a 1972 Columbo theatrical double-header

I love murder stories with theatrical or movie studio backgrounds and the second season of Columbo provides two such tales which makes these two episodes a perfect double feature for me.

The fourth season two episode Dagger of the Mind could have been called Columbo Goes to London. Never have I seen so much gratuitous use of travelogue-type footage of the tourist spots of London. This is also a very under-appreciated episode - there are several very important elements that many people seem to overlook in this story.

Everyone’s favourite shabby detective is in London, as a guest of Scotland Yard, to address a police conference. He finds himself caught up in a theatrical murder.

Fading stars Nicholas Frame (Richard Basehart) and his wife Lillian Stanhope (Honor Blackman) are about to open in Macbeth in the West End when the wealthy aristocrat putting up the money for the play is killed. Since this is Columbo and the murderer is always revealed right at the start there’s no harm in revealing that our two has-been actors are involved. The murder has been arranged to look like an accident but Columbo just happens to be on the scene and he’s immediately suspicious.

What follows is the usual battle of wills as Columbo tries to persuade the killers to make a mistake so he can prove his case.

The first important thing to note is that Frame and his wife are appearing in Macbeth. Just like the protagonists in the play the protagonists of Dagger of the Mind find that ambition has its price and it’s a price that keeps on increasing. There is one plot point that has attracted criticism but once you remember the Macbeth connection it makes sense - once you decide that ambition overrides everything else you have jumped aboard a roller coaster that you can’t get off.

Another point sometimes overlooked relates to Richard Basehart’s performance. He is not supposed to be playing a great Shakespearian actor. He is playing an ageing ham who thinks he is a great Shakespearian actor and thinks he sees his opportunity to prove it, and to prove his critics wrong. In fact both Nicholas and Lillian are well past their prime and this production is their last chance to rekindle their fading careers. With this in mind it’s clear that Basehart knows exactly what he’s doing with his performance and he nails Nicholas Frame’s character superbly. Blackman is equally good and the two of them chew every piece of scenery they can get their teeth into.

Adding to the fun is the great Wilfred Hyde-White as the butler Tanner.

The fifth episode, Requiem for a Falling Star, can be seen as a kind of follow-up to Dagger of the Mind dealing as it does with murder in Hollywood. Another link between the two episodes is that both deal with stars whose careers are on the downslide. 

Fading star Nora Chandler (Anne Baxter) is the murderess but she kills the wrong person. She meant to kill sleazy gossip columnist Jerry Parks (Mel Ferrer) who is blackmailing but by mistake she kills her faithful secretary and friend Jean Davis (Pippa Scott). Lieutenant Columbo happens to be one of Nora’s biggest fans and he hates to think she might be a murderess but the evidence seems to point that way.

This is a rather untypical Columbo episode. As usual it’s an inverted detective story but with several very interesting variations (I won’t spilt the episode by giving any hints as the nature of these variations).

Like all Columbo episodes it’s pretty scrupulously fair play. We see all the same clues that Columbo sees although of course we might not always interpret them correctly.

Anne Baxter gives a spirited performance as the formidable Nora. 

Columbo never pretended to be a realistic cop show and always works best when Columbo is up against formidable adversaries played by actors who are willing to go over-the-top. These two episodes qualify on both counts. Dagger of the Mind is more fun thanks to the extraordinary overacting of Richard Basehart and Honor Blackman but Requiem for a Falling Star is more ambitious and demonstrates what could be achieved when the basic formula of the series was tweaked just a little. Both episodes are fine entertainment.

Rivals of Sherlock Holmes - The Case of the Mirror of Portugal

I posted recently about the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes episode The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds dealing with a delightfully colourful rogue. The series featured a couple of episodes dealing with an even more dastardly rogue and swindler - Horace Dorrington, the hero (or rather anti-hero) of Arthur Morrison’s superb 1897 short story collection The Dorrington Deed-Box. The Case of the Mirror of Portugal (first screened in October 1971) shows Dorrington at his villainous best (or worst).

