IN A TWO-PAGE ADVERTISEMENT in the American show-biz magazine “Variety,” Rediffusion trumpeted its 10 years of achievement in Independent TV.

“There must be something special about the work we do,” the advertisement read. “Like Around the Beatles, This Week, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Crime and Punishment, Freedom Road, Riviera Police.”

Since Rediffusion has lined it with Shakespeare and Dostojevski as amongst its finest hours, it is clear that the London TV company is very proud of its series, Riviera Police.

Now it is clear that the vast majority of sensitive and intelligent critical opinion in Britain does not share Rediffusion’s enthusiasm for Riviera Police.

It has had an even worse critical reception than Groucho – Rediffusion’s other recent major light entertainment show – and when one has said that one has about plumbed the depths of pejorative language.

One critic called it “decadent, trashy entertainment,” and added that “everyone in it is courting contempt.”

“The Spectator” said: “This dear and nasty programme is apparently inspired by Continental Films, a publication rich in pin-ups which are a solace to tired TV executives.”

Now the name of the “Spectator” critic who penned those lines is Stuart Hood. Mr. Hood was Programme Controller at Rediffusion when the decision to make Riviera Police must have been taken.

‘Nasty’

If he thought the idea was “nasty,” theoretically it was in Mr. Hood’s power to prevent the series being made. Unless, of course, he was overruled. And there was only one man who could have overruled him – Mr. John McMillan, the general manager and present Programme Controller. Could this offer some clue to Mr. Hood’s short tenure of high office at Rediffusion?

In any case, it is clear from the “Variety” advertisement that Mr. McMillan does not share Mr. Hood’s distaste for this farrago of sun-tanned shenanigans on the beaches of the Mediterranean.

And it must be reported that Mr. McMillan certainly has numbers – if nothing else – on his side. Since it first began, Riviera Police has consistently jogged Coronation Street for the heady accolade of being No. 1 in the Tam Ratings. Why curl up with shame when that medal is being pinned to your breast?

Indeed, when I spoke to Lord Hill a fortnight ago, I asked him what he thought of a situation where critical opinion was at such wide variance with mass preference. Did he think the critics were wrong or out of touch? He tactfully dodged the question.

But in spite of Lord Hill’s reticence, it is evident that certain discreet noises emanating from the ITA indicated that the Authority was not happy with the moral tone of certain stories transmitted so early in the morning nor with the cameras creeping pre-occupation with flesh for flesh’s sake.

Blonde

I recall one early episode where a fetishist party – with girls dressed as animals so that they could waggle furry tails at the camera – occupied a good deal of the time.

A blonde sun-bathing on a piano stuffed the base of a champagne glass into her bikini top and cooed, “Fill me another, lover.” Another, removing her swim-suit, innocently gurgled: “Don’t these bikinis cut into you when they’re wet.”

The plot involved the detective being hit on the head and falling between the straddled legs of a bathing beauty. The legs were his only clue to the villains, and the rest of the film was a flurry of navels, thighs, bosoms and calves as every photogenic clue on the Riviera was carefully examined.

What a sad change, then, there is to report on one recent episode of Riviera Police.

Not a navel within whistling distance. The one bikini in view was dangled in middle-shot as if it were something ready to go to the laundry. The heroine was dressed in a one-piece black swim-suit and bosoms were so scarce that Riviera tourists authorities might well contemplate an action for defamation and loss of trade. Indeed, the most exciting garb was worn by some monks who were dragged into the plot.

Without sun-tan lotion to act as an aphrodisiac or rounded contours as a diversion, what is there to hold audiences to Riviera Police other than inertia?

The story was typically feeble and contemptuous of viewer intelligence. A woman archaeologist, madly possessive of her son, jealously murders all girls the son is interested in. She convinces the boy he has done the murders in his sleep.

Forgotten

Such details as to why the hotel authorities conspired to deny the presence of one of the murdered girls in the hotel were conveniently dumped – unexplained and forgotten.

