Peter Wyngarde Peter Wyngarde Peter Wyngarde (23 August 1927 – 15 January 2018) was a British actor best known for playing the character Jason King, a bestselling novelist turned sleuth, in two television series: "Department S" (1969–70) and "Jason King" (1971–72). His flamboyant dress sense and stylish performances led to popular success, and he was considered a style icon in Britain and elsewhere in the early 1970s; Mike Myers credited Wyngarde with inspiring the character Austin Powers. Peter Wyngarde's date and place of birth, his birth name, and his parents' nationalities and occupations are all disputed. According to his own account, he
1970s in television or social. "Roots", a multi-part miniseries that ran on a number of consecutive nights in early 1977, proved to be a huge hit in the ratings and thus paved the way for others of its kind like "Shogun" and "The Thorn Birds". The variety show received its last hurrah during this decade. Popular during the 1950s and 1960s, variety shows carried on in the 1970s with "The Carol Burnett Show". With a repertory company that included Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner, the veterans' series continued to be successful and ran well into the mid-1970s. NBC aired a variety