British TV’s first female top cop
Jill Gascoine, who has died aged 83, was British television’s first female “top cop”: DI Maggie Forbes in
The Gentle Touch. In the first episode, broadcast on ITV in April 1980, her character is promoted, and her police constable husband is killed by an armed robber. It was a symbolic moment, said The Guardian. In the macho 1970s, women had been marginalised in shows like The Sweeney and The Professionals. Petite but tough, with a distinctive bubble perm, Forbes was a new kind of detective for a new decade: from her base at the fictional Seven Dials police station, she tackled not just traditional villains, but topical crimes involving prostitution, euthanasia and anti-Semitism, while struggling with single parenthood and sexist colleagues. But she was not alone for long in “the fight against small-screen sexism”: four months later, the BBC brought out Juliet Bravo, set in Lancashire and starring Stephanie Turner as Inspector Jean Darblay.
With fewer car chases than other cop shows, and a greater focus on personal themes, The Gentle Touch “changed the rules”, and at its peak it attracted 18 million viewers; but it was clunky in parts. In one episode, Forbes meets a young sex worker. “We really should talk, woman to woman,” Forbes tells her. The actress playing the sex worker, Lynda Marchal, reckoned she could write more convincing dialogue. Encouraged by Gascoine, she started work on the treatment for a series about a botched bank robbery; it became Widows, and under her nom de plume, Lynda La Plante, she eventually created Prime Suspect, and arguably the most famous female police detective of them all – DCI Jane Tennison.
Jill Viola Gascoine was born in Lambeth, south London. She was sent to Tiffin Girls’ School – where she was very unhappy – and later attended the Italia Conti theatre school. She started her career in Leicester, working with Ken Loach; later, she took a job in rep in Dundee, and married a local hotelier, Bill Keith, with whom she had two sons. It was after their marriage broke down that she found fame on
The Gentle Touch. It ran for four years; in a spin-off series, C.A.T.S. Eyes, Forbes then became a member of an all-female squad called Covert Activities Thames Section, that worked from the offices of a detective agency called Eyes. It was a commercial success, but the critics were not kind. It was a bit “silly”, Gascoine conceded, like “Charlie’s Angels set in Kent”. Later, she starred opposite John Thaw in the sitcom Home to Roost.
She fell in love with her second husband, Alfred Molina, while rehearsing for a production of Destry Rides Again at the Donmar Warehouse in 1982, and they later relocated to Los Angeles. “The romance developed during the show and we still haven’t closed. Just moved to a bigger theatre,” he said. In America, she continued to act, and also published three novels. In 2009, she was slated to join the cast of EastEnders, but pulled out at the last minute. The reason became apparent soon after, when she revealed that she had Alzheimer’s. By 2014 her condition was so severe that she had to move into a care home. She is survived by Molina, her two sons and her stepdaughter.