Horace Dorrington (Peter Vaughan) is a private detective, the principal of the Dorrington and Hicks agency (although we never actually hear anything of Hicks and we suspect he may not exist). An impoverished French charcoal-burner, Jacques Bouvier (Michael Forrest) enlists Dorrington’s help to retrieve an item that was stolen from him by his cousin Leon Bouvier (Oscar Quitak). The item is a diamond. A very large diamond. A very large and very valuable diamond known as the Mirror of Portugal that was once part of the French Crown Jewels. It might seem very unlikely that a humble French charcoal-burner would have possessed this fabulous jewel but Dorrington finds his story to be strangely plausible. In fact Dorrington is convinced that the story is true.

The first order of business for Dorrington is to rid himself of Jacques Bouvier as a client. Dorrington intends to retrieve the diamond but he also intends to keep all the proceeds to himself. Dorrington is a very competent private detective but he is also, alas, a very dishonest one. He is in point of fact a thorough scoundrel.

Actually getting hold of the diamond should be child’s play for Dorrington. He’s up against rank amateurs who have foolish ideas about fair play. Or at least that’s what the villainous private detective thinks.

Julian Bond did a fine job with the adaptation. It’s a wonderfully clever little tale with some very nice plot twists. Mike Vardy’s direction is very competent. 

As I mentioned in my piece on The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds this 1971 series was made in the style of British television of the 60s, in other words shot almost entirely in the studio, although this particular episode does include a very brief sequence shot on location (a very unusual feature for this series). 

Paul Eddington is almost unrecognisable at first as a diamond merchant with very flexible ethics. Eddington is remembered for his roles in sitcoms like The Good Life and Yes, Minister but he was actually quite a versatile actor. He was memorably slimy and sinister as Strand in Special Branch and The Case of the Mirror of Portugal gives him a chance to be rather shady and sneaky, which he does rather well.

Kenneth Colley as Farrish and Petronella Barker as Miss Parrot, Dorrington’s two long-suffering assistants, provide competent support.

It’s Peter Vaughan’s performance however that dominates this episode. Vaughan was a marvelous actor who could really go over-the-top when required to do so. In this episode he does so to spectacular effect. He plays Dorrington as a moustache-twirling villain straight out of Victorian melodrama. It’s absolutely the right approach.

It’s not just Vaughan’s acting that brings to mind classic Victorian melodrama - everything about this episode is done in that style and it works to perfection.

It’s the combination of an excellent adaptation of a terrific story and Peter Vaughan’s epic scenery-chewing as Dorrington that makes this a superbly entertaining piece of television. Highly recommended.

In fact both seasons of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (available on Region 2 DVD from Network) can be very warmly recommended.

The Professionals, season 1 (1977)

The Professionals marked a change of pace for Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell. They had enjoyed enormous success with series like The Avengers and The New Avengers - witty and stylish action adventure series with no pretensions to realism. In 1977 they launched a new series for London Weekend Television - a series that was determinedly and self-consciously in the mould of the increasingly popular Gritty Realism school of television drama. The series was The Professionals which was a major hit, running for five seasons from 1977 to 1983.

The Professionals deals with CI5, an elite (and wholly imaginary) British counter-intelligence agency specialising in anti-terrorist operations. CI5 is run by the hardbitten George Cowley (Gordon Jackson) and the focus of the series is on Cowley and his two top agents, Doyle (Martin Shaw) and Bodie (Lewis Collins)

The Professionals aimed not only to be gritty and realistic but also reflected the increasingly violent and cynical tone of British television in the late 70s. The body counts in some episodes are quite alarmingly high!

Gordon Jackson had been best known for playing a butler in Upstairs, Downstairs so he might have seemed an unlikely choice to play the ruthless Cowley. Jackson was however a versatile actor and he relished the opportunity to play a bit of a heavy.

