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.
September 1995
It’s His Department
Peter Wyngarde might be living quietly in London these days, but his character, Jason King, is riding high in the popularity stakes.
Jason King was one of the most flamboyant and charismatic of screen heroes. He not only changed the way men dressed, but could also be credited with changing the face of television.
The colourful writer and investigator, played by Peter Wyngarde, first in Department S and then in his own series, remains a cult figure.
It was Wyngarde who brought his own sense of style to Jason King and also persuaded the television bosses to film on location – something very rarely done in the 60s and early 70s.
Says the actor, now almost 70-years-old and living quietly in London, “I wanted us to stop doing those terrible studio backdrop scenes, but I was told that location filming was just too expensive.
“Eventually they agreed to send just me and a lighting cameraman away. We went to Vienna and did shots by the wheel that featured in The Third Man and a man appeared dressed in black with a hat pulled down over his face, looking just like Orson Welles. He was actually selling watches, but it was wonderful stuff.
“We went to Rome and came across this gaggle of nuns and I just ran into the middle of them like some terrible rooster among all these hens,” he says. “Then we would write storylines to fit in with the locations shot.”
The result of this inspired improvisation was a very different looking series. The idiosyncratic King was very much the creation of Wyngarde himself.
“When Department S was being planned, I was told that I was going to be an Oxford professor sitting at his desk who solved problems for two Americans. I thought that was a bit dull. Then I had this bright idea of basing him on Ian Fleming.
“The clothes were a sort of extension of me. I was a bit of a Peacock then. I love clothes, but I didn’t much like the kind of fashions that were
about. Then I saw a picture off an Edwardian riding coat and I thought it had real style, so I did some drawings and had a similar coat made. A conventional tie never look right with it and I had the idea of making the shirt and tie the same colour.”
That idea started a popular fashion, as did the trademark of turning back cuffs, which actually evolved by accident.
“We were filming in Venice in a gondola and one of my cufflinks felt off into the water,” recalls Peter. “The camera was rolling so I just turned back my shirt cuffs over the sleeve of my jacket and that was how it began.”
The influence of Jason King in his heyday was almost frightening. He was an all-action hero but, at Peter’s insistence, he had no guns.
“I was in a park once. Some kid playing and one of them kicked another one really hard in the crotch. I asked him what he thought he was doing. This kid just rolled back his cuffs and said, ‘I’m Jason King, who are you?’ And I thought, that’s it, I’m never going to ever to carry a gun.”
PETER WYNGARDE: The Official Website 
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