Television
Father figures
Martyn Harris
The star of Barlow, Regan, Pyall and Fancy (BBC 2, Monday, 8.50 p.m.) was Andy Beaumont, a superintendent in the Thames Valley police. Amiable and soft- spoken, he deployed the kind of candour available only to those at the top of their profession, or who have just been sacked from it, or who don't care if they are.
'The power we have,' he explained, 'is the power to take you by the shoulder and lock you up.' There was a nervous giggle from his invisible interviewer. 'I could do it to you now,' Beaumont went on, still level and pleasant, but the menace as tangible as his owlish spectacles and the silver pips on his navy sweater.
They would release you in a day or two, of course. Money, middle-class status and connections would see to that. But Andy Beaumont could lock you up, and get away with it, no doubt about it. 'There is fascina- tion to that,' he said. 'It has a fascination to me — and I need to control it.'
This programme was the centrepiece to a night of TV cop show repeats: Z-Cars, The Sweeney, Shoestring, Fabian of the Yard. Its argument was apparently the routine one that cop shows have changed, as society has changed, from the good old 'mind how you go' days of Dixon of Dock Green, through the more morally queasy Z-Cars, to the corruption, violence and racism of The Sweeney and of G.F. Newman's Law and Order. In fact the story of TV cop shows is more complex, as Troy Kennedy Martin, creator of Z-Cars, tried to explain.
'The trouble with police series is that they give you an answer to everything — they superimpose a structure on the anar- chy and they provide a father figure . . I don't really like police series and I don't like the fascism inherent in that part of the audience that wants to be reassured by strong father figures.'
Barlow in Z-Cars was meant to be a rather marginalised character, using the patrol car system as a political ploy to revive his career. It was Stratford John's magnetic performance which turned him into such a formidable figure of menace, with his bull neck and glistening dewlaps and shaved pate — a Merseyside Mussoli- ni. This was only slightly dented by the tes- timony of Brian Blessed (Fancy Smith) that Stratford John was so nervous before the live transmissions that he used to throw up, and had to spend an hour unwinding with a
masseur, after which he would appear on set 'wobbling like a white balloon'.
I was also slightly disappointed to learn that Frank Windsor, who played Barlow's sidekick, sturdy Sergeant John Watt, expressed his anxiety through uncontrol- lable farting. On the other hand I now understand why, in any scene with Watt, Fancy Smith always had a forefinger laid pensively beneath his nose.
The Sweeney turned the ratchet of nasti- ness another notch, and became a favourite with the police themselves, as Andy Beau- mont testified: 'We broke car windscreens with pickaxe handles; we wrote off motor cars by driving them into other cars; we would, on occasion, drink Johnny Walker before going on patrol . . . we were copy- ing.' In Law and Order, which was much concerned with police corruption, there were unofficial police advisers on set, who would be paid with brown envelopes full of used fivers at saloon bar assignations.
Serving policemen like Metropolitan Commissioner Paul Condon called Law and Order 'a sickening travesty', but retired cops like Jack Slipper called it 'Very, very good. Most of the scenes have happened in the job.' The most striking thing about this excellent and thoughtful documentary was the way in which the police themselves had come to find catharsis in the more realistic cop shows, as if it Mid taken TV to relieve them from the burden of arbitrary authori- ty — of always having to play daddy to the rest of us.
Previous page
