By Nick Setchfield – 28th February 2018:
Raise a glass of vintage port to late genre icon Peter Wyngarde. Salut! The late Peter Wyngarde always suited the outlandish. A carafe of vintage port in human form, he was a magnetic, flamboyant presence who seemed to live his life between inverted commas; too outsized to be contained by the real world but utterly at home in the imaginary. Certainly it’s his genre turns that made him an icon. In The Avengers episode “A Touch Of Brimstone” he’s John Cleverly Cartney, a bullwhip-snapping dandy who leads a resurrected Hellfire Club. “Checkmate” in The Prisoner casts him as a memorably sly Number Two, matching wits with Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six.
1980’s Flash Gordon hid his imperious, vulpine features behind the glittering mask of Klytus, kinkster-in-chief of planet Mongo and master of the royal bore worms. It was left to that majestically louche voice to stamp Wyngarde’s brand of gently decaying decadence on the role. 1961’s The Innocents gave him no voice at all, but his wordless ghost, gliding like a kite on the edge of reality, is unforgettable.
Jason King made him a household name. Wyngarde first played the foppish sleuth in Department S (1969-70) before winning his own, more outrageous spin-off show in 1971. Dismissed by the star as a “blasé idiot”, King was a colossus in crushed velvet who seemed to have Hai Karate aftershave swilling in his veins, a genuine sex symbol who now looks like a merciless parody (the Austin Powers films took inspiration). Made obsolete by punk, naff as nylon in the ’80s, he was reclaimed by ’90s ironists as the ultimate bossa nova action hero. Wyngarde and his creation blurred, but then they always had done: “Jason King has champagne and strawberries for breakfast, just as I did myself.”
The finer details of his personal history were elusive (“I prefer to be a man without a past”). Was he born Peter Paul Wyngarde, as he claimed, or Cyril Goldbert? In Marseille? Or Singapore? Was his father a British diplomat, his mother a racing driver, or were those the glamorous longings of a natural shapeshifter who once admitted, “As a child it was difficult to differentiate sometimes between fact and fantasy”?
No matter. Print the legend and live it too. As he said of Jason King, “He was the right character at the right time. I guess he just brought some colour into people’s lives.”
Nick is from an obscure body in the S-K system, your majesty.
The Hellfire Club: The OFFICIAL PETER WYNGARDE Appreciation Society: https://www.facebook.com/groups/813997125389790/
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