Jason King was the spinoff from Department S that ran from 1971-72, keeping only Peter "Klytus (I'm bored)" Wyngarde's flamboyant Jason King as the main character. The telefantasy TV detective genre was well-established by the early '70s, so Jason King attempted to stand out from the crowd by playing around with and subverting all the by now familiar formulas. This was most obviously accomplished by having the character of Jason King, a writer of James Bondesque spy novels, continually comment on the events of the stories he himself was taking part in as though he himself had written them.
While other episodes of the series would take this even further (most obviously Wanna Buy A Television Series? in which the main plot takes place within a framing device of Jason King trying to sell the idea of a TV series to a producer, and includes several instances of scenes being shown twice and changed when the producer insists to Jason they be made more exciting), one of the most enjoyable instances of this playing with the format is found in The Stones of Venice.
This episode is set, as you might guess from the title, in Venice, so it includes a load of stock footage to try and convince us it is really taking place there (and not in a TV studio somewhere in the UK), plus one scene of a Wyngarde lookalike in some dark glasses who is actually on location in a place that could even be taken for St Mark's Square.
It begins in media res, showing us the end of the story before the beginning when we have no context to know what is going on. That in itself is not a major subversion of the format (though it isn't exactly common either), but this is only the start. The police then arrive to arrest Jason King, and the police captain is played by...
Roger Delgado!
This would have originally been broadcast on ITV in March 1972, around the same time as Delgado was also starring in The Sea Devils on BBC1. No stranger to playing telefantasy rentabaddys, here his role is a bit different - although Delgado's police captain arrests Jason King and tries to interrogate him, this becomes a framing device whereby King tells the episode's story to him in the form of extended flashbacks. This is also an excuse for much comedy where the captain is in the dark about events just as much as the audience is, putting him in the position of audience surrogate, and he reacts with increasingly exaggerated incredulity to the implausible occurrences that King unfolds.
The plot is therefore given an excuse to be even more outlandish than is typical even for this series, which frequently sent up the common tropes of telefantasy detective stories. Here it includes a sidekick for Jason King called "Toby" who is a champagne-drinking dog; identical twins who are both played by the same actress (including a poor quality split-screen effect for the one scene where they appear together), one of whom pervs on Jason King when he is changing his clothes (a complete reversal of the usual situation when Jason King is involved); and a a computer that can be trained to write novels in the style of Jason King by feeding in all his 'real' (that is, real within the confines of the TV show) novels, thus anticipating modern computer 'machine learning' (a.k.a. 'Artificial Intelligence') by about 50 years.
The combination of all these different elements makes for a completely ludicrous hour of television, but it is a lot of fun and Delgado is a great comic foil for Wyngarde, once again demonstrating what a versatile and underrated actor he really was.
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