Denis Shaw Season: The Mind of Mr JG Reeder - The Strange Case
Content warning: this show contains racist stereotypes of Chinese people and a white actor 'blacked up' to play a Chinese man.
Regular readers will be familiar with the way I start one of these series of posts thinking that it will only take a few weeks, and then it takes over my life and results in a series of posts taking months. This series of posts about shows in which actor Denis Shaw has a part may not become quite that unwieldy, but it is certainly becoming more of an undertaking than I expected it to. It's introduced me to several shows I didn't know and has encouraged me to revisit a couple of shows I have only tried before. The Mind of Mr JG Reeder is one of these: I have definitely watched it before and not taken to it.
The show (1969 to 1971) is perhaps unusual because while other media of the time was apeing the past (Adam Adamant, for example) this show is based on fiction which genuinely comes from the past. The show is set in the 1920s, not far from when Edgar Wallace was writing the stories it's based on, and the music and titles have a very go-ahead art deco twenties feel. The show is about JG Reeder, who is an assistant to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the the investigations he does because of his ability to disentangle complex situations and crimes.
The Strange Case is about the Earl of Sellington, a great philanthropist who runs charities for refugee children and others. Notwithstanding, he has managed to make a mess of his own family life, because he has disowned his own son, Lord Carlin, for marrying a shopgirl. Lord Carlin has fathered a boy with his wife and then abandoned both of them; Lady Carlin applied for a job as a temporary secretary to Mr Reeder, so is in on the whole thing. The situation fiurther complicated by Lord Carlin's problem with opium. The crime is about money which has been taken from one of the Earl's charities, and he suspects his son.
Denis Shaw's role in the show is another unfortunate one: he plays a Chinese man who runs a Chinese restaurant which is a front for an opium den, attended by Lord Carlin. As an idea of what Chinese people are like and how it is acceptable to portray them, I suspect this role is taken directly from the original fiction, but surely even by the 1960s was already creaking like an old gate. When I say that it's terrible Shaw's character even says at one point that he is 'velly solly'. Now I know you might say that that would have been more acceptable in the past but it's just off-putting.
It's not bad as a show though, and I certainly haven't been wanting to tear my own eyes out while watching it for the purposes of this post. There is, however, one major plot fault with it, which is from the beginning, two things are blindingly obvious: that the son didn't steal the money and the identity of the person who did steal it. There is also the problem that the theft from the charity would require the son who hasn't spoken to his father for years, to have an intimate acquaintance of his dealings on that particular day/
If you wanted, you could watch this as a criticism of past charity and the dissolution of the British establishment and particularly nobility, but of course this may be an anachronism.
An interesting show with a few flaws, providing another unsuitable role for Denis Shaw.
This blog is mirrored at
culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)
Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog