Hometown Detective

Imagine my surprise when I turned over to watch George Gently and saw the name of my hometown appear as the caption for the episode. South Shields, 1968.

I've never seen a detective programme set in my home town before. It was most strange. It was about racism with locals and immigrants from the Yemen (my town was also the site of the first UK race riots - not something they put in the tourist brochures). The episode featured a seedy bar on the beach called The Shoreline, which I was sure was a real place and having checked with my mother, it was. She went there once, thought she was too good for the place and then tripped on the step on the way out.

I guessed what was going on quite quickly, rather ruining the plot for myself, but I still enjoyed the episode. I'm a big fan of Lee Ingleby, who plays the sidekick, Bacchus.

I wondered if every episode would be set in "canny auld Shields" as it is often referred to up there, so investigated further. It turns out that the series is set in Northumberland (except obviously this episode as South Shields is not in Northumberland at all), but is based on books set in East Anglia (where I went to university coincidentally), but is filmed in Ireland. So it wasn't probably wasn't South Shields afterall, but it looked just like it.