Found It! Longstreet

A while ago I came across a series called Longstreet in a book I was reading about a blind detective from the 1970s. It isn't available on DVD but I've found some clips from an episode on Youtube.

It is an episode called "The Way of the Intercepting Fist" which stars Bruce Lee, hence its popularity on the web. Here is an extract. The whole of this episode is online but broken up into YouTube sized chunks, but I will watch it all at some point soon.

Song of the Week: "Theme from Ironside2 by Quincy Jones

There hasn't been a song of the week for a long time. This week is can only be one thing, the theme from Quincy.

I usually avoid just doing theme tunes, but I've pretty much ran out of other tenously connected songs, and this one is by the legendary Quincy Jones so I think deserves its place here.

It is a great dramatic opening to the show and the theme is then reprised through the episodes in different forms to indicate the mood. I do love it but ten episodes into the boxset, it is beginnign to grate on me slightly.

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.

Old Beginnings

In the last week I've seen the pilot episodes of two shows. Unfortunately they aren't the discovery of new shows, but just that I've finally seen how two old favourites began.

I was given the boxset of the first series of Ironside for Christmas (hurray!) which begins with a feature length pilot episode which shows Ironside receiving the gunshot injury that leds to him being in a wheelchair. I had assumed that much of Ironside's tough-talking cynicism came from being disabled, but this episode showed that the pre-shooting Ironside was much the same. He gave a great welcome to new recruits to the police force that told them they'd either be corrupt or assumed to be corrupt, and unappreciated until they were shot in the line of duty. He gave the nun nurses in hospital a hard time, he gave his colleagues a hard time and then he caught the person who shot him.

ITV4 continues to show no logic in how it shows Randall & Hopkirk Deceased and completely out of sync throw in the original pilot episode in the middle of the series. Whereas Ironside was disabled, the first episode here shows how Marty Hopkirk ended up dead and wearing a white suit. Marty is killed in what appears at first to be a hit and run, but he returns to haunt Jeff to tell him that it was murder. It is a great introduction to the premise of the series, that would have been better had it been shown at the start of the series!

Ms Fletcher and Ms Christie

Once the festivities were out of the way, I spent much of my Christmas break in the company of the most famous female crime writers; Agatha Christie and Jessica Fletcher.

There was a "Murder She Wrote" marathon consisting of four feature length episodes of the crime-solving mystery writer. The quartet had plots involving the FBI and stolen security secrets, slavery and Jessica's great aunt (Angela Lansbury in a bonnet), a convention of writers and a treasure hunt in Ireland. None were set in the murder capital Cabot Cove, but still it turned out that two of Jessica's friends were killers.

Aside from bits and pieces of Miss Marple, I watched a few episodes of Poirot with my mother. My mother has seen most episodes of Poirot already but due to lack of anything else on the television (and lack of anything else to do), she didn't mind watching them again. I had not seen these episodes before, but impressed my mother by quickly guessing the murderer, before the Belgian detective did. In the episode "Poirot at Christmas", I guessed the killer so quickly that my mother took to telling me I was wrong to throw me off the scent. I didn't quite identify how the crime was committed, but considering it involved a balloon that squealed like a pig that was hardly surprising.

Suffering from my customary inability to sleep in a strange bed, I also saw a bit of the 1978 film "Agatha" about the writer's disappearance. It starred a young Dustin Hoffman, as a journalist, not as Ms Christie!

Along with Christmas Cake and sprouts, I've had my fill of Christie and Fletcher for a while.

Ends?

Several shows came to an end this week.

Wallander - just a three part series this one, but it probably cost a fortune for the BBC to make. The second episode had a rather over-the-top plot which seemed highly unlikely, but showed Wallander at his most Morse-like, i.e. falling in love with an unsuitable woman which clouded his judgment about the crimes. The third episode wasn't any more probable, involving a cross-dressing postal worker. I like the scenery and the doom-laden take on society falling apart, and I loved the theme music, but the plots were rather lame and I'm not sure I could have taken any more episodes. I deleted the two episodes of the Swedish version I'd recorded from BBC4 unwatched.

Life - Crews bought his ex-wife a white horse and found out who the real killer was. But lots of loose ends remain, setting up a second series where he can find out how high the corruption goes. And perhaps what becomes of the horse? I'll be tuning back in.

