Public Eye: The ABC Years

Public Eye, which ran from 1965 to 1975, is about as far removed from the world of the adventure TV series we’ve been discussing recently as any program could possibly be. It represents a very different but equally interesting side of British television in the 60s and 70s.

The series was originally produced by Britain’s ABC Television. In the late 60s a shakeup of British commercial television saw ABC merged with Associated-Rediffusion to form Thames Television, which continued production of the series.

The idea of the series was to do a completely unglamorous private eye series. And Frank Marker is about as unglamorous a hero as could be imagined. Public Eye is determinedly seedy. Frank Marker is a very decent guy but his life is as far removed as could be imagined from the popular image of the private eye. He’s a rather battered and not overly successful middle-aged private enquiry agent. He doesn’t drive a sports car and he isn’t surrounded by beautiful women. His cases do not involve the international jet set. He does credit checks, divorce work, looks for missing dogs and strayed husbands, and in fact takes any work he can get.

It might sound dull but in fact it’s a thoroughly engaging and very entertaining program. What it lacks in action it makes up for in superb writing and great acting.

Much of the success of this series can be attributed to the performance of Alfred Burke as Frank Marker. Burke was enthusiastic about the series right from the start, and was particularly keen to play a very unheroic and unglamorous private eye. Burke brings this shabby but oddly engaging character vividly to life. Frank Marker’s profession can be sordid at times but we never lose sympathy for the character. Unheroic he might be, but he combines this with a quiet strength of character. Marker has his moral standards. There are lines he will not cross, and he sticks to his principles with a great deal of stubbornness. To an outsider his job might seem grubby but because he does stick to those principles he has surprising reserves of self-confidence. He is down-at-heel but he is not a loser. When things get tough he doesn’t give up. He might bend, but he doesn’t break.

Unfortunately the first three seasons are mostly lost but the remaining four seasons starting with the 1969 season survive in full. 

Network DVD have released the five episodes still in existence from the first three seasons in a two-disc set called Public Eye: The ABC Years.

With only five of the 41 ABC episodes surviving it’s frustratingly difficult to judge whether the tone of the series differed in any substantial way from the later Thames seasons. This is particularly frustrating since in its later years the series did undergo several subtle changes in direction. 

Certainly Frank Marker seems just as shabby and his cases seem just as commonplace as in the later seasons. 

The two surviving first season episodes, Nobody Kills Santa Claus and The Morning Wasn't So Hot, suggest that at this early stage Marker may have been slightly more of a tough guy character. In The Morning Wasn't So Hot he takes on a case involving prostitution and organised crime and takes a few risks that the later Marker might have been less inclined to take, although when things start to get rough he certainly backs off rather hurriedly. This episode deals with runaways from the provinces who are “befriended” at the railway station by smooth-talking ponce Mason. Frank Marker is hired to find one of these runaways but Mason has sold her to big-time operators. By the standards of 1965 this episode is extraordinarily frank in confronting some rather sleazy subject matter.

The second season sees Frank relocating to Birmingham. Frustratingly, since the final episode of season one and the first episode of season two do not survive, we have no way of knowing what prompted the move.

The two survivors from season two both deal with divorce cases. In those days divorce work was the bread-and-butter of a private detective. It was boring and routine but it paid the bills. These two episodes illustrate this show’s remarkable ability to make the most mundane details of Marker’s work into totally engrossing television. In Don't Forget You're Mine a woman hires Frank to find her husband. He finds that there are some very important things she has neglected to tell him.

In Works with Chess, Not with Life, Marker exposes a phony compensation claim by a woman complaining of being poisoned with bad mushrooms at an hotel, then gets mixed up in a case of an adulterous doctor. Marker ends up working for three different clients, including both the husband and the wife.

The sole surviving third season episode is The Bromsgrove Venus. This finds Marker once again caught in the middle of a domestic drama, with both the wife and the husband seeking to employ his services. A photographic competition is the catalyst for the drama. The photographs are on display in the Bromsgrove Public Library, with the winning photograph being a nude study of the Chief Librarian’s wife. The situation is much more complicated that it seems to be. Marker as so often finds himself having to function more as a marriage counsellor and psychologist than as a private detective.

