What a calamity! The Beeb has turned Devon into the Wild West
At the far end of the M5, beyond the Westonsuper-Mare services and deep in Injun territory, lie the badlands of england’s Wild West — lawless country, where herds of magnificent Dartmoor ponies roam the plains, and prospectors dig for clotted cream.
the local sheriffs are powerless, but one woman walks tall, bringing justice to these frontier lands. her name is Calamity Jane, and she is The Coroner (BBC1).
In the best hang ’em high tradition of Western movies, your disbelief will have to be suspended from the topmost gallows when you tune in to the Beeb’s new crime drama, running every weekday afternoon. It isn’t meant to be a comedy, but everything about this series set in Devon is laughable.
Calamity is a solicitor who rides into a seaside town to take control of the coroner’s court. Corruption is the only law here, with the powerful chief magistrate able to do as he pleases, and the townsfolk too scared to raise a protest.
Jane (Claire Goose) has to conduct her own investigations into the daily murders, but if she wants information she has to pay for it. even the burly publican won’t tell her the time of day until he sees a fistful of tenners — and he’s her father-in-law.
When she sends a deputy to question a suspect, the outlaw punches the hapless copper full in the face and knocks him down.
the deputy slinks back to the saloon with a black eye, because that’s just how life is in rough, tough Devon. It’s a man’s world, and only cissies press charges for petty infractions like assaulting a police officer.
It isn’t so hard to understand how the show got made. Some commissioning editor must have decided to combine the silliest elements of Doc Martin with the daftest bits of Bergerac, and set it along every stretch of picturesque coastline from Dartmouth to Budleigh Salterton.
the heroine is a single mother, with a truculent teenage daughter whose wardrobe is apparently modelled on early-eighties Bananarama, all quirky hats and coloured sunglasses.
there’s a dark streak, too: Calamity Jane (no, really, that’s what they call her) gets her insights and inspirations by hanging round the morgue on her own and talking to the corpses. All this ought to add up to the perfect blueprint, which only goes to show how difficult it is to construct good tV to a formula.
Manufacturing a rock’n’roll superstar is not an exact science either. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (BBC4) traced the sputtering eighties career of Jimmy ellis, a glorified elvis impersonator from tennessee.
Jimmy’s manager, the roguish head of Sun Records, Shelby Singleton, dressed him in star-spangled jumpsuits and a sequinned mask, to spin an air of mystery around him. Rumours spread that this really was elvis reborn — Jimmy had the velvet baritone, even if he did dance like a farmhand in wellingtons.
this was a meticulous documentary, with detailed contributions from a score of people who knew Jimmy well: bandmates, childhood friends, family members, besotted fans and more than a few of his numerous wives and girlfriends.
But there was an air of pointlessness about it, as there was over Jimmy’s whole career. he never achieved fame, and he spent more money on chasing his dream than he ever earned.
he recorded with stars like Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, but his name didn’t appear on the records — he was always Mr excitement, or Orion, or some other bogus moniker.
the result was a depressing, overlong portrait of failure and delusion, with a brutal ending: in 1998, shortly after Jimmy gave up on the music business and opened a pawn shop, he was killed by an armed robber.
But the strangest detail was buried under all the amateur video footage of Orion on stage. Jimmy didn’t just sound like the King: he was the image of elvis’s father, Vernon Presley.
And because Jimmy was illegitimate, his birth certificate listed only his father’s Christian name — Vernon. Could all that have been a coincidence?
Perhaps Jimmy ellis really was the forgotten half-brother of elvis Aaron Presley . . . a diamond among the rhinestones.