INTERVIEW: Action TV

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.

June 1994

Few actors have become a strongly connected with the series as Peter Wyngarde is with Department S and Jason King. The two series were part of the explosion of TV spy series in the 60s and 70s, but are remembered primarily because of Wyngarde’s engaging performance as the foppish author, Jason King.

Peter was originally offered a minor role in the series as an old Oxford professor. He was initially unsure about taking the job because he was involved in a play. It was only when the reviews came in after the first night that he was persuaded to do it.

“We all had a big dinner party and I was at one end of the table and the producer who asked me to do the series was at the other end. I said to them, ‘I never read the notices… If the notices come in I shall go away somewhere and when I come back you won’t breathe a word of what happened because I don’t want to know’. So the papers came and I went away to another room and came back about half an hour later and I could tell by the looks on their faces that it was the disaster of the year! Funnily enough, it wasn’t actually and we played it for six months so it was alright. I think they were trying not to look anything, and when actors try not to look anything, they always look constipated! So I thought, ‘Oh God, this is not going to work’ so I got a napkin and wrote, ‘I will be delighted to do your series, signed Peter Wyngarde’ and that’s how I got it”.

The role accepted that night was the old university Don; the role that made it to the screen was Jason King. His portrayal of the ‘crime writer adventurer and lover’ is a million miles away from the cranky old professor as it was originally conceived.

“I didn’t like the idea of playing two characters in a day because you get a bit schizophrenic,” Peter explains. “I said I don’t want to be too many people because I’ll go raving mad. So [I said] ‘why don’t I do the thing I’ve always wanted to do on film which is be an extension of myself?’ because I think all the really great film actors have always been an extension of themselves”.

This allowed Peter to do the play at the same time and bring out the humour Jason King. “If you’ve got humour in yourself then you’ve got to bring it out”, he says. “That was a lovely thing about playing Jason because he was a romantic extension – and I emphasise the word romantic – of yourself. You could do things like James Bond”.

Peter took acting like James Bond perfectly literally in both Department S and its follow up Jason King by throwing himself all heartedly into the stunts.

“There is one episode when you can see it actually happening, when I did my back in. You can hear the crack. I’ll leap from some stairs, not terribly high, but enough when you do a swallow dive onto the villains. I said ‘oh it must be me, so you must take it from underneath so you can see it me’. I’m not a stuntman, but you want to do those things yourself because they look so real if you do them. I’ve never really recovered from it”.

This experience clearly didn’t put him off as he continued doing the stunts even though his contract explicitly forbade it.

In one episode he had another accident when he jumped out of an aeroplane.

I think I had four days off and I went and did a parachute course. The idea was that the cameraman came with me and we both did this course outside Cambridge and we jumped and I did the junk with him and he photographed me so you know it’s mehfil stop unfortunately a very large tree got in the way, and so did the shoot, and I arrived upside down!

“What was so marvellous about it was they showed the rushes the next day… And this bloody director said, ‘my God, it’s amazing! Paul (who was my stunt double) is looking more like Peter every time I see him!’ He never found out, but everyone else was laughing”.

Although he enjoyed going out to film on location on Jason King, such extravagance was out of the reach of the budget for the Department S. Many of the stories were set in faraway countries, which was achieved by using the much cheaper technique of back-projection.

“You used to sit in these stupid cars and have that terrible thing behind you rolling away and you’re trying to be real. It was ridiculous. I used to get the giggles, I said, ‘Are you sure we have to do this?’ They said, ‘All right, we’ll make it one morning where you do them all in a bunch’. I had forgotten I kept changing clothes all the time, so I spent the whole morning changing clothes. I think I change suits 400 times!”

and what happened was our writers had to solve them. And that’s how they became a bit fantastic, but they were based on true stories, most of them”. The idea was that Jason King was really Flemming writing about James Bond, but in the early days of Department S he was part of a threesome with actors Joel Fabiani and Rosemary Nicols.

“I got on marvellously with him”, says Peter. “We didn’t hit it off with ‘Knickers’ as I called her, because she decided she was going to become a star and I think actors don’t like that”.

When Department S finished, Peter Wyngarde took a year off before returning to start in Jason King. “I didn’t really want to do another series because it was very tiring”, he says. “I thought that was jolly nice, I enjoyed that immensely now let’s have a little rest. So I took a little sabbatical away and went around the world. As a result of working so hard I got amnesia. I don’t remember that trip – waste of money! A whole year away and I don’t remember anything about it. People come up to me in the street and say, ‘What were what we got up to in Bangkok, really Peter!’ And I say, ‘What are you talking about?’ Apparently I behaved appallingly in Bangkok, but there we are”.

When he came back he was called in by TV Executive Lew Grade to talk about returning as Jason King.

“He said, ‘Well listen, I’ve got to tell you something, Peter. My idea of a hero is somebody who’s blond, blue eyed and has a lovely smile. I can’t understand how people can stand somebody like you with this long black hair, these funny clothes you’re wearing and this funny English you speak… but I’ve got to tell you this, my wife likes you so we’re going to do another series!’”