Public Eye remains one of the best private eye series ever made. The ABC Years set provides some fascinating glimpses of its early years. Extras include a brief contemporary interview with star Alfred Burke. Highly recommended.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, season one (1979)

The 1979 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century TV series was kicked off in 1979 with a TV-movie that ended up getting a theatrical release. Producer Glen A. Larson had been responsible for the 1970s Battlestar Galactica series which had also been kicked off by a theatrical release of the pilot episode.

The Buck Rogers character had originally surfaced in the 1920s in Philip Francis Nolan’s novel Armageddon 2419 AD. The novel spawned both a comic strip and a 1939 movie serial as well as an early 50s TV series.

The series has little in common with any of the earlier incarnations of Buck Rogers apart from the basic idea of a 20th century American who gets accidently deep-frozen and wakes up 500 years later. In this case Buck (played by Gil Gerard) is a 1980s US astronaut. How he became deep-frozen is never properly explained but when he does awake he finds himself on board a gigantic starship. This is puzzling but he starts to get really worried when he discovers that this starship does not come from Earth. He gets really really worried when he realises he isn’t dreaming and this is actually happening.

When he gets to Earth he finds that the 25th century is very different from the world he remembers. A nuclear war in the 1990s almost destroyed the planet and the survivors now take their orders from a council of all-wise and benevolent computers. The Earth is protected by a mysterious shield that is never explained, and by fighter spaceships under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Wilma Deering (Erin Gray) who will naturally become the love interest for the hero.

The first episode of the series proper, The Planet of the Slave Girls, was (for some obscure reason) also feature-length. As usual with episodes of a TV series extended over two episodes it has some pacing problems. It’s still, in its own way, kind of fun. The Earth in the 25th century is dependent on agricultural planets like Vistula 3. Vistula 3’s governor, played by Roddy McDowell, has allowed slavery to flourish on his planet. Now slave-dealer Kaleen (Jack Palance), who has gained a Messiah-like following, is about to lead the people of Vistula 3 in an invasion of Earth. Why a wealthy slave-dealer would want to risk everything on such a venture is never explained.

Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering must foil Kaleen’s plans and save the Earth.

This episode has most of the flaws typical of 1960 and 1970s TV sci-fi. Whole planets seem to have populations of no more than a few hundred people and the planet Vistula 3 is reminiscent of a very bad Star Trek episode, with people running around in costumes that look like they were left over from an epic movie on the Roman Empire.

Glen A. Larson seems to have been a very film believer in the virtue of two-part episodes. While they can be effective they can also tend to drag a little. Episodes 6 and 7 give us yet another two-parter, The Plot To Kill a City, involving a brotherhood of political assassins most of whom seem to have some kind of super power.

The TV series mercifully drops most of the post-nuclear war nonsense that made the original TV-movie rather more tedious than it needed to be.

Whenever it tries to take itself seriously it falls flat on its face, but luckily most of the time it is content to be silly fun entertainment and as such it works fairly well. The bits that are most reminiscent of the 1939 Buck Rogers movie serial are the bits that are most successful. A nice touch is the inclusion of 71-year-old Buster Crabbe in the supporting cast. Buster Crabbe was one of the all-time great screen action heroes and had played the part of Buck Rogers in the 1939 serial (and he’d also played Flash Gordon).

The special effects are very 1970s but for a TV series they’re generally pretty good, although there are a few very obvious and very bad matte paintings.

On the whole it’s reasonably enjoyable in a silly 70s way.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century has been released on DVD and is readily available.

Lord Peter Wimsey - Murder Must Advertise

Between 1972 and 1975 the BBC made television adaptations of five of the Lord Peter Wimsey murder mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers. They are all thoroughly enjoyable and are fine examples of just how good BBC television once was.