Cold Case - it hasn't come to an end so much as it isn't on the schedule for the next week, perhaps it is just taking a Christmas holiday. Frankly, I'm in need of a break too from its daily dose of misery.

One show that shows no sign of ending is Prison Break. "We're not getting out of here" seems to apply as much to the viewer as the Fox River gang. Its like being stuck in a maze (which actually also happened to me this week) - just when you think you are near the exit, the corridor turns into a dead end or you find out your mother worked for The Company.

Coincidentally the killer from Life turned up in Prison Break as a buyer for Sylla and Dutch from The Shield turned up as a gay man in Cold Case.
Small world.

Quote of the Week

"You'll do whatever I want. Even if it is working with a bassett hound in a birthday hat"

The General to Lincoln Burrows in Prison Break.

Working for the Company doesn't sound so bad. Bring on the bassett hound!

Extra Insight

I watched a BBC4 documentary this morning "Who is Kurt Wallander", a slightly misleading title as it was more about the Sweden that provides the context for the detective. Very interesting background on the social state ideal that has crumbled and now has the same problems as the rest of Europe.

Then the Sunday Times television critic A A Gill (the Marmite of critics, but I'm very much in the love camp even if I don't always agree with him) writes today about the death of the television detective in relation to Wallander. His theory is that the detective characters are still great but are let down by the plots (the article can be read here).

I think he has a made a good point. Many current shows rely on smoke and mirrors, tricks and quirks to distract from the slightness of the plot. The ante is upped on the levels of gore, nastiness or science to compensate. Perhaps we've seen it all before.

But does that matter so much? My favourite thing about Morse was not the crimes or their resolution, but the character of Morse and his relationship with Lewis. The plot is largely secondary to that. In the Rebus novels (particuarly the early ones), I was frequently disappointed with the whodunnit element, as I was with the Henning Mankell book I read, "Return of the Dancing Master", but enjoyed the characters. If the characters are strong enough I think the detective can survive.

So I will continue to watch the detectives even if all of the good plots have already been used. Although, of course, I do have a higher tolerance and intake of detectives than the average person.

Revisiting Rebus

From my limited crime reading, Rebus is my favourite detective but I've somehow missed much of the television adaptions. I remember seeing the "Strip Jack" episode which wasn't one of my favourite books and I vaguely recall that the programme lacked the political insights of the books.

Last night on the Alibi channel, I saw that Rebus was on and the episode was "The Hanging Garden" which I think is the only Rebus book that I've somehow managed to not read. This was from the first series of the show, when Rebus was played by John Hannah. As much as I like Ken Stott, I think John Hannah is a better Rebus. Despite his alcohol dependence and general rubbishness at relationships, the Rebus of the books does quite well with the ladies and I think John Hannah is more plausible in this aspect, at least as a younger Rebus.

Some of the other casting choices weren't so great. Siobhan Clarke was Scottish like her colleagues rather than English as in the books, and Rebus' daughter Sammy didn't seem as feisty and her relationship with Rebus was too good. But these are small points.

It was the best detective programme I've seen in some time.

It used voiceovers, flashbacks and freeze frames, rather experimental for a British show and it pulled it off. The plot was a great one, with some good twists that I didn't see coming.

First Impressions of Wallander

There was a fair amount of hype around the start of Wallander on the BBC (a fair amount of hype that is for anything that isn't a reality tv show). I'd read one Henning Mankell novel but not from the Wallander series and was intrigued by the hype of him being more cerebral than Morse.

It started with a harrowing scene with a teenage girl setting fire to herself on a rapeseed field in front of the eponymous policeman. It didn't get any happier from there. The murderer's preferred method of execution was scalping and although you perhaps didn't see as much as was suggested, it was unsettling to watch.

There is something slightly odd about the BBC's Wallander, about the way it has been filmed. It doesn't look like a modern television show. Something I think to do with the light. It might be the daylight of Sweden is different from ours, I'm not sure. But there was something unnaturalistic about it and it looked more like Bergerac or British shows from that time than things on television now. Or perhaps it is a more European look and the obviously British actors jar with the Swedish landscape.

I wasn't entirely sure about Kenneth Branagh at first. He literally seemed too big for the television screen. Rather than Morse, it was Boyd from Walking the Dead that he reminded me of most. Perhaps he didn't shout quite so much and it was a more nuanced performances than Trevor Eve ever gives but it was in that school.

