A law unto themselves
MY WIFE, ever keen on reducing clutter (my clutter), often turns her eye to the DVD shelves. ‘Do you actually want Series One to Three of Juliet Bravo?’ she asked me the other day. ‘It predated Jane Tennison and Cagney and Lacey. It’s historically important,’ I said, putting it back. ‘Yes,’ my wife said, ‘but do you actually enjoy it?’ She had a point.
The same point applies to LAW AND ORDER (BBC4). First shown on the BBC in April 1978, this 40-year-old crime drama takes the very modern tack of telling one story through four sets of eyes.
The coppers were first to be followed tonight and over the next two nights by the crooks, the lawyers and the prison system. Penned by Judge John Deed creator G.F. Newman, the first instalment must have shocked audiences reared on the grandfatherly tones of Jack Warner.
Reeking of Woodbines, spray-on Brut and Watneys ale, Scotland Yard’s DI Fred Pyall (Derek Martin) and his all-male crew saw off villainy with some villainy of their own. An unsophisticated system saw Pyall taking cash bungs to drop charges, or offering an easy ride in exchange for information.
Like a businessman with multiple concerns, he also sent his snouts to the insurance companies, who paid cash rewards for tip-offs, and then skimmed a commission for himself.
With all these scams going on and the ever-present threat of internal affairs and doing hard time, as a Seventies copper in a Seventies jail, you might have thought Pyall would be coming apart at the seams. That might have been interesting to watch too. But instead he remained as stolid and lifeless as EastEnders character Charlie Slater, who he would go on to play decades later.
The dialogue could have come from some manual of gritty crime shows, all blags and jobs and nice little earners and geezers wanting a taste. Talking of geezers, it was all geezers – only three or four times did any women feature.
One concerned a mother being told to shut up her kids. One was a ‘nurse’ in a pub, apparently wooed by being bought a glass of red by Pyall. A third was a group of schoolgirls, being drooled over by Pyall and his snout Mickey (Roy Sone) as they played netball – because it was 1978.
It was all of interest to the telly historian. In the era of armed robberies, it showed the police getting increasingly ugly as they saw off their foes. In a time before laptops, it showed the job as a physical one, twisting arms (or other parts of the anatomy), getting vital info from reluctant mouths and trading it upwards to land the biggest fish. It was also intriguing, against this macho background, to see villains as fathers, worrying how their families would manage if they went down (or rather daahn).
Not without interest but also not at all entertaining.
At school I spent a lot of time laughing and trying to make others laugh. I was about 16 before I realised what I was there for.
LIVING WITH THE BRAINY BUNCH (BBC2), which is loosely based on some scientific research, sends the kids who do not get it to live with the kids who do.
After a week lodging with the serious Tharush, party boy Jack’s score in a mock GCSE maths paper went from 37 per cent to 50 per cent.
“It’s not a hundred,’ Jack noted, with new-found wisdom. “But it’s halfway there.”