The French accents of the cast came and went with bewildering uncertainty. The shooting was flat, the editing leaden and the dialogue crass.

Determined to cash in on the success of such sophisticated thrillers as Burke’s Law, Riviera Police seems on every count merely a bumbling, pathetic copy from its colourless four detectives – some recruited from the Dominions to make them palatable in Australia or Canada – to the dire selection of cretinous plots chosen by its editor and producer, Jordan Lawrence.

The BBC, I would suggest, deserves some share of the credit – or blame – for sending Riviera police to the top of the ratings. Since it has consistently opposed it with repeats – either Hugh and I or the Likely Lads (and both recently seen before) – it has unwittingly conspired in the creation of the canard that the British public prefers programmes like Riviera Police to anything else on TV.

But what will the ITA think – I wonder – when it is handing out its new contracts of a company that lists Riviera Police as one of the finest achievements of its 10-year-career?

The post Decadent and trashy – Is this YOUR view of Riviera Police appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

UNDOUBTEDLY the folk hero of our time is the detective. Whether it is the rumpled Maigret or the suave Bond, there is an inexhaustible audience fascinated by the conflict of a lone figure against the combined forces of crime and evil.

We no longer demand of our private eye or special agent or police inspector that he be a paragon himself. Indeed, corruptibility must now be part of his equipment.

He can be a rake, bribe-able, cowardly, effete, seedy, snobbish, vicious, devious, boastful, dull and ugly, and still retain our sympathy in his struggle against amoral opponents who are sometimes not as amoral as he is.

I suspect it is basically his aloneness that makes him so appealing a figure for contemporary audiences. No matter what help he gets from assistants or scientific paraphernalia, he is always a man pitted physically or mentally against the unknown.

Mass identification with his problems and dilemmas comes naturally to societies like our own where loneliness has become a mass disease.

It follows, then, that in any TV series based upon the activities of a single detective, its success will depend more on the development of the central character rather than on the strength of the plot or the ingenuity of the detection processes.

Wasted

Judging from the work of three detectives seen on TV – Sherlock Holmes, Amos Burke, of Burke’s Law, and Frank Marker, of Public Eye – the Americans are beginning to learn this lesson while out producers are still light years away from it.

Sherlock Holmes on the BBC seems to me to be the saddest example of a wasted opportunity. On a completely undemanding level, the aura of sinister Victoriana is acceptable enough.

Douglas Wilmer has the authentic jaw, the hawk-like nose, the cold, detached stare, the clipped decisiveness that one envisages for Holmes. Nigel Stock, as Watson, is a bumbling appendage that rarely adds much to the action.

But a recent episode “The Beryl Coronet” adapted by Nicholas Palmer, summed up what I feel are all the faults of this series to date.

A valuable piece of a coronet had been stolen from the home of a leading London banker. The banker suspects his son but Holmes, after measuring the imprints of a wooden leg and finding some significant boots, proves that the boy was “inn-oh-cent,” as everybody seemed to pronounce it.

Now trying to stretch this story to an hour has obviously been too much for the imagination of either the writer or the director, Max Varnel.

Lingering on long pans up and down staircases, each clue was stretched out to fill Gargantua and flashbacks were used to repeat events we already knew.

An even worse mistake was not introducing either Holmes or Watson into the story until almost 20 minutes had passed.

With all that padding needed, couldn’t we be told more about Holmes? His cocaine addiction, his Stradivarius, his chemical experiments, his skill at fencing, his university, his brother, Mycroft.

Conan Doyle’s creation, brought up to date with some imaginative scripting and some modern pace to the editing, could still be exciting stuff. But this reverential, orthodox approach merely reduces to the routine a unique treasure of detective fiction material.

Now in Burke’s Law, shown on the Commercial Channel, gimmickery is all. The improbably stories rarely interfere with Burke’s conquest of the sexiest suspects in America. The only clues that really interest him are those found in mattresses.