London Weekend Television had asked Clemens to create a buddy series for them and that’s exactly what he gave them. Doyle and Bodie spend as much time trading wisecracks as they do blowing away terrorists. Fortunately most of the scripts (for the first season at least - I haven’t ventured any further than that so far) provide them with the right sort of dialogue so the formula works.

One of the things that Brian Clemens felt strongly about in regard to this series was that the emphasis should be on action and on the relationship between the three principals. Overt political content of social commentary was to be avoided since such elements would slow down the action and also date the program - there’s nothing more tedious than yesterday’s hot-button political issue.

When Clemens was asked how much background research he did on counter-intelligence and anti-terrorist agencies prior to creating the series he cheerfully replied that he had done none at all. Not that it matters - this is an action adventure TV series not a documentary and Clemens always understood that entertainment was the name of the game.

Old Dog With New Tricks was intended to be the debut episode and it gives us some of the background on CI5 and its peculiar structure (there are no ranks) and its powers (which are in practice virtually unlimited). It’s essentially an anti-terrorist squad and despite  Clemens’ having done no background research it’s a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the kinds of paramilitary anti-terrorist squads that have since become common. We also get a little background on Doyle and Bodie. Doyle is an ex-cop while Bodie is ex-military. The story is somewhat far-fetched. IRA terrorists steal a shipment of arms from an army base only to be hijacked in turn by a criminal gang with spectacular plans to spring a convict from prison.

Private Madness, Public Danger was the first episode to go to air (although this had definitely not been Clemens’ intention). It was a bizarre choice to launch what was intended to be a tough realistic no-nonsense series - this episode has a plot so far-fetched that it could easily have served as an episode of The New Avengers (of course that might have been the reason London Weekend Television picked it as the debut episode). Well-meaning idealists (and there’s nobody George Cowley hates more than well-meaning idealists) have decided to force the British Government to outlaw biological warfare - by launching a campaign of biological warfare. They are going to lace the nation’s drinking waters with hallucinogenic drugs. This is one episode that has not aged well.

Where the Jungle Ends, like Old Dog With New Tricks, is also outrageous enough to have been a New Avengers episode apart from the much higher level of violence. A team of mercenaries is conducting their own private war, in the heart of England. This episode gives us a bit more background on Bodie - it’s implied that he’s not only ex-military but possibly an ex-mercenary himself. These two episodes are quite over-the-top but both were written by Brian Clemens and if you can suspend your disbelief they’re quite fun. It’s amusing seeing David Suchet (Hercule Poirot himself) as a hardbitten and rather psychotic mercenary.

Long Shot (written by Anthony Read)  involves a plan to assassinate a former US Secretary of State, or at least that’s what CI5 thinks they’re dealing with. Roger Lloyd Pack gets to overact outrageously as the suave but ruthless assassin Ramos. Killer with a Long Arm (written by Brian Clemens) also deals with a foreign assassin operating on British soil, an assassin with a very special gun (and a very special target).

I thought the premise of Heroes was a bit unlikely - I can’t imagine the British government deporting a US Senator no matter how much they might disapprove of him. Clearly there are others who disapprove of him a good deal more - they intend to assassinate him. Cowley’s problem is to keep the Senator alive long enough to expel him from the country. One of the slight weaknesses of this series is the overuse of one particular plot element - the bad guys systematically killing all the witnesses to their crime. This episode makes full use of this idea and it becomes just a little predictable.

Everest Was Also Conquered begins with a prologue. It is 1953, the year of the Coronation (and the year Mount Everest was climbed for the first time, hence the title). A woman, a witness under police protection, is murdered by being hurled out of a window. A quarter of a century later a death-bed confession re-opens the case. The trail is well and truly cold but Cowley is determined to get a result. And yes, you guessed it, we again have the bad guys trying to kill all the witnesses!

