I know this is the last movie seen thread but on occasion television shows have been mentioned and Jason King has been taking up most of my rationed video entertainment time of late.
For those not familiar with the character, he started off in the ITC series Department S and is possibly more famous for being partially the inspiration for Austin Powers.
He is a flamboyant dandy and bon viveur and the author of a series of internationally famous best selling books featuring a character called Mark Caine who is essentially himself (or is he?).
He is also a notorious ladies man which is the source of much of the ironic humour of the show as he is played by the delightfully camp and clearly homosexual Peter Wyngarde (Bill Bryson didn't get the joke, nor did the Judge when poor Pete's career was destroyed by an indiscretion in a public convenience).
In Department S he was frequently called in to use his creative mind and frequently his glass jaw to assist in solving 'unsolvable' cases for Interpol but in the spin off series he is trying to leave that behind, though he is frequently roped in against his will and better judgment to assist the police, and the secret services of the many nations he visits (usually via stock footage).
The episode Wanna buy a television series? is a particularly playful episode.
It starts with the typical Jason King set up of showing the audience a set of bad guys setting up a highly improbable scheme to get their hands on some stolen goods but then we find out that it's all Jason in a media tycoon's office trying to sell the idea of a Mark Caine television series (which looks and plays exactly like the Jason King television series).
As it's already been established that Mark Caine and Jason King are both means for making each other look as 'fancy' as possible Peter plays both in exactly the same way. To complicate the issue further much of Jason King's background details (including the Mark Caine character) were actually invented by Peter himself who dressed the same way in real life and had a very similar background.
As Jason describes the fade out to adverts in the Mark Caine script it happens in the Jason King show, when the tycoon suggests a series of alterations to the story they happen in the show (he suggests an assistant for Caine at one point which starts off as a square jawed white American, then becomes a streetwise black guy and finally a Chinese man and as Jason considers his options the actors change back and forth without any warning to the audience).
It's a really early example (1971) of the sort of format breaking metafictional risk taking that would later show up in Moonlighting, Buffy, The X-Files, Stargate and numerous other shows.
It's also a clever piece of self satire.