Paul Temple: The Quick and The Dead (Seventies TV Season)
The introduction to this series of posts about 1970s TV shows can be found here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/seventies-tv-season-introduction
I have very briefly touched on the Paul Temple 'franchise' on this blog's predecessor but have never yet blogged about a whole episode. I am going to have to refer you to the relevant wikipedia page for the full details of the many books, radio plays, films and these TV programmes made featuring the fictional crime writer and detective. I am also going to have to refer you to WIkipedia for the full choppy history of this TV series, because it suffered from inexplicable BBC lack of interest. The show was broadcast across four series between 1969 and 1971, and became wildly popular in Germany. The BBC for unrecorded reasons seemed to lose interest in it, and so the final series, including this episode, was rather focusless. The series then suffered from the junking policies of the time. The upshot is that the only way to experience all of the remaining available episodes of this show is to watch them dubbed into German. It's bizarre.
As it happens this fourth series episode from 1971 is an absolute cracker of a TV programme. It's like the show took all the ingredients guaranteed to make a drama successful in the seventies and mixed them up. There is a strong streak of folk horror in this one: we have inbred villagers, an ancient Pagan site, suspected current Pagan worship, all sorts of unexplained goings on, an apparent suicide, a supposedly mystified vicar, a young lad who is creepily the only child in the village and spends his days playing the organ in the church and being screamed at by his working class father... And then into the middle of this Temple and his wife Steve walk in like fashion plates and Temple blows the whole thing apart.
You'll notice that I'm making a point of being fulsome in this episode's praise first because I want to make it plain that the criticisms I'm going to make of this show don't mean I don't think you should watch it. This show is so lush and layered that it can't actually fail, but there are a few things I've found myself wondering.
A major thing is that you'll recall I said above that Paul Temple is a detective novelist and detective, and then the features I list above are not characteristic of a detective story. In that it also tends to be a bit different to many of the other episodes of the series I've seen. In fact I would go so far as to say that this is an MR James-style ghost story, rather than a straightforward Paul Temple in the mould of Francis Durbridge. If you want a more recent inspiration for the approach, you could possibly look to Hammer or one of Tigon's anthology films. You get the idea.
They made the decision, rightly, to accompany much of the programme with organ music. This was absolutely the right thing to do because it gives exactly the right horror film ethos. Some of the time we see an actual organ in an actual church being played, and the rest of the time virtually all of the interiors are sets, which is where it rather tends to go wrong in my opinion. The problem with the visuals is that this show can't decide what decade it's depicting. We see Temple and Steve dressed up to date, in synthetic fabrics, Temple with his shirt open almost to the waist, and they're standing in what looks like a set for a 1930s drama. Probably an Agatha Christie. It's the interiors of the cottages they're got wrong, and they should have done what they did for the church, and show an old place with gradual additions over the years, in other words the way anyone else decorates their house. Instead what we actually get is scenes that look like they're set in the seventies and then the scenes in the cottages look as if they're set in the thirties, with nothing visually dating from before or after. This is my only real criticism of this, that it makes the change from one scene to another seem wrong.
To me this feels like a loss of interest in quality control and I have read that there were a number of ways the final series really wasn't attended to properly, and it honestly shows. You don't get that in the earlier episodes I've seen. Another example is that to a native British person it is apparent that the boy is of a completely different class from his biological father, who also comes form a completely different part of the country, despite them all supposedly having been villagers since Doomsday. If you recall the Monty Python sketch about the poet father who disapproves of his coal miner son it is as ridiculous as that, only the other way round.
I suppose you could also say that there is too much going on in this show, but I personally like the sheer volume of stuff they've got in.
As I say, I don't think you should let these criticisms put you off: this is an excellent episode of a rather diverse and layered programme, which is well out of the ordinary for seventies TV shows.
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