The Female Factor is much more interesting. A call girl is murdered. She had tried to contact Doyle shortly before her death. Doyle takes this rather personally and involves himself in the case, even though this is certainly not a case for CI5. Cowley is about to give Doyle a dressing-down for wasting time of such a trivial matter when an alarming discovery is made. A sheet of notepaper with a telephone number is found in the dead woman’s flat. The telephone number is the Prime Minister’s direct line. Now this is definitely a CI5 case - only a handful of people have that phone number and all of them are very important people with access to very important secrets. 

The political incorrectness of this series is absolutely off the scale. There’s more political incorrectness packed into one episode than you’ll find in an entire season of The Sweeney.

The extraordinary ruthlessness of CI5 may also come as something of a shock. George Cowley really doesn’t care what methods he has to use to get results. There is nothing that is off limits.

What makes The Professionals interesting is that it tries on the surface to be a hardboiled and brutally realistic crime/espionage series and in many ways it succeeds in being just that but then on occasions some of the story lines really do stretch credibility. That’s not by any means a fatal weakness and even when the stories are a little incredible they’re highly entertaining.

I wasn’t a great fan of this series when I first encountered it but revisiting it now I’m finding it to be rather enjoyable indeed. Recommended.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes - The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds

Everyone loves a good villain. The best villains of all (for entertainment value) are either diabolical criminal masterminds or brilliant swindlers. Swindlers are fun because they’re clever and they can appeal to us on two other levels - either as glamorous rebels or as dastardly cads. Guy Boothby (1867-1905) was an Australian writer who created both a memorable diabolical criminal mastermind (Dr Nikola) and an equally memorable swindler (Simon Carne). It is Simon Carne we are concerned with at the moment, or more specifically the 1971 television adaptation of The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds which was the fourth episode of the first season of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, made by Thames Television in Britain between 1971 and 1973, included adaptations of many of the superb stories written by late Victorian and Edwardian authors who were contemporaries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds was adapted by Anthony Stevens and directed by Kim Mills, a reliable and prolific TV director during the 60s and early 70s.

Wealthy socialite Simon Carne (Roy Dotrice) has just returned to England after an extended stay in foreign climes. Simon seems to have everything a man could want - wealth, breeding, education, a ready wit and a good deal of charm. He is a charismatic and fascinating figure with an entrée into the world of fashionable high society. He does however suffer from one slight social disadvantage - he is a hunchback.

You might think that his disfigurement would make him bitter. He is bitter, but for other reasons. Simon Carne is not quite what he appears to be.

He arrives back in England to find that the latest sensation in fashionable circles is a mysterious private detective known as Klimo. There has been a disturbing rash of daring jewel robberies which have baffled all the attempts of Scotland Yard to bring the perpetrator to justice. Klimo has been enjoying great success by solving these crimes. Although he does not exactly solve them, not does he catch the criminals. What he does, for a large fee, is to explain to the wealthy victims precisely how the crimes were carried out. This has caused much humiliation for Scotland Yard since Klimo’s explanations are invariably not merely plausible but quite watertight.

There is much trepidation at the Yard at the approach of the glittering ball about to take place at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Wiltshire. The duchess will be wearing the fabulous, and enormously valuable, Wiltshire Diamonds. It seems almost certain that the daring jewel thief who has caused them so much trouble will try to steal the diamonds. The Duke has decided there is only one way to prevent such a calamity - rather than waiting until after the robbery he will hire Klimo to prevent such an eventuality. This turns out to be not such a simple thing.

What does all this have to do with Simon Carne? You’ll have to watch this episode to find that out. It’s a clever story and it’s extremely well executed.

Roy Dotrice is a fine actor and he gives a suitably mesmerising performance. THe supporting cast is exceptionally strong, with John Nettleton as Carne’s butler Belton being particularly outstanding.

The mid-70s saw a dramatic sea change in British television drama, with the old shot-in-the-studio-on-videotape style giving way to the new shot-on-location-entirely-on-film style. The emphasis was on greater realism and more action. The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes was made in the older style and it does have that characteristic studio-bound feel. On the other hand the sets and costumes are generally impressive and it was made in colour and on the whole it looks rather splendid.

The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds was not the only episode of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes to feature a dastardly cad and unmitigated bounder and I’ll be posting a review of some of those other episodes in the near future.

Both seasons of this wonderful show are available on Region 2 DVD from Network. Great viewing and highly recommended.

Dynasty (1981-89)

One of the reasons I enjoy doing this blog is that it inspires me to watch lots and lots of old TV shows. And one of the reasons I enjoy watching so many old TV shows is that I missed  so many of them in the past. I am afraid that when I was younger I took life rather too seriously. In was a bit of a pop culture snob. There were certain types of television shows that I would never have considered watching. Shows like Dynasty and Dallas for example.

Fortunately I have overcome most of my prejudices and as a result I’ve been watching both Dynasty and Dallas recently, and enjoying them both a lot more than I expected to.

Of course the two series have a great deal in common. Both are soap operas, albeit big-budget prime-time soap operas. Both deal with oil billionaires. Both focus on the lifestyles of the very wealthy. Both focus not only on the personal and family dramas that are the staple of soap operas but also on the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes in the world of big business. Both feature outrageous over-the-top characters and both feature delightfully outlandish plot lines. Both include unscrupulous conniving characters (J. R. Ewing in Dallas and Alexis Carrington in Dynasty) that the audience loves to hate. Both series wear their trashiness as a badge of pride, which is something I admire tremendously.

There are however some subtle differences. Having now watched quite a bit of both these shows it seems to me that Dallas is a bit more grounded in reality. The characters are more or less believable - even J. R. might be larger than life and over-the-top but he is still just about believable. The other characters are mostly reasonably realistic. The story lines are convoluted and rely to a considerable extent on coincidence and they can get pretty outrageous (all of which is simply to say that it conforms to the conventions of the soap opera genre) but they still maintain at least a modicum of plausibility.

Dynasty on the other hand abandons any pretense at realism. This is pure fantasy stuff. The characters are straight-out melodrama figures, and the villainous characters are pure melodrama villains (or villainesses). The stories make no attempt to remain within the bounds of probability or plausibility. In other words Dynasty conforms to the conventions of melodrama - not the Hollywood style of melodrama but the classic stage melodramas of the 19th century.

None of this is intended as a criticism of Dynasty. The approach the producers decided to run with was a deliberate choice and it’s a perfectly valid choice. And that choice having been made the writers, directors and cast have done a splendid job and the results are ridiculously entertaining (even if at times they’re also entertainingly ridiculous).

On the whole I think I slightly prefer Dallas but I’m certainly not immune to the charms of Dynasty. And it’s Dynasty I’m supposed to be talking about at the moment.

Dynasty tells the story of oil billionaire Blake Carrington (John Forsythe) and the immensely complicated inter-relationships of his ill-assorted and frequently feuding family members. Forsythe wasn’t a bad actor but he knows this is soap opera and he is never tempted to try for subtlety. He knows what is expected of him in this sort of television and he delivers the goods.

Of course Dynasty’s biggest drawcard and its greatest asset is Joan Collins. She is magnificent. She knows it’s her job to be the uber-bitch and she knows just how to go about it. Alexis is appalling and yet she’s so mesmerising and so magnetic and she plays the bitch with so much style that you almost find yourself on her side.

Joan Collins is the sort of actress who is likely to overshadow everyone else but this doesn’t really happen. Everybody else is overacting as hard as they can and for the most part they succeed in not being overshadowed too badly. Pamela Sue Martin as Alexis’s daughter Fallon Carrington is certainly in no danger of that - she holds her own very convincingly. She might not be an uber-bitch but she’s capable of some pretty impressive scheming of her own and she can be frightening formidable when she’s set her mind on something. Young actresses don’t always have the confidence to give outrageously over-the-top performances but Pamela Sue Martin is most definitely not afraid to do so. Blake’s wife Krystle (Linda Evans) is one of the more sympathetic characters but even she has her moments, and to her credit Evans is not intimidated even by Joan Collins in full flight.