The casting of Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter was just about ideal although Carmichael was perhaps just a little too old for the role. Fortunately he is so perfect in ever other way that this minor quibble can be easily overlooked.

Sayers’ 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise was the third of the five stories to be adapted. Lord Peter goes undercover in this tale, obtaining a position as a copywriter in an advertising agency. His predecessor in the position, a Mr Victor Dean, was killed in a most unfortunate accident, meeting his death in a fall down the spiral staircase connecting the two floors occupied by the agency. Mr Dean left behind him a letter addressed to the Mr Pym, the agency’s managing director, stating that undesirable things were happening in the office, things that could have very serious consequences. Mr Pym was sufficiently alarmed to procure the services of a private detective to investigate the late Mr Dean’s allegations. That is how Lord Peter comes to be working as an advertising copywriter. 

He soon discovers that Mr Dean had not been especially popular, He also learns that Mr Dean had been involved with a very dangerous and very notorious social set, centred around the younger members of the de Momerie family. This set represents the wildest of the Bright Young Things.

Wimsey’s brother-in-law, Chief Inspector Parker, is also interested in the de Momerie set. He has reason to believe they are involved in cocaine smuggling on a large scale.

The plot is fiendishly complicated with various romantic jealousies being possible motives

as well as the dope smuggling angle so Wimsey faces quite a task in unravelling this mystery. The solution to cracking the dope smuggling operation involves the kinds of immensely complicated criminal conspiracies that you will only ever find in detective stories of the golden age.

The one plot point that is somewhat unconvincing is Wimsey’s attempt to make the criminals believe he is actually two people, Lord Peter Wimsey and Lord Peter’s disreputable (and wholly imaginary) cousin Death Breedon. It is utterly inconceivable that two cousins could look so completely identical as to be indistinguishable. It’s one of those plot devices, like disguise, that were once immensely popular in crime fiction but now seem impossibly far-fetched.

Fans of golden age detective fiction are rather sharply divided on the subject of Lord Peter Wimsey. To some readers he seems impossibly affected and they are further irritated by the fact that he seems to be an expert on every subject under the sun. Other readers are delighted by the very things that annoy his critics. I personally like him as a character, and Ian Carmichael gives him a warmth that may be enough to win over those who are not great fans of the Wimsey of the books.

For an early 1970s BBC production Murder Must Advertise looks surprisingly expansive. While much of the action takes place in Pym’s advertising agency there are more outdoor scenes than you expect in this era. 

The period clothes are a major highlight. The men’s clothing is actually even more colourful and outrageous than the women’s, with Lord Peter wearing some truly astonishing suits. He also spends an inordinate amount of time in a harlequin costume, and Carmichael manages to play several serious scenes successfully while wearing this outlandish outfit.

 The BBC also seem to have splurged on 1930s cars for this production. It all looks magnificent.

This production takes a remarkably jaundiced view of the world of the Bright Young Things. Rather than being portrayed as glamorous and liberated they come across as shallow, cruel, self-indulgent, selfish and annoyingly self-destructive. I personally found it to be rather refreshing that the show is willing to do such a hatchet job on a generally over-glamourised social set.

Acorn Media’s DVD release includes part of an interview with Ian Carmichael which is spread over the DVDs of the five 1970s Lord Peter Wimsey serials. 

Murder Must Advertise looks terrific and is splendid fun. Absolutely top-hole. Highly recommended.

The XYY Man, season one (1976)

The XYY Man was a British espionage TV series made by Granada. The first season which aired in 1976 comprised a single three-part story while the second season consisted of a further ten episodes. The premise sounds quite promising. William ‘Spider’ Scott (Stephen Yardley) is a cat burglar. He spent the last year of his most recent prison sentence at a kind of criminological research facility attached to a prison farm. You see Spider has an interesting genetic mutation, an extra Y chromosome. This abnormality predisposes a person to criminal tendencies and makes it very unlikely that the subject, once launched on a life of crime, will ever reform. The British intelligence services have taken an interest in this criminological research and they have decided that such a man, especially one who is a skilled cat-burglar, might prove to be very useful to them.

