finally made it through my last one! Hooray!
Fancy Quotes
Jason: What's my cover?
Annabelle: Jason King, author.
Jason: Best-selling author.
Rafic: This King, isn't he the one who writes books?
Esplin: Yes.
Rafic: And likes women?
Esplin: [reading a couple of pages of a file, then laughing] Yes!
Cheers!
• A woman buys one of Jason's books while Stewart and Seretse are in a bookshop; Seretse quips that it will give him another excuse for "a whisky at football". Take out the football part and that's probably true.
• At the belly-dancing club, Jason's first order is a large whisky. Without ice, of course; wouldn't want to spoil the flavour.
• At Michelle's flat, Jason is given a drink by his hostess. In this case, the flavour will be spoiled, as she drugs it! (She develops a conscience and stops him from necking it, though.)
• Escaping two thugs sent to kill him, Jason returns to his hotel and winds down after the unpleasant experience with a glass of whisky to replace the one Michelle spilled.
• While watching Michelle's flat, Jason assuages his worries for her with another glass of the old brown fluid.
Author! Author!
 |
| "I can't believe he wrote me in as the incompetent comic relief!" |
A whole slew of Jason's books appear or are mentioned this episode: Istanbul Iliad, Enough Is Enough Is Enough Is Enough, The Lady Is Willing, Identity, Mark Caine!, From China Yours Sincerely, Index Finger Left Hand and The Man Who Fell To Earth (pretty sure that title was already taken...)
This Looks Familiar
The stock footage of Stewart and Annabelle crossing the desert to reach Beirut is exactly the same as that used to show Jason crossing the Egyptian desert in 'Spencer Bodily'.
Michelle's apartment is, perhaps inevitably by now, reached via the Department S corridor.
You can't hide from us, corridor! We know it's you pulling double-duty as the building housing Rafic's cover business.
