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.
Broadcast: BBC Radio 4 – August 1994
The programme opens with a sound bite from the Jason King episode, ‘A Red, Red Rose Forever’,
Voice of Fan 1: “I just remembered him as a quintessential English gentleman; a sort of James Bond character but as it was on TV, it was so slightly cheaper value. I also remember him wearing all the fab gear”.
Voice of Fan 2: “Jason King would usually pull up in a flared car of some sort – the tyres would be flared, and he’d sort of waft out, keeping his hand on his head to keep his wig in place; his moustache would be vibrating succulently. He’d have a bird on his arm and be smoking a corduroy cigarette. He’d usually be wearing some sort of double-breasted affair and fantastic shoes, no doubt”.
Voice of Fan 3: “He got the clothes. He got the girls. He was the man!”
Voice of Host: “Even though they were knee-high to a grasshopper when Jason King graced our screens, these guys do remember him. Fab! Jason also had a way with words”.
Voice of Fan 2: “I recall he had a thing of ending every sentence with, ‘Do-dee dee-dee’“ [1]
Voice of Host: “As well as being Prince of mix and match. No wonder as the release date of Jason King on video nears, that so many people remember the flamboyant adventurer and notorious lover of women who could solve crimes even Interpol battled with”.
Voice of Fan 2: “I remember he was in this love-scene with a famous actress at the time, and I remember him saying to her, “You really turn me on,” and her replying, “You’re really fab!”
Voice of Host: “Everyone at the time looked like him; you could hardly walk down the street without tripping over a droopy moustache. Peter Wyngarde is the actor who played this Sultan of style”.
Peter: “I thought the funniest thing of all was the fan mail you got from girlfriends and wives, saying things like: ‘My husband looks exactly like you,’ and you’d get this photograph of him and he’d look like Godzilla. It was absolutely unbelievable!
“There was this man with more hair on his head than anybody has ever had in their lives on top of their head, and a moustache that went down to their knees. It was unbelievable. They also had these great grinning teeth. And they’d say, ‘Could you sign his photograph – not my photograph – his photograph. People exaggerate what they think they see”.
Voice of Host: “And what about the clothes?”
Peter: “The idea was to give me more height, so I double the height of the collar and I made it much higher, that’s all it was. And instead of a tie which I believe displays a person’s personality; if you look at the people that have little tiny knots you know what else they have which is tiny! You know there’s no freedom and that they are so introverted they almost disappear into themselves,
Voice of Host: “He would often draw designs for his suits on brown paper which were sent to his own tailor. the pink high-neck shirt with gigantic matching tie bursting out from the jacket of the caramel suit; the high waisted trousers and the snooker players waistcoats. He was busy on set as there were at least eight changes of clothes per episode from Tweedy suit to sheepskin jacket to tight jumper; powder blue suit in the morning, red kaftan at night. Ohhh, the flick of his jacket as he strolled across the parquet floor to tick off a villain. The way the trouser leg hung just so”.
Peter: “I think you’ve got to dress to make yourself look better, if possible – to make the body look better. The fact that I used a riding jacket of the 18th Century gave it a kind of elegance in a very masculine way, which I was also after, you know, so that the jacket became longer, the trousers became narrow, and I wore riding boots, so you had this wonderful line. It was an elegant line; it had something, and I was doing alright in my private life with this, so why not use it in my public life. It was a very classic line”.
Voice of Host: “So what happened to the suits? Apparently, some were just given, so always look out when trawling the charity shops, you may get lucky and find a genuine Wyngarde suit that he’d once given to Oxfam. There’s even a rumour that an original pair of Jason King trousers are doing the rounds at various raves”.
Peter: “I can’t find any now as they’ve all disappeared with different people. Sometimes I’d say, ’Where’s that lovely steely grey one? I haven’t seen that for ages”.
Voice of Host: “Would you recognise without any shadow of doubt one of your suits?”
Peter: “Immediately! That’s why I knew when I went to Germany, France, Sweden and I’d see ‘Jason King Suits’ in shop windows, I said: ‘That’s not my suit!’ But everyone says it is. ‘No. It’s terrible. This is wrong, this is wrong this is…’ I could tell right away. They didn’t know the cut. The secret was the cut. I know that secret to this day so if I’m kidnapped, you know what happened.”
Voice of Host: “With Jason, the dandy writer of crime fiction who had better brains than all of MI5 put together, surely, he should have moved from crime into a fashion slot or joined the style police and kept the colour wheel firmly on beige”.
The world of cheese certainly won’t let him be forgotten.
Voice of Retro Clothes Shop Owner: “We have a screen that shows a photo’ of Peter Wyngarde around every 5 seconds to subliminally entice people into our 1st floor shop”.
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Notes:
[1]: Don’t remember that one…!
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PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 
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