INTERVIEW: The Observer

Please note that some of the additional information provided here by the journalist named below may not be accurate, so it should be treated with caution.

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Sunday, 19th December 1993 

The distinguished British actor said Jason King had champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as he did.

Jason King went from national idol to national joke the day the first narrow lapel was sold in Carnaby Street in 1977. It was for that reason, I was told when attempting to set up an interview, that Peter Wyngarde, the actor who played him, was wary of meeting the press. All we ever talked about was Jason King, the kipper-tied, crushed-velveted, flared-trousered, ridiculous star of ITV’s Seventies detective series Department S. Wyngarde, it was explained to me, was a classical actor of many parts.

Given this warning, and the fact it is about a thousand years since Department S, I hadn’t expected even to recognise Wyngarde. Imagine my surprise, then, when I spot at the other end of the hotel where we are to lunch – Jason King, complete with a scaled-down version of the Zapata moustache, a raw silk shirt and a flash suit. The toll the years have taken (he claims not to know his age but it must be 60-odd) only becomes apparent when he removes his fedora to reveal a dramatic reduction in the bouffant.

‘I decided Jason King was going to be an extension of me,’ he says over his dietetically-correct lunch. ‘I was not going to have a superimposed personality. I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy, used to go to the tailor with my designs. And my hair was long because I had been in this Chekhov play, The Duel, at the Duke of York’s.’

The pilot of Department S was reshown, firmly within inverted commas, by BBC 2 on August Bank Holiday. A previewer brilliantly described a typical plot as having King drive his Rolls to a country mansion occupied by a mad colonel and mini-skirted daughter, drink a bottle of claret, smoke 50 cigarettes, and flirt with the daughter before arresting everybody. Not every detail is correct, however. Wyngarde points out it was a Bentley, not a Roller, and champagne, not claret.

Wyngarde boasts that he is the last of the matinee idols, an incurable romantic. He was married once, briefly, at the age of 22, and had a love affair with Vivien Leigh: wooing women has never been a problem. ‘My problem,’ he says, ‘is that they fall in love with Jason King and find I am really Dracula.’

Is he really Dracula?

‘I am, in a way, very sadistic. There is a sadistic streak in me, but I think women quite like it. You have got to be tough with them, really tough and then they love you for it. Treat them with any amount of charm, that’s how you start – then you throw off the frock coat and put on the bearskin. I love being the caveman. The reason I think I am sadistic is that men have a side that hates their mothers. Having so many women is a revenge against your mother.’

He was taken from his mother when he was tiny. She was, he says, beautiful, a Claudette Colbert  lookalike and racing driver, ‘quite a gel and chased by men all over the place’. His father, a diplomat, divorced her and took Peter with him to China only months before war with Japan broke out. While separated from him, Wyngarde was captured and taken to the same internment camp as J. G. Ballard. The alternative explanation for his ‘sadism’ lies there, in Lung-hui. He has an indelible memory of two adults fighting over a quarter inch of ribbon fish.

Back in England, after public school and the briefest period reading law at Oxford, he began acting in rep. By his account, his was a prodigious but unreliable talent. One day, having just seen Rebecca at the cinema, he played the racket-swinging juvenile lead in a drawing-room comedy in the style of a moody Olivier: ‘All the other actors thought I’d gone mad and I was sacked.’ On another occasion, in a Somerset Maugham play, he broke into a popular song of the time ‘A Room with a View’. He was sacked again. Nevertheless, he made it to the West End.

His stories, told the long way round, present him as more misunderstood than misunderstanding. He lost the lead in a production of King John by telling the director how he should direct it. In St Joan he insisted that Shaw had missed Joan’s sexuality. Having been promised the title role in the film Alexander the Great, he lost out to Richard Burton and, compensated with a subsidiary part, was left on the cutting room floor when the studio objected to the homo-eroticism of their scene together.

Department S and the spin-off, Jason King, brought Wyngarde all the fame he could want, and then some. Voted by Australian women the man they most wanted an affair with, he arrived at Sydney airport in 1970 and was mobbed. ‘It was one of the most terrifying experiences I can remember. They got me to the ground, tore my clothes, debagged me and cut my hair off (he points downwards). I was in hospital for three days.’

Feeling he could take the part of Jason King no further, he left after two series. What happened next? Readers with sufficient memory will recall a trivial, but embarrassing, court conviction in 1975, an incident I have agreed not to dwell upon. He says only that it upset him deeply at the time, but that he does not feel it affected his career. In the late 1970s and 1980s his career nevertheless described a steep decline: small parts, small films, panto. He blames type-casting.

‘In the late 1970s the whole character had gone into a kind of icebox. He was still loved but he was no longer hot. But all the scripts called for Jason King. It was the lack of imagination of producers. And if you’re a perfectionist – horrible expression – which is what I am, producers don’t like it, because they are so mediocre.’

So how does he rate himself? ‘Extremely high. I mean why am I doing it if I don’t think it’s important?’

Wyngarde’s anecdotes not only exhaust my reserves of tape but stretch over two lunches. He is full of the future too. He has just filmed an episode of Granada’s Sherlock Holmes (his cameo was enthusiastically applauded when it was shown last month as part of the National Film Theatre’s Holmes season) and he wants to direct.

‘Someone said, ‘It’s so sad about you, Peter – if only you had said ‘yes’ more often’, he tells me over lunch number one. Peter Hall apparently once complained that Wyngarde ‘was not a company man’. I have no idea whether this is the real reason for his fall. And, likeable though he is, I doubt if Peter will ever be quite honest enough with himself to discover the true cause either.

Interviewed by Andrew Billen.