So again it is another new show that I neither love nor hate but will be adding to my schedule to see how it develops.

Too Much

I've not posted much lately because I've not had much to write about. A daily dose of Cold Case and a weekly helping each of Randall & Hopkirk Deceased and Life.

Last night however I returned to Law & Order Special Victims Unit. The one episode I'd previously seen of this series featured a ridiculous virtual reality plot which is always a sign of being out of ideas, so I'd been put off it. Last night's episodes weren't as bad, but still they seemed overblown, as if it was trying too hard to shock. Which is a strange thing to say given the subject matter of the programme, which has always been disturbing, but one episode last night in particular crossed the line.

Olivia went undercover in a women's prison to find a rapist Corrections Officer. The plan worked too well and he tried to rape her. He was stopped but his pants were undone and pressed next to her face. This was too much. We don't normally see this much and nor do I think it is necessary.

I think I may just stick with my regular diet of shows.

New Kid on the Block: Life

Taking a break from the never ending episodes of Cold Case, I decided to expand my horizons and recorded the first two episodes of a new series, Life.

Cop Charlie Crews was convicted of a triple murder he didn't commit and served 12 years in prison before the conviction was overturned. He receives an undisclosed amount of compensation, but chooses to return to working for the LAPD. His time in prison has given him greater insight into people which he uses to solve cases and at the same time slowly piece together who framed him.

"Life was his sentence. Life is what he got back" is the tagline for the show which is spoken by Crews' attorney in the introduction to each episode.

The first episode wasn't that great. Often first episodes are a bit slow as the scene is set but this was all done in the introduction which is repeated each time. But since I'd recorded two episodes I stuck with it and I found the second episode more interesting. The cases he is given to work on aren't that interesting, but I'm hooked by the on-going story of his case.

The style of the show is odd though - it doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be dark or light. We see Crews spending his millions and picking up women, seemingly enjoying the celebrity and wealth he has found, but on cases he is brilliant but random, in the style of Goran from Criminal Intent. He seems to have a liking for fruit (which reminded me of Prot in K-Pax) which is a rather tame and lame quirk. But then parts of it are darker - the horrific crime he was accused of and that we aren't sure who he can trust. There are documentary style talking heads bits with people connected to him and the case (his ex-partner, his ex-wife, the cop from the original case) but I don't understand who is making a documentary and why.

So I don't love it and I'm beginning to think that The Wire has ruined all other television for me as nothing lives up to that, but there was enough in this to keep me interesting. I would like to know whodunnit.

How to write an episode of Cold Case

1. Episode begins with a scene from the past. It could be anytime from 3 years ago to 60 years ago. A date will appear on the screen, but you can tell it is the past because it looks different. Anytime before 1965 will probably be in black & white (they didn’t have colour back then, you know), later will be in colour but with a washed-out haziness to it.

It will be a scene from the life of a group of people. They will be wearing the fashions of whatever the chosen period is and there will be a song from that time playing. Either there will be some obvious tension in the scene or someone will profess to being the happiest they’ve ever been. Someone will soon be dead.

2. Cut to the second scene. A dead body.

3. A retro police person carrying a file down to the basement bearing the name of the victim in the previous scene.

4. Fourth scene is the present day (this will be in sharp full colour with naturalistic lighting). A discovery is made or someone turns up at the police station – something that leads to the case being reopened.

5. Cue the dramatic theme music “Waaa, Waaa, Waaaa, De De De ” etc (I’m not very good at expressing music noises).

6. Next scene is present day and the detectives visit either the nearest and dearest of the victim or the person who was the chief suspect. You will see the person in question as they are now, with a quick flash to them “back in the day”. The drama of this will vary – it may be that they are an old man now and boy when the crime happened, or if it happened in the 2000s, they might just have a slightly better haircut now.

7. They will be asked a question and their response will be seen as a flashback, always with period detail and soundtrack.

8. Something that is mentioned in this will send the detectives onto another suspect.

9. Repeat the above three stages with an average of four more people. (Optionally, it can be peppered with hints of the personal lives with the detectives, normally their doomed relationships, but this would be a slowly evolving sub-plot over a whole series).

10. Evidence given by the last of these people will led back to one of the people interviewed previously. Return to them and repeat the process of question and flashback again. This may reveal the murderer or it may lead back once more to one of the other people already questioned, who will then be the killer.