At least that was the popular psychological theory at the time, but psychological theories are basically intellectual fads and that particular fad is now out of fashion.

Whether this psychological theory has any basis in reality or not the premise of this series  does seem to have considerable potential. An unreformable super-criminal recruited against his will by the intelligence services - that should be the ideal set-up for an entertaining action-filled spy thriller series. Unfortunately The XYY Man is a little short on action, and to be brutally honest it's somewhat lacking in the entertainment department.

So what went wrong? In this case that’s an easy question to answer. The XYY Man is more in the style of those incredibly tedious British political thrillers that started to infest the nation’s TV screens during the 1970. It takes itself very very seriously, it’s very grim, it’s overflowing with fashionable cynicism and it has a political agenda. A political agenda that it is quite happy to use as a bludgeon.

Another problem is that the show’s most intriguing element, the genetic abnormality that predisposes Spider towards crime, gets completely forgotten along the way. In fact, for a criminal who is incapable of reforming, Spider shows an amazing determination to go straight. His determination to stay on the straight and narrow is so string that it undercuts the program’s whole premise. Of course the problem here is that if the writers had followed up on the XYY idea it would have weakened their political agenda, which demands that Spider be seen as a victim of oppressive police officers and oppressive cynical and corrupt intelligence service chiefs. 

It’s probably fair at this stage to indulge in a small digression on the subject of spy TV series. Such series can quite obviously be divided into two schools, the gritty realist school and the glamorous adventure school. They can also be divided in another way, into series where the focus is on the spy, and series where the focus is on the political machinations of the spymasters. On the whole (with a few notable exceptions) I prefer the glamorous adventure school to the gritty realist school. I also much prefer those series that focus on the spy rather than those that focus on the spymasters and the politics. On both counts The XYY Man falls into the categories that I personally am not especially fond of, and this is undoubtedly a major reason for my negative response to this series. If you’re a spy fan who loves the gritty realist approach and the focus on spymasters and politics, if for example you’re a big fan of series like The Sandbaggers and Smiley’s People, then you might well enjoy The XYY Man a great deal more than I did.

The three-part first season of The XYY Man doesn’t really have quite enough plot to sustain a three-part story. Spider gets out of prison and is hoping to start a job working for an art dealer. During his prison sentence Spider had acquired a degree in art history, specialising in Indian antiquities. The evil corrupt and cynical operative from the security services, Colonel Fairfax, makes Spider an offer. Ten thousand pounds for a relatively simple burglary on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. Of course if he’s caught they will deny all knowledge of his activities, but ten thousand quid for two hours’ work is still good money. Spider refuses the offer, so evil corrupt and cynical Colonel Fairfax persuades the Metropolitan Police to put some pressure on him, and since police officers are naturally oppressive they agree to do so. Eventually Spider accepts Fairfax’s offer. Of course we know that the job is not going to go smoothly and that evil corrupt and cynical security services will set poor old Spider up.

The tricky part of the burglary is that it involves breaking into the Chinese embassy. The Chinese have obtained photographs that compromise a senior South African diplomat who is about to play a major role in negotiations over Rhodesia. For rather obscure reasons the British security services wants to get hold of the negatives, which is the job for which they’ve recruited Spider. Lots of other people, including the South African security services and a group of black Rhodesian guerillas, also want the negatives. This plot provides ample scope for heavy-handed political messages and these follow a pattern that would become all too common in British espionage and political thriller series - the British government is always corrupt and cynical, and the British intelligence services are always the bad guys.

One of the problems with the very downbeat approach used in this series is that it can become just as predictable as the mandatory happy endings of an earlier era of movies and TV. The double-crosses become a little too easy to anticipate.

The series has other problems, problems which would also become increasingly prevalent in British TV. There are no sympathetic characters. The atmosphere is unremittingly sleazy. Any British character who is not working-class is automatically assumed to be either vicious and corrupt or vicious and stupid. The tone is grimly pessimistic.