Who Killed Rosie Sunset? enabled Burke, played with dead-pan aplomb by Gene Barry, to investigate a flamenco dancer, a concertina player, a counterfeiter, and an abstract Russian sculptor. He was mauled by a luscious brunette tax expert, he was cornered by a Slavic beauty whose English vocabulary consisted only of the words “hello” and “yes” and he was stroked by a rich blonde wearing tights that were little more than an epidermal disguise.

Racy

In his Rolls, equipped with telephones and cocktails and driven by an Oriental chauffeur, he raced from bedroom to nightclub to artist’s studio. I cannot tell you who did it or why, but while it lasted it was racy, pacy and alive. With a much better story the Holmes episode was slow, bumbling and dead.

But, by comparison with ABC’s new series, Public Eye, both Holmes and Burke are masterpieces of TV technique. Its private eye, Frank Marker, is supposed to typify the new anti-hero figure.

He has sleazy offices, shady clients, an old sports jacket, stains on his tie, is plagued by income tax demands and when he gets into a fight, he loses.

All of this information came out of the TV Times. None of it was visible in Saturday’s first episode, “The Morning Wasn’t So Hot.”

In technique and subject matter, it brought back memories of “No orchids for Miss Blandish,” which I have always considered on the most tasteless British films ever made.

It concerned the activities of a pimp who picks up unsuspecting girls newly arrived in London and turns them into call-girls and prostitutes.

A little brunette, Jenny, is desired for their brothels by a crime syndicate and the pimp is forced to sell Jenny to them.

When Marker, who through no detection device that was visible to the naked eye, finally finds Jenny – her mother has been worried about her – Jenny decides she wants to stay a prostitute.

“Mr. Marker, last week I earned £300 [£6,500 today, allowing for inflation – Ed]. Did you?” is her decisive answer to his revelation that she has been sold to other brothel keepers. There’s a moral to keep our girls pure and unsullied.

Roger Marshall’s dialogue would best appeal to the paperback literati of Shaftesbury Avenue with sentences like “The nearest he gets to power is in your bed” and “He’s in town getting the lay of the land.”

Alfred Burke, as Marker, had little to do except look hang-dog and disgruntled while this flow of “ugh” poured over the screen.

During the advertisements I switched over to BBC and listened to Quintin Hogg and Malcolm Muggeridge in Not So Much engaging in a fascinating and adult discussion about sexual morality.

It is perhaps typical of our sense of values that Not So Much should be condemned as offensive while puerility like Public Eye will probably survive.

Which, in the end, is more corrupting?

The post Some of the things Burke (of Burke’s Law) can teach Sherlock Holmes appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.

This week my 1965 ITV programmes are coming from Westward and ATV Midlands.

28th April
The Fugitive ‘Somebody to Remember’
Westward

For reasons I forget, we watched the film version of The Fugitive in RE at school. Having spotted it in the schedules, I’d been intrigued what the television version would be like. I gathered from the synopses that they follow the same plot of a man falsely convicted of murdering his wife, escaping and going on the run, planning to try to catch the real killer and thus clear his name. I love shows that neatly explain their premise to viewers in the opening titles (The Prisoner being one of the best examples) and The Fugitive does just that, showing how Dr Richard Kimble escaped with a voice over filling in the rest.

In this episode, Kimble is working in a warehouse. His Greek boss discovers he is dying and, revealing that he has always known who Kimble really is, concocts a plan. They will trick the police, making them believe Kimble has escaped to Greece under his boss’s name. But really, Kimble will still be in the US and so he will have some time to get a few more steps ahead of the police. Unfortunately, someone else has also found out who Kimble is and the police are soon in town.

The episode is tense as the plan so very nearly works and it all builds to an exciting climax, with the police pursuing Kimble and his boss from the airport. Those opening titles ensure we have firm belief in Kimble’s innocence and I was willing him on to get away!