11. The killer is arrested. He/She looks sheepish, both as he is now and as he was at the time of the crime. Montage of all of the characters in their current setting (with a brief glimpse again of them in the past), looking wistful or depressed. Melancholic or outright heartbreaking music from the period plays over.

12. Then the piece de resistance, the victim appears and smiles gratefully at the arresting officer. The arresting officer acknowledges them (even though they aren’t really there). All the while, the heart-wrenching music continues, tugging at the heart strings of the audience.

13. The case box is returned to the basement with “Closed” written on the box.

14. The music starts up again “De, Dedde Da” etc

Animal Instincts

The new television service is bearing wonderful fruit. Last night I discovered a whole channel devoted to detectives (fictional, not that nasty true life stuff). The Alibi channel has Murder She Wrote, Taggart, Bergerac, Dalziel and Pascoe and Shoestring. What delights! I shall look forward to spending some quality time with these guys over the weekend.

Elsewhere on a channel called something like Thriller Zone, we came across Manimal. A relic from the 1980s that I’d heard of but never seen. “This should be right up your street” harrumphed the OH, before going in the other room to listen to sport on the radio. The premise of the show is (I quote) “a man who can change himself into any animal fights crime”.

To say it is ridiculous would be a huge understatement. From the bits I saw, this man (played by Simon McCorkendale, who I’d seen before in “Death on the Nile” and is a poor man’s Remington Steele) turned himself into a parrot so that he could eavesdrop on a conversation and a big cat so he could scare some villains. You didn’t see much of the big cat (presumably because of budgetary restrictions) hence my inability to say for sure whether it was a lion or tiger, but we did get several close-ups of the parrot looking thoughtful. The day was ultimately saved by an elephant, but it turned out that this was an actual elephant, rather than our man in disguise.

Vintage Pair

I had the morning off work and never one to miss a sleuthing opportunity, I sneaked in a couple of vintage shows.

Randall and Hopkirk Deceased was a case involving a scam with a fake spiritualist. I was struck again about just how weird this programme can be. Hopkirk spied on one of the con men and caught him pretending to be an orchestra conductor, putting on a classical music record and standing in front of a mirror with a baton in his hand. It had no bearing on the plot whatsoever but it is these little quirky bits that make this show so good.

Next was an episode of The Professionals from 1978 entitled “Everest was also conquered”. When a senior policeman claims on his deathbed to have killed a woman called Susie, Cowley’s former mentor asks him to investigate. The duo uncover a web of corruption (corruption is always a web!) involving police and respected businessmen. Parts of it were predictable including the “twist” at the end, but it was saved by the banter between the pair. Not sure if it was an intentional joke, but people in the episode kept referring to them as “Doyle and Bodie” when it is normally “Bodie and Doyle” and it sounded ridiculous the other way round, like saying “Dec and Ant” or “McCartney and Lennnon”.

Sadly I had to go into the office after The Professionals finished, but I enjoyed this luxury.

Banned

I’ve been banned from watching Cold Case!

The OH has banned me from watching it. I don’t see how he is going to enforce this exactly but he is doing it for my own good since an episode of it yesterday left me sobbing.

I’ve often mused on whether it is callous to watch so many crime shows, that depict so much death and suffering and what that must say about my character. What makes most crime shows tolerable is that they focus on the process of solving the crime or the criminal without too much time given to the victim. But recently I can’t stomach SVU and now it seems Cold Case is too much for me, and what these have in common is that you are constantly reminded of the victim.

The episode of Cold Case that had me in tears involved a murder from the 1960s (my favourite period so I was looking forward to this one) but it was a case that had only just come to light when a body was washed up by the sea. It was the body of a child. I should have just turned it off at this point. The story involves four year old twin girls, an abused wife and a wonderful Sixties soundtrack that just added to the sorrow. It was all too much for me to take.

Perhaps the OH was right to ban it.

Week One of Sky Plus

The joys of the Sky Plus box means that I no longer have to miss my favourite shows because of inconveniences like work and sleep! Whole new worlds of viewing have opened up to me – except typically there doesn’t seem to be that much on at the moment.

Nonetheless I recorded (is that the right word – captured perhaps?) an episode of Psych that I hadn’t seen before. It involved alien abduction, tanning salons and speed dating. A fairly typical plot then!

