Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - How come all your friends are on their way to being someone else?

Word comes that the pilot for the American version of Life on Mars has been totally scrapped and production is off for a complete redo.

Will Pickering puts his finger on exactly what feels so wrong.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Nuf Ced McGreevy Shouted "We're Not Here to Mess Around!"

Life on Mars - Series One, Episode Five - February 6, 2006

The final episode of Life on Mars aired on BBCAmerica last week, and I've been alternately anticipating and dreading the BBC's upcoming sequel and the American redo (although the writers strike might have put a stake in the latter's heart by now) One of the joys of Life on Mars is the way it can play with the audience.


We know, as Sam knows, what's coming. There's something about sport(s) that brings in the pack instinct. Next week will see the SuperBowl played between two teams from two cities that hate each other's sports teams. There will be a week of taunting and chest thumping and then, after one of the team wins, there will be still be taunting and chest thumping and one more thing to yell about at the next Yankees/Red Sox game.

There's a moment at the end of this episode - everyone in the city is walking to the game. I love that moment. You start walking with just your friends and family (or even by yourself). Then as you're sitting on the bus or the train, you start noticing people dressed like you. You get off and start walking again and all of a sudden you're in a huge mass of people all walking in the same direction. I love that feeling, and I love how we see it in this scene.

Sam is walking against the tide of people. I love that too.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - a quick bitch

For a while now, I've been wishing that there was some sort of licensing board that arbitrates what constitutes a DVD extra.

Subtitles are not DVD Extras.

Interactive Menus are not DVD Extras.

Listed on the Jason King box: "Jason King is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio"

Frequent visitors to this site will know that I tend to veer away from hyperbole, and I hope that readers will take that into account when they read the next sentence. The person who thought it was necessary to put "Jason King is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio" on the box as a selling point deserves to be shot in the head.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - An opportunity arises!

About a month ago, I was skimming a message board someplace when I saw someone mention a new release of Jason King on DVD. Part of the message was a "pity I'm in the wrong region, I can't get this" lament, so I figured that it was out in the UK, and with the dollar the way the dollar is, it would likely be way too expensive for me.

I should have looked closer - turns out it's an American release.

It arrived today. I have just watched the first seven minutes of episode one. I think I'm going to have a lot to say about this.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Next Time Won't You Play With Me?

Z-Cars - "Happy Families" March 18, 1964

I'll Get the the meat of the episode in a moment, but first I have to tackle a question. And before I can do that, I have to tackle a different question.

Why do Americans say "zee" and Brits say "zed?"

Good question.

It turns out that long ago, as written English was being put into rules, the letter "Z" was one of the last ones to be recognised as a separate letter. The prevailing theory seems to be that the symbols were invented to correspond to the sound, and the actual names of the symbols came later. For "Z" there seems to have once been three popular possibilities: "zee," "zed" and "izzard."

"Izzard" seems to have gone out of fashion entirely. (Fans of Harry Stephen Keeler will recognise it - he likes to use the phrase "A to Izzard" most likely due to the oddness and the obscurity of it.) (I also like to think that there's an alternate universe somewhere where there's a cross-dressing stand-up comedian named Eddie Zed.)

So anyway, we're left with "zee" and "zed." It seems that for a while "zed" was the favorite on both sides of the Atlantic until American schoolchildren were given the dubious gift of the "ABC" song ("Now I know my ABC's/Next time won't you play with me?"). You see, "zed" doesn't fit the rhyme scheme and "zee" does.


The next thing to clear up:

What the heck is a Z-Car?

Good Question.

An interesting subset of the study of car design is the design of cars that are preferred by people in positions of authority. Frequently one variety of car becomes the default symbol of upper government and law enforcement. Examples of this are the American Crown Victoria, the Soviet Volga and in the UK, the Ford Zephyr. (The luxury variant of the Zephyr was the Zodiac - I infer that the Zodiac was used for the higher ranks, in the same way that the Crown Vics have a police standard (The "P7" or "Interceptor") and officials use the civilian (luxury) model.)

Now, to business.

Z-Cars ran for sixteen years and clocked in at 667 episodes. It seems to have been one of those things that (if half the episodes hadn't been destroyed) one could just watch episode after episode spotting actors that were better known from somewhere else.

