Police state
Clive Gammon
Sufficiently forewarned by advance publicity which proclaimed it to be concerned with coppers, I was able to avoid Hunter's Walk, the new ITV Monday-running series. But I was taken in by Sutherland's Law (BBC 1) which at first sight seemed to be more concerned with the Scottish legal system. How was I to know that a Scots Procurator-fiscal is some kind of local gauleiter they have up there, with one foot in the court room and another in the police station? I don't think I can be alone in being very bored indeed with the proliferation of telly policemen. Such is its scale that it's becoming easy to suspect a vast brain-washing project designed to convince us that policemen are intelligent, honest and, let's even say, human. Since this is contradicted daily by the real thing, (as God is my witness, I saw a police motor-cyclist the other day whose petrol tank had 'Inter Spectator, 'June 16, 1973
pot Commando' transferred on to it. What did he think he was uP to? Been watching too much telly I suspect).
Dixon is, of course, unspeakable. Barlow becomes more ridiculous, ingrown and incredible weekly. Z Cars even the children don't bother to watch and now they want to give us more. So be warned against nine o'clock on Monday evenings (Hunter's Walk) and Wednesdays at eight when lovable lawyer John Sutherland is Mr Fix-it for some unidentified small town in the Highlands. This was, by all accounts, a clumsy, patched-up thing. The familiar sociology/detection presentation done more amateurishly than usual. Its modest aim, one imagines, is to present a slice of life. This quickly falls down when we have such cobbled and incred.
ible sequences as the shop-lifterin-court sequence that was part of
the first of the series. The only moment of pleasure in this long fifty minutes was the occasional sight of Maev Alexander as Sutherland's plump, pretty clerk, but there were long and arid intervals between her appearances.
• Another new series Son of the Bride (BBCI) I was not permitted to see, since BBC Wales was going on in Welsh to the utter incomprehension of 80 per cent of its audience. But they did allow Robbie (BBC 1) through — ten minutes of Fyfe Robertson on what was described as the first of a series of " light-hearted quests," a search in this case for good beer. Although I've never shared a taste for the nasty, brown stuff, I can see that it's a topic of absorbing interest and I felt that it was a shame so little time was allowed it. Robertson himself never changes: Often the ' subjects he deals with are booby-trapped with boredom potential but the old master picks his way through inimitably.
Still on the new series kick I watched Warship (BBC 1). (And I just want to say here and now
that I would have watched Julian Pettifer's Can't Be Bad If It's Sport, Sport! had I been permitted
to by BBC Wales. They, however, were screening an English lan guage programme of almost un believable amateurishness called,
appropriately, Week In Week Out.
A handsome frigate such as HMS Hero berthed at Cardiff Docks and sending a party of marines ashore with automatic weapons to secure the BBC Wales studio at Llandaff is just the sort of episode I would like to see in the future.) Meanwhile, if I can drag myself away from my obsession for the moment, the series once Hero got to sea, made a promising start, and although it's no doubt a pipedream, if it kept out of the wardroom and on deck it would provide a season of compulsive viewing. This first episode concerned the interception of a thinly disguised ' Claudia ' running arms for the IRA from a Mediterranean port, the only lack of verisimilitude coming in the unnaturally spick and span condition of the Irish gun-running vessel.
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