Stingray ‘A Nut For Marineville’
Westward

I haven’t seen ATV/ITC’s Stingray before and it must have some of the most thrilling opening titles of any television programme. A voice tells us to “Stand by for action!” and then something explodes out of the sea. Our characters and the Stingray ship are introduced and then we are told that “Anything can happen in the next half hour.” Anything? Like what? I don’t know but we’ve had a crash zoom, Stingray has just fired into the ocean, then leapt into the air, some planes have soared overhead and a giant fish has been blown up. I’m firmly convinced that anything really could happen.

Some baddie aliens have got a ship they believe is indestructible. I’m not sure what their long-term plan is but I’m just going to assume it’s to take over the Earth. That seems to be standard. The aliens’ design includes silver faces, high foreheads and what I can only describe as face fins – I love it. They also have some cracking evil dialogue. One admits of their plan, “Yes it’s crazy,” but then adds, in a lovely cheery tone, “Crazy enough to succeed!”

29th April
The Saint ‘Marcia’
Westward

With the third series recently finished, Westward are repeating the second series of ITC’s The Saint, which has numerous single word episode titles including, ‘Judith’, ‘Teresa’, ‘Iris’, ‘Luella’ and ‘Sophia’. Have you spotted the theme? Marcia herself doesn’t make an appearance in the episode. After having acid thrown in her face, the film actress committed suicide and now an unknown, Claire Avery, has been brought in to replace her in a film. Claire starts getting threatening letters, saying that unless she pays up, she’ll face the same fate as Marcia.

This isn’t the only Saint episode to be set in a film studio and I always think it must have made it easy for them to source props. Simon Templar himself features relatively little in this episode, with the focus given over to the rest of the cast much of the time. The only one I recognised among them was Johnny Briggs, who plays the third assistant director. By the time of this repeat he was a regular in No Hiding Place and in the next decade would join Coronation Street for a thirty year stint as Mike Baldwin.

Gideon’s Way ‘To Catch a Tiger’
ATV Midlands

Thanks to the magic of time travel, I’m able to watch Westward and ATV Midlands at the same time tonight. I’ve only seen one episode of ITC’s Gideon’s Way before and it didn’t particularly impress me but I head in open-minded.

A woman is killed after a car accident and uses her dying breath to say that John Borgman murdered his wife. Soon afterwards we see John Borgman sacking an employee, Samuels, who has been fiddling the books so he can afford to care for his sick wife. The old guy goes home, poisons his wife and shoots himself. Borgman has another wife now and a mistress in his secretary. His new wife is suspicious and convinced he’s having an affair. The married couple aren’t getting on well and Borgman is horrible to her throughout the episode. Gideon has looked into the first wife’s death and discovered she had an enormous amount of morphine in her. I become desperate for Borgman to be the killer, especially after he viciously calls his current wife a “fat, drunken slut”. He is (hooray!) and following a tense courtroom scene in which one of the coppers nearly cracks under the pressure of Borgman’s top solicitor, the evidence wins through.

Gideon’s Way reminds me a lot of No Hiding Place. This episode even has a similar opening to the No Hiding Place I watched in 1961 – there too a police investigation begins because someone has reported suspicions about a man murdering his wife. Both focus more on the guest cast than the recurring characters and while I enjoy this novelty, it does mean needing consistently good casting throughout the series. When there is a weaker episode in terms of casting or plotting, you don’t have the leads there to carry the episode and I worry that it would be hard to maintain that consistency. The other similarity is that they are both very slow. As much as I have enjoyed the episodes of No Hiding Place I’ve seen, there is no way I would use it or Gideon’s Way to introduce someone to 1960s’ television. Even for me, the pace is only just about still acceptable.

