Private Detective Season: The View from Daniel Pike - The Manufactured Clue

I am finding this series of posts on private detectives unexpectedly difficult. Even though I had a clear mental list of the shows I was going to blog about to start with (and have come across another couple of series which I might blog about), I'm finding that choosing the episodes is difficult. I'm not sure why this is: perhaps it's because of the customarily bleak surroundings of private detectives. In addition I'm also watching another series with a view to a series of posts I've had in mind for some time so perhaps I've just overloaded myself.

The number of private eyes I've seen in the past few weeks has confirmed certain characteristics of the TV/film PI in my mind: they have to be cynical; they have to have a number of dodgy or ambivalent relationships, sexual or otherwise; they have to have definitely messy relations with the rozzers and various local authorities, and above all they have to have a history. The nature and details of this history sometimes come out in the story and sometimes don't. For example, we know that Frank Marker is permanently marked by ending up in prison as a result of being screwed over.

Daniel Pike, however, is a private investigator who appears fully formed complete with oceans of cynicism, but whose history is not given in any great detail. I really love the economy with which the first episode of the two series just starts off with him in an investigation with no explanation of who he is or what he's about. Obviously we know he's in Glasgow, because in terms of grittiness this show makes Public Eye look like The Magic Roundabout. Each episode manages to get through its entire half hour with never a smile, with continual scenes of utter desolation, depravity, violence, and corruption: in fact this show has probably done more to frighten people off Glasgow than Glasgow itself has ever done. There is little about it on the internet, but as far as I can see it has a group of small but devoted fans. It was made by BBC Scotland (more likely, although some online sources say BBC2; it does, however have familiar 1960s actors from England in it as well as its Scots cast), and its thirteen episodes broadcast in two series between 1971-3. Some only survive in black and white but the entirety of the remaining eleven episodes are on the internet.

At the beginning of The Manufactured Clue we see two young men in the street in the evening, clearly out for vandalism and trouble, who wind up killing a man who runs a pie stall. Again, in conformity with the private eye genre it isn't about the investigation and is instead about the character and relations of the investigator and others, so we see what's happened from the start, even though some of the witnesses of the incident are so traumatised that they just can't remember what happened.

The police are desperate for an arrest so take in a likely suspect, and the rest of the show is about the attempts of the various concerns involved to either pervert the course of justice or to ensure the right man gets convicted.

It is a wonderfully evocative and atmospheric episode of an interesting show which I've only discovered when looking round for this series of posts. I don't know whether this was intentional, but the episodes of this show seem to have a particular theme, so in this one there are a lot of scenes revolving around dodgy nightclubs and nightlife; presumably because of the milieu in which the crime took place. Probably at the time this was broadcast it would have made the audience think of the Kray twins, who were both sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969, and who moved in exactly the sort of world that is depicted here.

I have just one criticism of this episode in particular and possibly some of the others. Pike often does investigate the sort of things that private investigators investigate but it frequently seems to me that the subject matter crosses over into criminal matters, which reduces the credibility of the series somewhat. I don't know whether that is intended to increase the deliberate grittiness of the show, although often Pike investigates side matters to any crimes that come up. Essentially the matter of this episode, whether it would legally be murder (I'm not sure they have manslaughter in Scotland so whatever legal thing they have instead) is exactly the sort which no private detective would touch with a bargepole if they've got any sense. And I don't just mean not investigating it, I can almost hear Frank Marker telling his clients to go to the police with anything touching this case at all, let alone getting involved.

I like this show a lot. It's relatively slow paced, and I don't really have an instant comparison, but it's growing on me as I'm watching more episodes. It does require attention and concentration, and definitely shouldn't be binged because it's so bleak, but this is a great show to add to the stable of cult TV shows.

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