"Actor: Dennis Alaba Peters"

• Department S: The Complete Series | Blu Ray | (02/10/2017) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  All 28 episodes of the crimefighting drama series about an elite branch of Interpol agents who take on the cases no-one else can solve. A trio of ace investigators led by suavely assured novelist Jason King (Peter Wyngarde), hard-nosed professional Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and coolly efficient computer expert Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nichols) try to outdo each other as they seek to solve the cases baffling police forces throughout Europe. Episodes comprise: 'Six Days', 'The Trojan Tanker', 'A Cellar Full of Silence', 'The Pied Piper of Hambletown', 'One of Our Aircraft Is Empty', 'The Man in the Elegant Room', 'Handicap Dead', 'Black Out', 'Who Plays the Dummy', 'The Treasure of the Costa Del Sol', 'The Man Who Got a New Face', 'Les Fleurs Du Mal', 'The Shift That Never Was', 'The Man from 'X', 'Dead Men Die Twice', 'The Perfect Operation', 'The Duplicated Man', 'The Mysterious Man in the Flying Machine', 'Death On Reflection', 'The Last Train to Redbridge', 'A Small War of Nerves', 'The Bones of Byrom Blain', 'Spencer Bodily Is Sixty Years Old', 'The Ghost of Mary Burnham', 'A Fish Out of Water', 'The Soup of the Day', 'A Ticket to Nowhere' and 'The Double Death of Charlie Crippen'.

• Department S - Vol. 1 - Episodes 1 And 2 - Six Days / The Trojan Tanker | DVD | (10/07/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  The hit of the 1969-1970 season, Department S was an attempt on the part of television company ITC to create a "with-it" follow-up to the The Saint and Man in a Suitcase series which were starting to look staid by then. The department of the title is notionally part of Interpol, a group managed by the first of many black TV top cops (here Denis Albana Peters), and assigned all the bizarre cases The Avengers hadn't handled. Often they would come up against modern variations on the classic "locked-room" or "paradox" mysteries so favoured in crime fiction, mysteries which verge on the sort of phenomena The X Files would later specialise in (except no aliens appear in Department S). The supposed leads are Action-Man-type Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and English-rose computer whiz Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nichols), but the break-out character is the flamboyant Jason King (Peter Wyngarde), a mystery writer and puzzle-solver notable for his Fu Manchu facial hair and an enormous wardrobe of safari suits, ruffled shirts, flared trousers and velvet jackets. King was the only male character on TV to be as fashion-conscious as the Avengers girls, and his preening peacock attitudes--along with the scripts' above-average mysteries--made this essential viewing for the Age of Aquarius. Volume One includes the following episodes: "Six Days", in which a missing airliner turns up but the passengers have no idea that they've lost six days, with Peter Bowles; and "The Trojan Tanker", in which a mystery woman is found in a luxury suite concealed inside an oil tanker, with Simon (Doomwatch) Oates. --Kim Newman