When you happen to come across an episode like The Downstairs Bride which features Joan Collins, Pamela Sue Martin and Heather Locklear all competing to see who can be the most deliciously bitchy then you have true trash TV heaven.

And the scenery-chewing and the gloriously excessive viciousness and backbiting are not monopolised by the male characters, with Adam Carrington (Gordon Thomson) being perhaps even more breathtakingly appalling than Alexis.

The acting in this series could not in all honesty be described as good acting in the conventional sense. It’s soap opera acting and (with a few exceptions) it strikes the right notes. You just can’t be too excessive in this kind of television.

Dynasty began its run in 1981 and at the moment I’m getting close to the end of the third season which takes us up to 1983. As you’d expect there’s a lot of early 80s style to the show but while there’s some amusing and rather delightful expensive bad taste on display by 80s standards the overall look of the series is by no means as ghastly as you might expect (although some of Linda Evans’ costumes are rather frightening). Joan Collins of course could look stylish in anything and always manages to look magnificent.

Dynasty is trashy, no question about it, but it doesn’t care. It’s not afraid to go all the way, and then go even further. You really can’t push high camp much further than this. Its sheer extravagant and shameless outrageousness is intoxicating. It’s a lot of fun. Plus you get Joan Collins at the absolute peak of her form. Recommended.

Burke’s Law, season one (1963)

When a television cop show is centred around a police captain who happens to be a multi-millionaire and who gets driven to crime scenes in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, I think it’s fair to assume we’re not meant to take the program all that seriously. Such is definitely the case with Burke’s Law, which ran from 1963 to 1965.

Captain Amos Burke (Gene Barry) is the chief of the homicide division but he only turns up at the police headquarters when an actual murder occurs. The rest of the time he spends lazing on the beach with his beautiful girlfriend, chasing other equally beautiful women, attending exclusive parties and hanging out at expensive night-spots. It’s a tough life being a cop.

But don’t let appearances fool you. Amos Burke is actually a very good detective and he takes murder very seriously. Of course if there are two suspects to be questioned, and one is  female and attractive and the other is neither of those things, somehow Captain Burke always ends up interviewing the attractive female. 

Of course a TV cop has to have side-kicks. Burke has two. One is an old-time hard-bitten cop played by Regis Toomey, the other is young ambitious up-and-comer Tim Tilson, played by Gary Conway. Tim is efficient to a fault. No matter what needs to be done, he’s already done it. His superior regards all this with amusement rather than jealousy.

It’s all played with tongue planted firmly in cheek. There are running jokes, there are wisecracks, there are bizarre suspects. What’s pleasant is that everyone is clearly in on the joke, including the guest stars. Elizabeth Montgomery hams it up outrageously in Who Killed Mr X as a ditzy blonde sexpot actress who is obviously a kept woman for a wealthy eccentric.  

In the following episode, Who Killed Cable Roberts, it’s the turn of Lizabeth Scott, still looking remarkably glamorous in one of her last screen appearances before her retirement became final and determined to show she can chew scenery with the best of them. Any scenery still left unchewed is taken care of by Paul Lynde and Zsa Zsa Gabor in supporting roles. When you’ve got Zsa Zsa Gabor cast as a maid you know that this is not exactly going to be a gritty realistic police procedural.

There are three key ingredients in this show - humour, glamour and sexiness. The humour is good-natured and fun, the glamour is over-the-top (it was produced by Aaron Spelling, later responsible for Dynasty), and it’s as sexy as a prime-time network TV show could get away with being in 1963. Amos Burke is a character who could be insufferable but Gene Barry strikes just the right note, making him likable, genuinely charming and extremely witty.

Gritty it may not be, but the tongue-in-cheek approach is combined with reasonably good and well-written whodunit stories.