So, as an example, here we can see Brian Blessed starting out as one of the series regulars, before he grew a beard and started doing that thing where he opens his mouth really wide and goes "arrrrrgh" for no apparent reason.

I've already hit two shows that promised on their debut that they would be more gritty and realistic (and by extension, truthy). Here we have the granddaddy of the phenomenon (at least on UK television.

The nature of this episode's grit? Looks like a kid has come into a handful of naughty pics, and his mother has decided that now that the child has looked at, well, whatever he's supposed to have looked at, his brain is fried, he is now a criminal, call the police and lock him up for the good of society.



I suspect that this particular episode was trotted out for a recent repeat because it was more of a curio, than an example of the show at its best.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Two for the road

The Persuaders! - "The Old, the New, and the Deadly" - November 12, 1971

Ages ago, when people discovered that I had a hobby of accumulating British television, I always seemed to have the same reaction from males born between about 1957 and 1962.

"Do you have The Persuaders!? I loved that show!"

My response: "No."


I came to learn that The Persuaders! were Tony Curtis and Roger Moore as millionaire playboys who fight crime. It sounded like a jolly romp, but not anything I wanted to work terribly hard at getting a copy of, no matter how many party acquaintances were interested in a nostalgia trip.

So when my Tivo informed me that The Persuaders! was on BBCAmerica, I hit the little thumbs up button and waited. The episode that came my way was one that the Tivo likely picked out because I have Doctor Who thumbed up - the villain is played by Patrick Troughton.

I am now going to say something awful that I realized as I watched this episode. Something that I think will cause me to be shunned by the old school Doctor Who fen that I used to run with.

I don't think that Troughton was all that good with the dialects.

The story as I tried to follow it is this.

Danny (Tony Curtis) is believed to be in possession of a Nazi artifact. He is in fact, not. His ex-girlfriend is the one who has brought it with her on her honeymoon. Nasty Former Nazi (Patrick Troughton) sees the artifact is (not really) in Danny's possession and sends his henchmen after it. Hilarity ensues.

The punch line comes when the henchmen - after a few of their number have been arrested and/or killed discover that NFN was not after the Nazi artifact because it was incriminating to him (as they believed), but because NFN thought that Hitler was teh hunky and wanted to snuggle with it. So the henchmen shoot him themselves.

Much of the commentary on the show seems to come from the question of how much Curtis and Moore actually got along with each other, followed by just how drunk they actually were on set. It's hard to find a definitive answer to this other than to point you to a recent photo of the two of them at a function somewhere:

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - The streets of where I'm from are paved with hearts instead of gold

Spender - "Homecoming" - January 8, 1991

There always seems to be a need for shows about the police to constantly be re-inventing the genre. It seems that every few years a new show comes out that promises to finally show the truth and grit of the lives of the world of crime (We have reached the point where, with Life on Mars, one of the unspoken tropes is that the show is so gritty that it is no longer legal for the Police to engage in the gritty truthfulness that you are about to see.)

As we will see as I go back and forth in televisual history, the ground that is being broken might not be as significant as it seems at the time.

The ground that seems to be broken in this first episode of Spender falls into two categories:

1. A confirmation of the existence of Newcastle
2. Of all the variations of quirky detective/policeman personalities, it is harder and harder to create a personality that is at once recognisable, but yet new and interesting. After all the quirky, hard boiled, and however many variations of straight arrows the genre can manage, in Detective Spender we have a new type - an enormous mope.

First, a bit about Newcastle.

I grew up in a depressed industrial city that is located in what well-paid political consultants tend to refer to as "America's Heartland." Because of this, a lot of this episode's "So, you've come back for a visit, eh?" tone really hit home with me. The Newcastle here has that same feel - that mixture of "We're just as good as that la-di-da metropolis that you've left us for, we have everything that you want, you just never bothered to find out" and the "We're better than that la-di-da metropolis that you've left us for, because we don't have all that stuff that they have -- It means we're more honest and real." I also know what it is like to go back and look up old friends - you see that passing of time more clearly when you've been away.

I suppose I'm doing more to talk about the second point - Why is Spender such an enormous mope? I do get it. Here in my la-di-da metropolis I have become skilled at playing the "naive milk-drinking Midwesterner" card. It's a good trick. (I enjoy making up completely nonsensical regional slang just to watch the reaction.) I imagine that, in London, he came to use his "well, I'm from the North and we do things like this" as a tool, rather than as a detriment. So tossing him back into Newcastle takes away that edge.

