Private Detective Season: Bulman - Pandora's Many Boxes
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The former Detective Sergeant George Kitchener Bulman has obliquely appeared on this blog before, although I don't know whether he was mentioned by name. This is because he managed to appear in three series over more than a decade of which the first, The XYY Man (1976-7), has appeared on here before. The others are Strangers (1978-82) and Bulman (1985-7), to a total of 65 episodes. While this doesn't quite match Stratford Johns's many appearances as essentially the same character for years on end, this is of course an impressive run.
Bulman started off as a side character in The XYY man. He was a police officer, and obviously was a hit because he then got Strangers as the same character. Something which keeps hitting me in this series of posts is that your average private detective is probably not best suited to work as a police officer: the word manverick comes to mind, probably impatient with procedure, with red tape, and certainly not best suited to getting on in the sort of boys' club you find in police forces, unless he happens to be exceptionally gifted and also have understanding superiors. If this was the case in the 1970s I'm certain it is even more the case now.
Anyway Bulman has all of these personal qualities which would make him essentially unsuited to police work. He's maverick beyond belief, forever frustrated at the limitations of police work. Incidentally he comes with background galore, including a marriage and the many contacts you get by police work, which actually make him fit the stereotype of the private detective perfectly. I wonder whether many former police officers become private detectives, but in this series Bulman has come to his senses and actually left the force, and honestly it suits him down to the ground.
He sets himself up in a business mending clocks and on the side does a bit of private detecting. One of the characteristics of this show is that the detecting is quite different from, say, Public Eye. Bulman doesn't do divorce at all, and one of the characteristics of this series is that he ironically keeps being approached by the police and security services to do jobs for them, which they can't do by following the rules because they know he doesn't do rules. For example, in this one he manipulates a former colleague in to finding things out for him on the police computer system, which Bulman no longer has access to. He does this by beating up his former colleague in a strip club. This aspect of the show gives it a unique approach and means it overcomes the criticism I've found myself making of other private detective shows where they drift into cases which are really the province of the law, not the private inquiry agent, by making the law the subject of this inquiry agent.
One of the things I like best about this show is the way it is like they've bottled the 1980s and let it out bit by bit. Although Bulman himself doesn't embody anything about the 1980s in particular, the entire surroundings and all the characters bring back that decade to perfection. I did watch this show at at the time, but of course the 1980s were going on then and I couldn't have known how I would reminisce about them forty years later!
In this one Bulman is approached by Dylan Chadwick, who has applied for some high flying job and been turned down for it because of the results of the checks that have been carried out on him. This means he has already left his previous job, can't get it back, and doesn't think he can get any other job. He also can't know what the checks have supposedly revealed about him, and feels like he has been slandered by this. It has certainly had a significant impact on his life, so he approaches Bulman to find out what has happened and what can be done about it.
The way Bulman and his sidekick get to the bottom of this is relatively pedestrian, with a few twists and tricks, as you'd expect, but then I don't think the private detective is ultimately about the investigation. There is an additional twist in that there is a rumour that Chadwick murdered his wife.
I have noticed that the private detective genre often incorporates a discussion of the ethics or morals involved in the case or its investigation, and the solution to this one has a heavily ethical slant. We also get to hear Bulman's discussion of the ethics of his investigation and deciding what to act on and what not to act on.
I don't have any criticisms of the show or this episode.
A highly recommended series and episode.
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