The guest stars are a mix of movie stars in the twilight of their careers and young up-and-comers, but the witty scripts and the ample opportunities to overact inspire them all and the show benefits from some truly glorious and outrageous performances. Anne Francis’s guest performance landed her her own spin-off series as glamorous private eye Honey West. Carolyn Jones (better known as Morticia Addams from The Addams Family) makes a couple of guest appearances, in one episode playing no less than four parts. Yvonne de Carlo, Ida Lupino, Tina Louise and Annette Funicello are among other guest stars.

If you think this sounds like a delightful frothy concoction then you’re spot on. It’s a hugely enjoyable romp.

Burke’s Law ran for two seasons, followed by a third season with a new title (Amos Burke Secret Agent) and a revamped formula, the new formula sadly being much less successful than the original.

I have the season 1 boxed set and I will definitely be buying the season 2 set as well, assuming that it finally gets released (which unfortunately seems increasingly unlikely).

Public Eye, season 5 (1971)

Public Eye is both one of the best and one of the most unusual of all television private eye series. The first three seasons were produced by Britain’s ABC Television between 1965 and 1968. After the merger of ABC and Associated-Rediffusion to form Thames Television four more seasons were made between 1969 and 1975.

All but a handful of the ABC episodes are lost but happily all the Thames episodes survive. 

When Roger Marshall and Anthony Marriott created the series they had a very definite aim in view - Public Eye would strip away the glamour and the tough guy aura from the private eye genre. The hero, Frank Marker, would be a very ordinary private detective (or private enquiry agent as they were usually known in Britain). He would handle the sorts of cases that an actual private enquiry agent would handle - a bit of divorce work, missing persons cases, credit checks and other routine matters. While Marker is no wimp he dislikes violence intensely. Fortunately violence is rather uncommon in the usual run of cases that such a man would deal with.

Marker is very unglamorous indeed. He is middle-aged, he doesn’t own a car, he most certainly does not own a gun, he is no fashion plate (he is often a bit on the dishevelled side), he is more at home with a pint of bitter and a packet of crisps than sampling vintage wines or gourmet food.

It all sounds deadly dull. It isn’t. It’s not only intelligent and thoughtful television, it’s immensely entertaining and totally fascinating. It success stems from the soundness of the original idea, the consistently high quality of the scripts and the superb performance of Alfred Burke as Marker.

Public Eye was made in the usual style of late 1960s/early 1970s British TV - shot on videotape in the studio with a relatively small amount of outdoor shooting on film. Towards the end of its run Thames contemplated switching the series over to the new style that their subsidiary Euston Films had pioneered with Special Branch and The Sweeney - series shot entirely on film with much more location shooting, faster pacing and much more action. Alfred Burke felt that this would be a very bad idea indeed and decided to call it a day, and thus this very popular series ended with the 1975 season. Burke was absolutely correct - Public Eye would never have worked in this new style. The older shot-on-videotape-in-the-studio approach suited the material perfectly, giving it a slightly seedy and slightly claustrophobic feel and allowing the emphasis to be on character rather than action.

At the time this series was made British television was also moving towards a focus on gritty realism, violence and cynicism. Public Eye adopted a slightly different approach. While it can be at times quite dark and it does have its own distinctive style of kitchen-sink realism and can be quite gritty it never really succumbs to cynicism. It certainly never succumbs to nihilism or despair. Frank Marker might be a very down-at-heel private eye who makes a very modest living out of the game he is not a man given to despair or self-pity. He mostly enjoys his work. Sometimes it’s a bit sordid but it can be interesting and it beats digging ditches for a living. And besides, it’s all he knows. He has his share of troubles and setbacks, even serving a term in prison after being set up by a client, but Marker is the kind of guy who picks himself up again and gets on with life. He doesn’t feel sorry for himself and he doesn’t need anyone to feel sorry for him. He’s unmarried and a loner but on the whole he finds the human race to be quite interesting and even worthy of a certain guarded affection.

The rather short Season 4 had been something of an experiment. Each episode had a self-contained plot but there was also an overall story arc, following Marker’s (successful) attempts to get back on his feet after being in prison. Season 5 followed a more conventional format with no ongoing story arcs. It also saw Marker relocate from Brighton to Windsor.

Marker’s office in Windsor sets the tone of the series exceptionally well. It’s a poky shopfront and there is no glamorous secretary to answer the telephone because Marker can’t afford a secretary. Just inside the door there are bookshelves - all of them completely empty! This could be a depressing or even a pathetic touch but oddly enough it isn’t. Frank Marker doesn’t believe in cluttering up his life with anything that is not strictly necessary and it would never occur to him to fill the bookshelves just to make a good impression.

Who Wants to Be Told Bad News? is a particularly fine episode demonstrating the masterful way in which the writers on this series could make great stories out of the most seemingly mundane cases. In this instance it’s a credit check. It seems that a remarkable number of people just don’t want Marker to help then.

The Man Who Didn't Eat Sweets shows that checking up on an unfaithful husband can produce results that can even surprise the most hardened private detective.

Ward of the Court presents Marker with one of those cases he wishes he hadn’t taken on. He has to find a father who has taken his son from his estranged wife. Although he’s working for the mother he finds himself in sympathy with the father, but to make things more difficult he can still see the mother’s point of view and in fact both parents seem more intent on hurting each other than on the boy’s welfare. Not an especially pleasant job, but he’s taken it and now he can see no alternative other than to see it through. An episode typical of the moral complexity of this series - sometimes you have two choices and whichever you choose someone gets hurt.

Transatlantic Cousins is the type of episode that really illustrates the genius of this series. Marker takes on a case that is remarkable for being so trivial and minor. In a conventional private eye series the case would of course turn out to be something much more serious. Public Eye avoids that kind of obviousness. The case really is as trivial as it seems to be. Marker encounters a wealthy American tourist named John L’Etrell in an antique shop. The American, whose family went to the US in the 18th century, wants to find his long-lost English cousins. What he finds is an English baronet who is a shocking old reprobate. 

That’s all there is to the story. There are no crimes, no conspiracies, no deep dark family secrets. And yet this episode is compulsively watchable. It’s a finely crafted piece of social observation. Not social criticism, just social observation. It’s about real people and no matter how trivial it might all be to the people involved these things are important. Real people do concern themselves with matters that appear trivial to outsiders. And these are real people - what makes it especially interesting is that at first they seem to be stereotypes, but actually they aren’t. John L’Etrell seems to be the archetypal brash American tourist but he’s actually a pretty decent guy. His daughter seems to be the archetypal rebellious daughter but she isn’t. Despite initial appearances she loves her father and she respects him. Sir Roger L’Etrell seems to be the archetypal wicked old aristocrat but he’s really a rather sad old man. James Doran’s script displays the perfect lightness of touch.

Shades of White is somewhat darker. A rich man wants Marker to check up on his teenaged daughter’s wild friends. Marker discovers things he would be have been happier not knowing and his faith in human nature takes a bit of a knock. We know he’ll get over it, he always does, but it will hurt for a while. John VII. Verse 24 is another story that has a somewhat serious tone. Marker is employed by a policeman who claims to be victimised by a corrupt senior officer. This is the sort of case that Marker really prefers to avoid like the plague. There’s just too much potential for serious aggravation and the last thing Frank Marker wants is trouble with the police. It’s his stubborn streak that makes him stick to this case. When someone warns him off a case he digs his heels in.

Generally speaking I’m not a great fan of television series (or movies) that aim for absolute realism. My tastes tend to run more towards the fantastic and the baroque (series like The Avengers). If you’re going to aim for absolute realism you really have to do it well. Public Eye does it very very well indeed. It’s an object lesson in how to take apparently mundane  subject matter and turn it into fascinating and very entertaining television, helped by great writing and Alfred Burke’s superb acting.

The four Thames TV seasons have all been released on DVD by Network, as have the surviving ABC episodes (as Public Eye: The ABC Years).

Very highly recommended.