30th April
Burke’s Law ‘Who Killed Cop Robin?’
Westward

Captain Amos Burke is the ladies man of the Los Angeles Police Department. His vast personal wealth probably helps in this but he is also a rather suave fellow. We see little of this tonight though as he shows a more severe side while hunting down the killer of his old mentor. If my years of watching police shows have taught me anything, it’s that no one likes a cop killer and appropriately Burke takes no messing around from the suspects tonight. We get a fantastic fight in a warehouse so they can take full advantage of the potential of toppling boxes. They are a lot cheaper than smashed glass and furniture.

1st May
Dr Who ‘The Dimensions of Time’
BBC-1

This is episode two of the serial that has come to be known as ‘The Space Museum’. I don’t remember this story very well but once I’m watching, bits come back to me. The Doctor has dumped his granddaughter by now and picked up another young girl, Vicki. Along with Ian and Barbara, they land on a planet with a museum containing all sorts of things from other worlds. From the dialogue in this episode, we learn that the travellers have seen themselves as exhibits in this museum. They must find a way to change things and avoid that happening.

Despite the serious nature of this problem, the episode manages its lighter moments. The Doctor hides inside a Dalek casing, which is also a good reminder that the Daleks are not the machines but the aliens that usually inhabit them. The Doctor also tricks a machine designed to display images of his thoughts. The Doctor simply imagines ridiculous things instead.

One of the things I have come to love about Dr Who’s early years is its sheer ambition. They have a tiny studio space to work with but decide to present an entire museum. We’re over a year into the show now and this is the first story that actually uses time travel as part of the plot – it has always just been a way of getting somewhere before.

2nd May
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Westward

Electricity pulses and the camera pulls back to reveal a man strapped to a chair with electrodes on his head. He’s being brainwashed but we can’t be sure who by because they are simply a booming voice, insisting he pledge allegiance. It was such a gripping opening. The brainwashed man (David Hedison) is captain of a nuclear submarine and upon return to it, begins sabotaging the mission. He’s been told he’ll be watched because he’s not the only one onboard who has pledged allegiance to the organisation. This was so intriguing and the submarine sets are fantastic. I’m left still wondering who the mysterious villains really are.

3rd May
Tales of the Riverbank
BBC-1

This short programme from the Watch with Mother strand was wonderfully laid back and relaxing. It features real animals, with the story narrated by a voice over. Hammy, a hamster, is new in town and meets Roderick, a rat, who takes him on a boat trip. They also meet some ducks. I was impressed by the animal actions and, to enable me to sleep easy, will assume they were all treated well.

4th May
Association Football
BBC-1

Liverpool are playing Inter-Milan in semi-final of the European Cup, which was eventually replaced by the UEFA Champions League. While European football gets prime time live screenings in the present day, I feel sorry for 1965’s viewers who get a mere half hour of highlights. Liverpool won 3-1 in this home match, but would lose in the second leg and Inter-Milan eventually went on to be the tournament’s victors.

What you could have won – missing and unavailable

Here are some of the listings that intrigued me but I was unable to watch this week.

MISSING Public Eye ‘Have It on the House’ – ‘Hired to track down a military man who has duped a woman out of £700, Marker’s instinct tells him he’s being taken for a fool – but conning an expert can prove dangerous.’ I adore Frank Marker in Public Eye. He’s such a wonderful down-trodden character. This is the final episode of the programme’s first series.

MISSING The Bed-Sit Girl ‘The Last Half Inch’ – This Sheila Hancock sitcom follows a young woman dreaming of something more – oh aren’t we all? I don’t know of any earlier sitcoms with a woman as the main lead and every episode of this is missing.

MISSING Orlando ‘Humpty Dumpty’- Remember Crane from 1963? This is a spin-off starring Crane’s friend. While Crane’s survival rate of two episodes (out of 39) is poor, at four (out of 76) Orlando’s isn’t much better. Crane was shown later in the schedules but Orlando was specifically styled as a children’s serial and as a result gets an early evening slot.

The post Back in time for TV: 28 April-4 May 1965 appeared first on THIS IS MY 1960s from Transdiffusion.