The pacing is problematical. The whole of the 50-minute first episode is spent on setting the story up in a way that really could have been done in half that time. We don’t get any action at all until the second episode. That would be less of a problem if the time had been spent giving us some reason to care about the characters but alas the characters are two-dimensional and invite very little empathy. 

It’s not all bad news. There’s some action in the second and third episodes and the pacing picks up a little. There’s also considerably more dramatic tension and even a little excitement. There are a couple of genuinely clever plot twists and Spider becomes a somewhat more interesting character.

And while most of the supporting performances are rather one-note Stephen Yardley is reasonably good. I didn’t like Spider very much but I liked him a good deal more any of the other characters. Detective-Sergeant Bulman (Don Henderson), a man obsessed by the thought of putting Spider back behind bars, went on to feature in two spin-off series. Mark Dignam as Colonel Fairfax provides some moments of amusement and is at least cynical in an entertaining way.

Network DVD have released all thirteen episodes from both seasons in a boxed set. The transfers are reasonably good. 

The first season of The XYY Man is definitely not my cup of tea. I’ve yet to sample season two so I have no idea if it would be more to my liking. I can’t recommend the first season but as I mentioned earlier that may have quite a bit to do with my personal tastes in spy fiction. You mileage may of course vary.

The Rockford Files, season one

The Rockford Files was a very successful private eye series that aired on NBC from 1974 to 1980. James Garner played the lead character, Jim Rockford.

What made The Rockford Files unusual for an American private eye series was that Jim Rockford was not a suave glamorous private eye. Rockford is an ex-con and he lives in a trailer. He wears cheap off-the-rack clothes. As American TV private eyes go Rockford is very close to the bottom of the food chain.

This approach had already been used with great success in the British series Public Eye which ran from 1965 to 1975. Frank Marker, the unlikely hero of Public Eye, is also an ex-con and he is also a very down-market and rather seedy private eye. Like Jim Rockford he has an uneasy relationship with the police, being always conscious that a man who has been in prison has to be extraordinarily cautious in dealing with cops. Being an American series The Rockford Files is naturally much more action-orientated although it is notable that Rockford rarely carries a gun.

Jim Rockford prefers to deal with cold cases. Open cases lead to problems with the police. In fact Jim manages to get himself involved in difficulties with the cops no matter what sort of cases he takes on. He’s not the most tactful individual and he has a stubborn streak that leads him to accept cases he’d be better off avoiding.

James Garner is perfectly cast in this series. He captures the rather seedy spirit of Jim Rockford perfectly. Rockford would like to be a glamorous PI but he doesn’t have the money and he doesn’t have the class. No matter how hard he tries he looks cheap. That’s not to say he’s not an admirable character is his own way. His stubbornness makes him an effective detective and while he’d hate to be thought of as a soft touch the fact remains that he finds it difficult to turn down a case when the client has a convincing sob story. And once a case captures his interest nothing will persuade him to let it go.

The series is played fairly straight but with some definite comic overtones, and that’s a mix that is ideally suited to James Garner’s acting style. Garner is adept at trading wise-cracks but underneath the brassy and cheap exterior he is able to convince us that Rockford has a certain integrity, that he has more substance than we might think at first glance.

While Rockford very rarely carries a gun (he claims to be terrified of them) there’s no shortage of action. So far, judging by the season 1 episodes I’ve watched, the action sequences are more imaginatively staged than you generally expect in a TV series. The pilot episode features a duel between a man on the ground with a handgun and a guy in an aircraft with a machine-gun. Another early episode features a rather witty car chase on a golf course. Tall Woman in Red Wagon has action scenes in a cemetery. In yet another episode there’s a very clever car chase in a car park.

It seems like some real effort was put into giving this series a distinctive flavour, with the slightly offbeat action sequences being part of this strategy. The fact that Rockford doesn’t carry a gun proves to be an advantage, forcing the writers and the directors to come up with action scenes that don’t involve gunplay.