I also recorded an episode of Criminal Minds which turned out to the season finale of season 2 which I’d seen nothing of, so I deleted that without watching it in the hope that I will be able to watch the full season at some point. A similar fate befell an episode of Intelligence, which I’d seen the first ever episode of, but that wasn’t enough to allow me to follow what was happening in this one.

I hope to be able to store up some more viewing for those long winter nights, but I’m not going to resort to Colombo just yet.

Life without Television

We are without television. Not entirely - we do still have a portable with the basic five channels in the bedroom but that hardly counts.

Someone at the OH's work gave us a DVD of the first series of Morse which is three episodes. I thought this wouldn't last very long. We made the mistake of trying to watch one when we came in on Friday night after a concert. I fell asleep 10 minutes in, the OH faired a bit better but still didn't see the conclusion. I tried to watch it again on Saturday night but fell asleep twice! So we still have three episodes left to watch.

The sixth and final season of Homicide has also arrived chez us. We had read that it wasn't very good but it had to be better than nothing? The first couple of episodes weren't bad at all. There was a Pembleton shaped hole that they were trying to fill with Giardello's son, but otherwise it was ok. After about five episodes I started to doze. There was a double episode with Kellerman as a Private Investigator but still sleep was calling me. Tonight we will resume watching this, and then perhaps it will be back to Morse.

Hopefully on Wednesday we will have Sky installed although I won't reap the benefits of it until next week as I'm away for the rest of this week.

Cherry-Picking Cold Cases

This week we will part company with our cable television provider. We started out with Homechoice about six years ago and the service was great. Unfortuately they were taken over by Tiscali and the service worsened. Television reception has been poor with periods of complete unavailability. So we are moving to Sky.

The new service will hopefully be more reliable and give me access to more detectives, but the one thing I will miss about the current provider (when the service actually works) is the on-demand channels. Through this service I was able to watch the whole of the first series of Criminal Minds and around a dozen episodes of Cold Case.

To make the most of it while I could (and the OH was out watching sport), last night I thought I would watch a couple of episodes of Cold Case. After 20 minutes of loss of service (this is why it is going), I decided that I would cherry-pick the episodes to watch as I've seen episodes here and there and don't have enough time left to watch them all. I decided that I would go with my favourite period in history, the 1960s. The three I started up weren't from that decade but the fourth one "The Volunteers" was. It involved hippies, Vietnam, draft-dodging, illegal abortion, Black power and communes. There was music by Jefferson Airplane and references to Woodstock and bell-bottoms. It was marvellous.

Of the 11 episodes currently available to watch, it turned out only one was set in the Sixties, so I just watched the next two episodes in the sequence as it looked like there might be an interesting background plot involving the detective, Scotty Valen's girlfriend. The next episode was "The Lost Soul of Herman" which was about basketball and the 1980s. It wasn't bad, but not was good as the previous one (the Eighties are never as good at the Sixties). Then it was "Resolutions" which was a crime from the cusp of the millennium.

I stopped after that as the OH had returned and we ended up watching a bit of Quadrophenia instead!

Crossing James Caan

Yesterday I watched an episode of "Crossing Jordan". It was entitled "What happens in Vegas, Dies in Boston" and involved a private jet from a Vegas casino landing in Boston. There was a dead man on board with a security box containing $3million chained to his arm. The chief suspects were the head of casino security and his glamorous female assistant. Later in the episode, James Caan turned up, threatened a few people and everyone seemed to do as he said. I'm surprised they didn't obey him straightaway - this is James Caan, don't they know he is connected?

Actually what I didn't realise until I looked it up this morning on IMDB is that Caan and the other two casino employees are characters from another show, "Las Vegas", so American viewers presumably would have known all about these characters before they popped up here. I've never seen "Las Vegas" so didn't know that they were definitely good guys, which perhaps added some mystery to the show that in-the-know viewers wouldn't have had.

This main storyline didn't conclude within the episode, which annoyingly ended with a "to be continued". It is next shown on Hallmark on Monday at 6pm when I'll be at work, but I suspect that it may not even be continued in "Crossing Jordan" but the story would have been wrapped up on "Las Vegas" instead. So I may never know what happened.

Although the sub-plot in this episode was actually what kept me watching. This involved the possibility of a very young child being a psychpath, and fortunately this bit was resolved, albeit sadly, within the hour.