So anyway, as much as I understand it, I do not understand the plot. Such as:

1. The initial incident that sends him to Newcastle is so obviously an equipment failure that nobody could possibly find fault with him.
2. He is reluctant to have his children stay with him, as he is going to be working on police work, thus making them vulnerable. They know who he is, and he hasn't been to Newcastle for a while, so they must have come to London and stayed with him while he was a policeman.
   
3. His method of purposely screwing up is to tip off the mob boss that he is meant to help bring down that he (the mob boss) is about to be arrested. The mob boss declares that he will have revenge on Spender for saving his neck.
4. Meanwhile, the police chief that Spender screwed up for to get himself fired keeps him on.

One of the things about first episodes is that they are more set up than sense. There are a lot of balls in the air here. I'm curious to see how they all come down.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Whose side are you on, anyway?

One of the things that can sometimes really throw me when I'm watching film or television from the UK is realizing that I've presumed that the wrong character is driving the car.

It's something that only happens occasionally (which makes sense as there has to be a prolonged scene of two adults sitting in the front of a car.)

I think it is really interesting the way (at least my) brain works in these situations. I've driven a fair amount in England, and have had few problems - I find it's much harder to be a front seat passenger. But the thing is -- as I think about it now, I realize that my brain has taken all my memories of driving there and reworked them so that I am now remembering driving on the right side of the road while sitting on the left side of the car.

Weird.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - Nothing's gonna harm you, not while I'm around

The Sweeney - "Ringer" - January 2, 1975

I wracked my brain for a while trying to come up with a decent follow-up to my Comic Strip Project. I wanted to find something that had the same breadth (I do enjoy the tangents). So far, I have been unable to find something that narrow. So I cast wider.

As I discussed one of the episodes of the Comic Strip, I talked for a bit about my relationship with British Action Television:

Billions of years ago when I was young I spent half a year saving up for a book called "The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure" by Dave Rogers. In those days before the internet, it cost $55 to get an import copy of a book that had a list price of £9.95. This book was close to 600 pages of wonders, television programs that I was quite familiar with (The Avengers, The Prisoner) shows that I had heard whispers of, but had no hope of ever seeing in my lifetime (Ace of Wands, Sapphire and Steel) and finally a huge number of programs that I had never heard of. It was like an entire other world was opening up. All of these things had been made and broadcast. Millions of people had watched them. And, of course, many of them had been deleted long ago. Lost forever before I had even a clue that they existed in the first place.

My heavens I poured over that book. I learned all about Man in a Suitcase and Special Branch, and when I, through the magic of videotape trading, was able to get blurry, washed out seventh generation copies of things like Kinvig and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, I jumped at them.

I've gotten some response from that post. Between helpful friends and strangers, Internet shopping opportunities and Digital Cable, I am filling in the gaps in my UK television experience. And from that comes this latest series of posts. I'm just going to see what I can find and post on what I can see.

So anyway. To start.

In a former life, as I was working toward my MA in Literature, I annoyed a professor by taking these lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

to presume that Mrs. Porter was being busted by the Flying Squad.

It's horrific the sort of havoc that a bit of useless pop culture flotsam can wreak upon a helpless eight to twelve page essay.

Anyway, the bit of pop culture flotsam that I was aware of was The Sweeney, which I had never seen until I was able to catch the first episode, a little while ago.

Considering that it was sort of odd to be actually watching something that I'd been tangentially hearing about for decades, I was thrown by two things:

1. Hey, that's the guy who plays Inspector Morse!
2. The bad guy in this episode is played by Brian Blessed. This made an impact for two reasons. First, he was not overacting. So much. Until the end. Second, I was watching without looking at any background, but I knew that Brian Blessed had been on a big important British cop show that I had never ever seen, so I watched with the presumption that this was it. So even though he was quite obviously the baddy, I was ready for the twist ending to the first episode to be that he was actually another member of The Sweeney who had infiltrated the bad guys and the episode would conclude with him saying something along the lines of "I'm Captain Fancy of The Sweeney and you're nicked!" These hopes were dashed when Regan shotgunned him over the side of a quarry, at which point I loaded up the IMDB and realized that I was mixed up with Z-Cars. Still, it made the ending seem a bit less cliched - It's the double bluff!