The series features, as you would expect, quite a few glamorous female guest stars. Rockford though is not really much of a womaniser. The impression we’re given is that he has enough trouble dealing with day-to-day life without getting into constant romantic entanglements. Ex-girlfriends do show up in several episodes but they generally spell trouble.

By 1974 you could be forgiven for thinking that the television private eye genre had been mined for every possible ounce of ore but The Rockford Files manages to feel reasonably fresh. 

This series is readily available on DVD in most markets.

Recommended.

The Avengers - The Forget-Me-Knot

I’ve recently bought a book on the Tara King era of The Avengers. It inspired me to watch the episode that introduced her, The Forget-Me-Knot.

The Forget-Me-Knot is of course best remembered as Mrs Peel’s farewell episode. It had a curious production history. It actually belongs to the final 1968 season. It was made months after Diana Rigg had left the series, by which time Linda Thorson had not only been signed as her replacement but had actually filmed a couple of episodes. Then someone got the idea of an episode that would give Mrs Peel a proper send-off and also act as an introduction to the two new Season 6 characters, Tara King and Mother.

According to some sources Brian Clemens cobbled the whole thing together from an episode from the previous season that had been half-completed and then abandoned. He could only get Diana Rigg for four days’ shooting (and he could only get her at all rather reluctantly). 

The circumstances must have been a little embarrassing for both Diana Rigg and Linda Thorson. Thorson was nervous enough in her first few episodes (even a more experienced actress would have been somewhat daunted by stepping into Diana Rigg’s shoes) and having to appear onscreen with Rigg would hardly have helped her confidence.

While all fans of The Avengers have a soft spot for this episode for the closing scene with Mrs Peel, as an actual Avengers story it has a rather poor reputation. While the plot is nothing special it does have some nice touches. I like the fact that the amnesia-inducing drug is only partially effective, leaving its victims with confused snippets of memory. That actually gives Clemens the opportunity to make more inventive use of memory, both as a plot device and as a vehicle for gags. And since it’s Mrs Peel’s farewell episode it’s appropriate that the whole episode is about memory.

This episode also has an amazing number of fight scenes, with most being quite clever. I love Tara King taking out one of the bad guys by slugging him with her handbag, having had the forethought to place a housebrick inside it first. It’s not the way Mrs Peel or Mrs Gale would have done it, but it works and it immediately establishes that Tara is not going to be an Emma Peel clone or a Cathy Gale clone.

I think Linda Thorson acquits herself quite well. As the season wore on she steadily improved but it’s already clear that she has potential. The concept of the character was that she would be softer and more feminine than her predecessors, which certainly gave Thorson a challenge since she obviously also needed to make the character a convincingly formidable secret agent.  

The script might not have been one of Brian Clemens’ finest moments but The Forget-Me-Knot gets by on its visual style. It was on the whole a fairly successful attempt to link the final two eras of The Avengers.

And of course it leaves us with a puzzle that has intrigued fans for years - what exactly does Mrs Peel whisper in Steed’s ear?

The Forget-Me-Knot is included in the Region 4 boxed set of the 1967 season although it was actually first screened in 1968 as part of the following season.

Special Branch, season 3

Produced by Britain’s Thames TV, Special Branch was a somewhat unconventional police drama series. It ran for four seasons from 1969 to 1974, undergoing a major overhaul with the third season in 1973. This review will focus on that extremely influential third season.

The series differed from the general run of cop shows because it reflected the unusual role of the real-life Special Branch (as it then existed). Special Branch officers were police officers, and in fact formed part of the Metropolitan Police, but they worked in conjunction with the security and intelligence services. 

The duties of Special Branch could range from arresting spies to protecting VIPs to border security. They did background checks on people in line for appointment to sensitive jobs and they collected intelligence on subversive organisations. They were not exactly spy-hunters, that was left to the Security Service (popularly known as MI5), but they were in effect the enforcement arm of that service. 

