A Round Up
This post is one of my periodic round-ups when I have a number of shows which may or may not become full blog posts at some point in the future, but I want to park them on the blog to clear my head.
First up we have the series Charlie (1984) about a private investigator who in the course of his work stumbles on a dying trade union official, finds his own name and address in the official's address book, and so investigates a sinister conspiracy in the world of trade unions. This is a series notable for starring David Warner in one of the few of his roles I have ever seen, despite him being a much-loved actor in the classic TV world. He is better known to me as playing Steel in the Big Finish audio continuations of Sapphire and Steel adventures, where he gets the slightly acerbic tone just right. Here he is much more urbane, although dogged in his determination to find out what is happening. The show is essentially a depiction of machinations in the Distributive Workers' Union and the relations with the Communist Party; both clearly used to fictionalise the story and avoid the real world in the UK where I think all trade unions have always been affiliated to the Labour Party (at least until they start affiliating to the Green Party because of Sir Kid Starver, watch this space), and the clever use of the economic principle of distributism to create a fictional union name. It also abbreviates the union name to DWU, which of course gives an air or verisimilitude by making it sound like the TGWU union. I think the politics probably reflect reality accurately, because it never stops making me roar with laughter that we have both the Marxist Party of Britain and the Marxist Party of Great Britain, both convinced the other is completely wrong. Anyway, if machinations and politics, combined with the down-at-heel private eye genre, are your thing, you'll love Charlie.
Counterstrike (1969) was a science fiction series about an alien on Earth to prevent an alien invasion, who poses as a journalist. This series is a proper case of TV archaeology because its original full series of ten series were never broacast in full, and now only four episodes remain: these four episodes are currently on YouTube. I have to say that I loved what is left of it and find the episode summaries of the other six episodes fascinating, although perhaps this is me because even its own star described as a terrible disappointment with a poor script. What does he know? Of course my opinion of a show is always completely right: just because he was the star!
The play The Bouncing Boy in the seminal Play for Today (1970-1984) series, is about a dodgy used car salesman and his wife, who gives birth to their baby in the course of the play. It's very clear that he is a wrong 'un from the word go, and we see details of how he runs his business and how he treats his wife. However, this isn't completely a depressing piece of social realism: there are some interesting almost surrealistic scenes, one actually a dream and the other dream-like, suggesting that the world around him is slightly mad or perhaps that he doesn't live in the real world. This play is actually worth seeing just for the opening surrealistic scene, which is a dream set in a junk yard.
Another Play for Today which I've just discovered is the 1975 dramatisation of Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road about her bookish correspondence with a bookshop in London. It covers the same territory as the 1987 film, obviously, and does it in the same manner so I wonder whether the film built on the television play.
Diamond Crack Diamond (1970) is a series about a journalist who has done sterling work exposing corruption in an unnamed African country. Back in Albion, he suddenly finds himself the target of threats and assassination attempts. The show is about how this unwinds, and honestly is wild in places. It also uses an interesting technique where we get the protaganist's own thoughts because he records notes on a dictaphone as he goes along: I expect this was very go-ahead for the audience at the time.
Finally two children's shows. I posted some time ago about the first episode of The Danedyke Mystery (1979), about a former detective who has become a vicar and investigates strange incidents in his church, as an orphaned episode. Since then the rest of the series has been uploaded to YouTube. It's solid, wholesome viewing with none of your flighty nonsense. Watch All Night (1980) is much more exotic: it's about a girl who meets her father in London. He's a scientist working for one of those dodgy foreign countries. The next day he finds that he has completely disappeared from the hotel they're staying at, as has the room he slept in, to be replaced by a broom cupboard. I would just caution with this one that watching it requires the viewer to believe that the entire staff of a hotel are in on this subterfuge, which some viewers may think is a stretch too far.
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