Special Branch: Catherine the Great (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

Special Branch (1969 to 1970 and 1973 to 1974) is the show that will confuse you if you're not careful because it is more like two. The two halves divided over four series were done quite differently, despite both being about the same set up, with completely different casts, sets, filming approaches, and so on. Personally I think of series 1 and 2 as being the ones with Derren Nesbitt as the unexpected sexy piece (although I see he's been married four times and has five children so perhaps it's only unexpected to me) and series 3 and 4 as the ones with Patrick Mower as the more expected sexy piece. Despite Mower being the sexy piece, George Sewell still gets all the women. The pervading theme of this post will be that Special Branch always always surprises you.

Series three and four of 1973 to 74 are also noteworthy as being the first series made by Euston Films, as part of their proposal for a new type of television drama. From the start Euston always shot on film rather than videotape, and also had a trick of using two crews filming different parts of the same show at the same time. This gave its productions a speed and quick-change action that had previously been unknown. These 1970s shows seem to bring us to so many major turning points in TV and this is another one: this is the production technique that allowed shows like The Sweeney and its imitators later in the decade.

Catherine the Great is a series 4 episode about a German assassin called Helmut Rehfuss who has arrived in the country to perform the assassination of General Yqueras, the head Domegas, a former British colony who is also in the country. And who is, incidentally, as stubborn as a mule about resisting his protection. Thus far so pedestrian, and this plot could be that of many an episode of The Professionals or any other show.

Which is why I'm absolutely howling that the show has taken this pedestrian plot and essentially done it as if it was written by John Waters. This was broadcast on 21st February 1974 and could still give Ron DeSantis a stroke in 2023. It's absolutely wild. What makes it wild is the very simple plot device of having Rehfuss the assassin escape police surveillance by coming into the country dressed in drag, and so he repeatedly literally walks past them without them clocking him at all.

It's not only that he disguised himself but he is actually a drag queen and the show devotes quite a lot of time to his actual drag act and of course the Special Branch have to go to the club to see him perform. There is also quite a lot of discussion of drag and performative and notional gender, which again would be very sophisticated on today's TV. I love the bit where Craven's boss starts reminiscing about a 'friend' who didn't realise the bird he went with in Singapore wasn't. I have to say the scenes of a drag queen going around shooting people are very effective. In an age before people began to verbalise their misunderstanding that performative femininity is automatically sexual, I think the show was just intending to show all sorts of human life and indicate the way Special Branch's work took them into all sorts of odd corners of society. There's at least one other episode with a drag queen, played by Dame Hilda Bracket.

Just to add to the wokeness of the episode one of Rehfuss's contacts is a gay antiques dealer, although nothing happens because Rehfuss murders him.

There is further human interest in the episode by the way Craven isn't working with Haggerty but with Inspector North from CID, who he previously got kicked out of Special Branch for his failure to kill a suspect when he should have done. Here, he does get it together to shoot Rehfuss with reasonable force.

If I have one criticism of the episode (and I think this can tend to go for many Special Branch episodes) it's that the plot is a bit far-ranging and ambitious. It brings in gender politics, drag, sexual politics, national security, international politics, colonialism, post-colonialism, office politics, reasonable force, you name it. That said, this might just be an indication that this is another of those shows which require attention to be paid to them, although I feel like if I'd seen it on one viewing in 1974 I would have found it difficult to keep up. My only other criticism would be that if you have an actor doing a drag act you need to shave their pits or if they won't have them shaved put them in a dress with sleeves. This one's a blunder.

As you know I do get worried that writing about old TV will attract the gammons, so to ensure they're scared off, have a snatch of a Special Branch night out in the seventies:

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