Crime drama meets science fiction in this chilling and intriguing ABC series. Undermind, first broadcast in 1965 and starring Rosemary Nicols (Department S), Jeremy Kemp (Z Cars) and Jeremy Wilkin (UFO), is released here for the first time in any format.Detective Sergeant Frank Heriot is healthy, happily married, and has a good job. So what has made him cold and remote towards his family? And why is he suddenly plagued by terrible headaches? Is he mentally ill or is something far more sinister affecting his mind? Gradually, the answer becomes clear: Frank is the victim of an unknown force seeking to undermine public confidence in the people and institutions that form the backbone of the British Establishment. Doctors, teachers, scientists, clergymen and writers and are all among its targets; its ultimate aim is anarchy. Where will the mysterious menace strike next? It could be the man who sits next to you on the bus. It could be you...
Handling cases that are too baffling to be solved by normal police routine - It's all in a day's work for Department S - a shadowy Interpol department that specialises in the inexplicable and the illogical. Its small core of operatives include flamboyant novelist Jason King (Peter Wyngarde) who uses his overactive imagination and droll wit to help solve the most difficult of cases Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) a man of action who's not afraid to get his hands dirty and Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nicols) as the gorgeous computer expert with an eye for detail. This box set contains all 28 episodes.
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
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