Second Verdict: Who Killed the Princes in the Tower?
In October 2023 I published a post about an episode of the police series Barlow. I made the mistake of commenting in it that Stratford Johns played exactly the same character in numerous shows over the years and listed the ones I thought he was in. Naively I hadn't realised that I still didn't have the whole list of his appearances as Detective Chief Superintendent Barlow, and have since found that he was teamed up with a co-star in the Softly Softly series (Frank Windsor, who played Detective Chief Superintendent Watt) in other shows as well.
So these two actors played the same roles (I'm going by IMDb here) in Z-Cars (1962 to 1965), Softly Softly (1966 to 1969), Jack the Ripper (1973), Softly Softly Task Force (1969 to 1976),and Second Verdict (1976). These come up to a total of 345 episodes, and honestly they must have felt like they could do their job blindfold. In addition Johns played Barlow in Barlow at Large/Barlow (1971 to 1975) to a total of 374 episodes, playing the same character for 14 years! He even drifted into the role while a guest on the panel on Whodunnit and spoofed the role in The Two Ronnies.
I hope you're not that bored of your job.
In Second Verdict they come together as these fictional characters dramatically to try to solve long-standing mysteries. I'm fascinated at this format of having fictional characters solving real mysteries, and unfortunately it only lasted for six episodes (there was another series about Jack the Ripper which I will come to in a separate post). There is a mystery of studio and location filming for our fictional detectives and the testimony of the real people is acted out. It's clever television, and I'm afraid I can only echo what so many of the reviews on IMDb say, namely that you couldn't possibly make this nowadays. The reviews refer to this sort of TV as 'two men talking in a room', but I don't think that is that much of a problem when so much of the 'content' on the internet is people talking in a bunker echo chamber to their base nowadays. Rather I suspect that viewers (nowadays and possibly even then) wouldn't want to watch a show where they feel they are watching a conversation. This TV is more like watching a symposium or discussion than being told something.
The subject of the episode I have chosen is the disappearance of the deposed King Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, from the Tower of London in 1483. There has always been an assumption that they were murdered, probably on the orders of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who ascended the throne as Richard III. Just to be my normal annoying self I'm not going to say what Barlow and Watt conclude.
Even if you don't follow the line of reasoning and evidence that closely (and I'm sure there are endless enthusiasts of the subject who watched this with notebooks and screamed at the screen) this is delightful television. It takes us back to a former age of England, and anything with any scenes set in the Tower of London can't fail to do that.
There is a possible criticism of this show that it is possibly misnamed because they don't always reach a second verdict on these cases: clearly if you are considering a suspected murder committed in 1483 there is unlikely to be any evidence which hasn't already been extensively chewed over in the search for a solution.
Other cases reconsidered in the series are the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Henri Desire Landru murders, John Alexander Dickman who was hanged for murder, Lizzie Borden, and the arson attack on the Reichstag in 1933. Some of these are currently available on YouTube on a channel which is adding new contact so they may all still be available online.
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