Mid-life revamps were a common practice in those days but very few series ever underwent a revamp as drastic as Special Branch received in 1973. The entire cast was replaced. Even more importantly, Thames TV’s Euston Films division took over production of the show and in the process changed the face of British television.

Prior to this British TV shows were usually shot on videotape with location shooting done on film (which accounts for the sometimes jarring difference in picture quality between inside scenes and outside scenes), and most shooting was done in the studio. Euston Films changed all that, with everything done on film and on location. The revolutionary nature of the change did not become fully apparent until the next series they tackled, The Sweeney, but it was Special Branch that paved the way.

The familiar faces of the first two seasons all disappeared. The central character was now Chief Inspector Alan Craven (George Sewell). The action centres almost entirely on Craven with the other characters playing distinctly subsidiary roles. Craven’s sergeant, Detective Sergeant North (Roger Rowland), is a rather low-key character and is kept in the background. 

While the third season is dominated by Craven some spice is added by the introduction of Chief Inspector Tom Haggerty (Patrick Mower) as a semi-regular character. Haggerty gives the series a much better balance, thanks to Patrick Mower’s characteristically colourful performance. Haggerty is much more abrasive and mercurial and provides the perfect foil to George Sewell’s much more dour Craven. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Sewell’s performance. He was a fine actor and he makes Craven an interesting and complex character, a man who appears on the surface to be a by-the-book officer but is actually quite willing to bend the rules when it suits him. Haggerty gives the impression of being more of a young maverick cop but in actuality he is often more inclined than Craven to go by the book. Craven and Haggerty have an uneasy relationship but it’s one that produces results. The most effective third season episodes are certainly the ones featuring Haggerty as well as Craven.

At times it has to be said that Craven shows some disturbing bleeding heart tendencies, an ominous sign of things to come in British television. Thankfully Haggerty shows no such tendencies.

Compared to the first two seasons Special Branch now became slightly more action-oriented. While the visual approach adopted by Euston Films was revolutionary the series does become in some ways more of a typical police series, focusing more on police work on the streets than on the political machinations that were so much a feature of the first two seasons. The cases are still the kinds of cases that Special Branch would deal with, involving security risks rather than bank robberies, but with a much greater emphasis on violent political crime such as terrorism.

It is however a matter of degree - season 3 also features plenty of episodes that focus on routine investigations. The investigations might be routine but thanks to fine writing, good acting and imaginative directing ensure that it never becomes dull television.

The series is typical of 1970s British police series in combining glamour with seediness. The episode Threat has Craven and Haggerty moving in the world of movie stars but in the following episode, The Other Man, Craven is investigating the squalid private life of a suburban general practitioner. Police officers have to do things that are sometimes unpleasant and often boring and the series doesn’t try to avoid these realities.

Hostage and Blueprint for Murder deal with terrorism and political violence and they end season 3 on a relatively action-filled note.

Some of their investigations may lead to the discovery of major spy rings while others will lead nowhere. That’s the nature of the job. Sometimes there’s danger, sometimes there’s excitement, sometimes there’s frustration and sometimes there’s just plain boredom. The writing on this series is so good that the investigations that provide Craven with the most frustration and the most boredom are often the ones that provide the viewer with the most entertainment. 

It's noticeable that compared to the first two seasons the third season suffers from a subtle change in political orientation. The first two seasons try very hard to show things from the perspective of police officers who are doing their jobs in the most politically neutral way they can. The third season occasionally makes the mistake of taking a more overt political stance. This actually makes for less interesting and more predictable television. It's only a slight and very subtle change but it's a disturbing foretaste of the future. 

Personally I do slightly prefer the earlier seasons where the emphasis is very much on the difficulties faced by Special Branch officers trying to do their jobs despite political interference, bureaucratic power plays and an often tense relationship with the Security Service. Having said that season 3 is still very high-quality television.

All four seasons of Special Branch have been released on DVD in Region 2, and seasons 3 and 4 have been released in Region 1. In Region 4 only the first two seasons have been released.