Having been away for a year, he took little persuading to do the series, but he was surprised to find out Jason King was being based solely around his character. This, he feels, weaken the show.

“He’s a person you just want to see bits of, but if you’re going to go with him all the time you’ve got to go in another direction, a little more serious. And that’s what we had to do and he became vulnerable. I don’t know if you remember, we did one with that lovely girl, Felicity Kendal [Toki]. I fell madly in love with her of course, as me, not as Jason, or both of us fell in love with her. It shows, you see, and I don’t think Jason should ever have been vulnerable”.

Watching a video of Jason King 30 years later, it’s obviously a product of the 70s, if only in terms of the fashions. “The people in the streets were doing it which was marvellous, it was like at Mardi Gras”, says Peter. “But if you look at some of the episodes, my clothes are not exaggerated, there’re only exaggerated if I was playing a character within a character.

“I’ve never wore a medallion outside my shirt, for example, except for one character that goes to a discotheque. Of course they accused me of wearing a medallion and I became a medallion man, which I never was”.

One of the fashions Jason King is famous for are turn-back shirt cuffs. Peter only adopted the style when he lost his cufflinks on location in Venice.

“I was running from somebody or chasing somebody, I can’t remember which. I had to jump into this gondola. They [the cufflinks] were platinum, they were given to me as a present and one of them fell off into the drink. So I took off the other one and pull my cuffs back. It started a fashion, especially in Germany funnily enough. I remember going to Germany shortly afterwards and I went into a discotheque and every man in there had his cuffs back”.

The actor obviously has good memories of his time as Jason King because he talks of the show with great enthusiasm.

“It’s real danger which happens to a lot of actors – and it happened to me as well towards the end – is you get so embroiled with the character that you think nobody else can write for him and you are the only person who can write it and say the lines, which is probably 75% true. But then suddenly you’re only going in one direction. You must allow other people to come in on it otherwise you get a one-sided view of it. I think that the second series, the Jason King one, through no fault of mine, became too much of Jason King.

Peter Wyngarde still pops up now and again on TV, most recently in The Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes. “I was just asked to do it and I said yes”, says Peter. “I thought, that’s a lovely idea. The character was marvellously interesting, but there wasn’t enough of him. I don’t think”.

There were suggestions that his character would appear in every episode of the new Sherlock Holmes series, and may have taken off in his own series. Those plans appear to have fallen through.

“The idea was at one time to carry him on, not a Sherlock Holmes, but as an individual characters so that he could be the link mount between different stories,” explains Peter. “But I thought it was rather limiting because he wouldn’t be in a period. “If he could be like Quantum Leap, then I could be different people, I think that could be fun. Or go into different periods, then it could be more interesting, but to say in that period and use classic stories, Kipling and all those kind of things, I think was rather limiting. [It’s] very much what I call English television, a bit dull”.

In the mid-60s he made a couple of appearances in The Avengers with John Steed and Emma Peel. “I did two Avengers: A Touch Of Brimstone and Epic”, he says. “One got me an Emmy nomination while I was out in Greece doing and I Spy. I remember Bill Cosby was in I Spy and we flew to Hollywood for the Emmy Awards and he got it and I was terribly upset as he’s become a millionaire 25,000 times over and I haven’t. I suppose he may have been the right choice, I don’t know”.

He was in a famous scene where he got to fight with Diana Rigg while she was dressed in black leather. “I whipped her and she had a snake around her neck. I think I was mad for the snake, that’s probably what it was, I wanted the snake”.

The scene caused a bit of a stir at the time. “Yes, it did,” says Peter. “The clothes she was wearing and a man whipping her, I suppose. She’s a neighbour, so I’ve stopped whipping her now!”

He also had a major role in one of the better Peter Davidson Doctor Who’s. He played Timanov, a religious leader on the volcanic Planet of Fire.

“We went to Lanzarote which was lovely,” he recalls. “I had a lot of fun there. They were a super company to work for, really great fun.

“It is an interesting story, it was like a kind of prehistoric thing in it away, and I thought the location was absolutely appropriate; marvellous those volcanoes, the colours were fantastic. A lady directed that [Fiona Cumming] she was good. I don’t know why she hasn’t done more because she was really good, very helpful”.

He still get fan mail – at least that’s what he tells you when he’s asked about the female admirers he used to get in the 60s and 70s.

“I still get them! We’ve got a wonderful fan club… because of this Sherlock Holmes thing, they thought I was going to be a in every episode, letters have been piling in. It’s quite extraordinary. I don’t understand it at all, thank God, because I think if I did understand it, it would stop”.

Interview by Jane Killick.

---

© Copyright The Hellfire Club: The OFFICIAL PETER WYNGARDE Appreciation Society: https://www.facebook.com/groups/813997125389790/