All in all, it was a so so bit of television, but it's nice to have that shoe finally drop, and a good a place as any to start this off.

Breaking Down the Nervous Detectives - But first: a question for the police

While getting ready for my next semi-intermittent project I had a little question pop into my head.

How common is it for British police officers who find themselves in some sort of bother to get transferred to the other end of the country?

The usual Google and Wikipedia venues offered little joy, other than to find that regional police do seem to independent of each other. So to pursue, I had a look at the website for the Northumbria Police. The FAQ tells me that the three most common questions that they have are:

1. "I am the System Manager for my company's CCTV system. How do I comply with the Data Protection Act?"
2. "I have been asked to give evidence at court and am worried about what to expect. What will I have to do?"
3. "Where can I find information about how Northumbria Police has performed?"

I get the impression that they aren't in the frame of mind to put a lot of effort into deconstructing pop culture. Which is their right.

And congratulations to Chief Superintendent Kevin Lambert for becoming the "voice of festive talking road signs" in South Tyneside. That sounds like a fun gig.

The comic strip, part 35 - I get so angry when the teardrops start

"Detectives on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" - April 22, 1993

Billions of years ago when I was young I spent half a year saving up for a book called "The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure" by Dave Rogers. In those days before the internet, it cost $55 to get an import copy of a book that had a list price of £9.95. This book was close to 600 pages of wonders, television programs that I was quite familiar with (The Avengers, The Prisoner) shows that I had heard whispers of, but had no hope of ever seeing in my lifetime (Ace of Wands, Sapphire and Steel) and finally a huge number of programs that I had never heard of. It was like an entire other world was opening up. All of these things had been made and broadcast. Millions of people had watched them. And, of course, many of them had been deleted long ago. Lost forever before I had even a clue that they existed in the first place.

My heavens I poured over that book. I learned all about Man in a Suitcase and Special Branch, and when I, through the magic of videotape trading, was able to get blurry, washed out seventh generation copies of things like Kinvig and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, I jumped at them.

I say this here because I want to get across just how incredibly strange it is to see this episode. When Jim Broadbent arrives in the role of "Shouting George of The Weeney," I know exactly what he is sending up, even though I've never seen an episode of The Sweeney in my life.

I think that in the course of my life I have seen a grand total of three still photographs of Peter Wynegard. (apart from the episode of Doctor Who where he swishes across Lanzarote in a burkha), and that is the total of my experience with Jason King. But when Peter Richardson swishes in as Jason Bentley, I know precisely what is being referenced.

Bonehead and Foyle - well, we've met them before. They're meant to be The Professionals (as I understand it) and I know about them because Rogers cunningly entered their previous Comic Strip adventure in the book as well. And here they are again. The Professionals used to show up at two in the morning in the summertime now and then. I think I've seen about seven minutes total, and as far as I can recall it all has to do with different images of sportscars pulling up to park in front of pubs.

The odd man out, for me at least, is "Northern Detective" Dave Spanker. I suspect that the show he is supposed to be sending up was broadcast after The ITV Encyclopedia of Adventure was published. Still, I get the drift about what sort of show it was.

The musical numbers could be a reference to Cop Rock, but I would prefer to imagine that it was never shown in the UK and the Comic Strip production team were just having fun.

This is the first episode of the last real season that the Comic Strip has had to date, and it is sort of odd. On the one hand, once again, they go to what seems like a sequel, but really it isn't. The Bonehead and Foyle in this episode are the same as the ones in The Bullshitters, but if they were invented for this episode, it would work just as well. Sort of like if Bad News had wandered in through Private Enterprise, it would be weird but it would make sense.

Finally, I am nerd enough to know that at the time this was being made a group of television fans were searching out and compiling locations from various shows. The manor house, for example, looks like every other manor house that The Avengers or The Persuaders or The Champions or whatever would go pulling up to in the course of their investigations. It all looks familiar like that. So when I saw one shot in this episode:

I had to do a little digging, as it looked sort of like the exterior of Steed's flat from the color seasons of The Avengers. That would be a smart little in-joke. Unfortunately it wasn't to be. The Avengers filming was done in Dutchess Mews and looks more like this:


Close though -- I get points for trying.