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.
Saturday 20th August, 1969
It’s Super-Bodgie To The Rescue
Department S is one of the world’s most unusual police departments. It is an offshoot of Interpol in Paris and is asked to handle the sort of cases that baffle everyone else. One of the bureau’s investigators is just as unusual. He is Jason King, a dandy and a crime novelist who dabbles in criminology. The role is played by Peter Wyngarde who, by sheer flamboyance, as turned the show, seen on the Seven Network in Australia, into a personal triumph. George Tremlett in London, talks to Peter Wyngarde, who turned to TV after a stage and movie career.
Words ebb and flow like Welch poetry, with dramatic flourishes of a the silk cuffed hand, a raised eyebrow, a smile and sudden change of accent. It’s impossible to capture Peter Wyngarde in a phrase.
He’s a visual speaker: an artist with words: a born raconteur, telling self-deprecating stories with neat epigrams.
Do you know any Australian anecdotes I asked him?
“Only Bobby Helpmann,” he said with a mischievous grin, pausing for a laugh, and adding that he thought I was going to be a genuine, 100%, third generation Aussie myself.
“Then I could have been terribly rude to you. I was looking forward to it. There’s that lovely Mick Jagger going out there to play Ned Kelly and they’re screaming because he’s not a big butch farmer! And yet nobody minds Richard Green playing Robin Hood and he’s nearly a
dwarf. Oh dear. I shouldn’t have said that, should I? Anyway, he’s terribly short and not 6 foot 6 inches as you would expect Robin Hood to be. And then I couldn’t believe it when I read that the Hair album was being banned as obscene. If the Australian’s think that Hair obscene, they’ll think Jason King is filthy!
Well, maybe not filthy. Just unusual. F.C, Kennedy, TVT’s critic, has christened him Super-Bodgie after witnessing his incredible feats in Department S.
“I’ve never been to Australia. I was asked to go there with Vivien Leigh in Duel of Angels, but I turned it down and I’m glad I did. When the play got to Melbourne, members of the audience started walking out because they’d gone to the theatre expected to see Scarlett O’Hara. The only thing that they were interested in was her dress which was made by Dior. It’s fantastic that a country as large as Australia can be so parochial and insular. They need more young people running the country. We’re 20 years out of date in this country, but they’re 40 years out of date. It’s like the British Raj in the 1930s… There, will that do! Have I been outrageous?”
“Jason King is a 1970s character and that’s how I’ve always tried to portray him,”
Although the thought may offend, the words never do. His style is so puckish, his wit so rare – like an Oscar Wilde turned loose in the mod, hip, flowery, summery London of Beatledom and Kings Road fashions. That isn’t an actor you see in Department S, that’s Mark Caine and Jason King playing Peter Wyngarde – the parts are all interchangeable. He is them; they are he. The mannerisms are all his; the moustache and the thickly flowing hair are his (grown for a stage play and kept); the clothes are his – he was dressing at Mr Fish before the series made the styles so fashionable.
“Now I get letters from people asking where I get my shirts,” he said, with what appeared to be almost distaste.
Indeed one wonders what he really thinks of the fan clamour that is becoming so intense that Wyngarde now finds it difficult to step outside his front door. The other day he pulled up at a traffic light, noticed out of the corner of his eye a car full of staring people and turned slowly and elegantly round, and stuck out his tongue.
“Jason King is a 1970s character and that’s how I’ve always tried to portray him,” said Wyngarde, as we talked first in the studio, and then over lunch in the artistes restaurant at ATV.
This is his first TV series, but he’s no newcomer to the medium; starting in rep and working through seasons at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, the Old Vic, Bristol Old Vic and an 18 month stage run with Vivien Leigh, he’s gone on to play just about every kind of TV part. He’s been in Shakespeare adaptations The Taming Of The Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,. and he’s had cameo parts in The Saint, The Baron, The Prisoner and The Avengers. Hadn’t he been in Romeo and Juliet, too, I asked?
“No, that was Peter Finch,” he said. “Everybody says I am like him. When we were both younger, I was always taken for him. I understudied for him once in a play, and one night he was a bit late for a performance and I went on for the first five minutes until he came and nobody noticed the difference.”
Wyngarde says he himself has an unfortunate knack of missing performances, which led to one tumultuous scene with Vivien Leigh: “I’d missed one show because I’d been gambling for two days at Lake Tahoe in Nevada, and then I missed a plane and had to charter another one,” he said. “There I was in the plane and I turned to the chap sitting next to me and saw he had gone absolutely white, so I looked out, too, and we were surrounded by pine trees, and there was the wing but no propeller. I suddenly thought to myself, ‘We’re going to crash,’ and we did.” The next plane, hurriedly chartered, was piloted by a Gabby Hayes style character, who sat in the cockpit, chewing and muttering and it was only when we encountered a thick black fog over San Francisco that Wyngarde discovered that the pilot didn’t believe in radar! “And then the most amazing thing happened, something which I’ve never been able to explain to this day. He got me down safely, which in itself was remarkable, and as I left the plane, there was a big black car with a big black chauffeur, all dressed in black, and he stepped forward in the dense fog and said Mr Wyngarde? It was like something out of film. I said yes, got in and he drove me straight to the theatre, but to this day, I don’t know who told him to go to the airport.”
He arrived just in time for the performance, but afterwards was summoned to Vivien Leigh’s dressing room.
“She was in a terrible, terrible rage. ‘How dare you?” she raged. “I’ve never been treated like this by an actor before. I didn’t want you to come to America in the first place… and they didn’t want you and you do this to me. You’re late for show after show. No actor has ever treated me like this before.” And then she paused, hesitated, and said, “Except for one and he fell flat on his face!” And then she roared with laughter, and it was all forgotten.”
Stories, stories, stories… they kept on flowing while Wyngarde talked, skirting around the subject of his four years internment by the Japanese during the War: telling me in great detail, complete with accents, how an underworld gang boss invited him to go into business with him.
“He told me if I’d like to invest some money, he could guarantee me £8,000 pounds a year tax free – but I told him I’d got problems enough already,” said Wyngarde.
Interview by George Tremlett.
PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 