Catchee monkey
TELEVISION STUART HOOD
I suppose that, next to Wilder, Barlow is one of the most firmly established, most fully realised fictional characters to appear on our screens. After a long spell in which I have lacked interest in cops and robbers, I turned on Softly, Softy last week to find him there as alive, as quirky and as interesting as ever. Stratford Johns grew into the part long ago; to judge by his performance in this episode he has grown with it. It was intelligent, emotional and gripping. Admittedly he was helped by a good script from one of the original creators of Z Cars: Elwyn Jones, a writer who has always been interested in much more than the mere mechanics of thief-taking or man-hunt. He has, and exploits to the full, a quite eNtra- ordinary understanding of the relationship between policeman and criminal, between hunter and hunted, or—as in this case—be- tween the inquisitor and his victim.
The story was fished out of the turbid waters of moral ambiguity where some of the best ideas for the series and its predecessor have been hooked. A man is murdered. The motive may be sex (heterosexual or homosexual) or money. The police, in the course of their minute, boring inquiries, their raking over of possible contacts, stumble on a young butcher who not only knows the dead man and is obviously queer but (to go back to the fishing metaphor) at once nibbles at the bait. Barlow decides to interrogate the boy himself.
The interrogation was a set-piece, a subtle piece of writing, which showed how Barlow gets under the boy's skin, persuades him to talk of his miseries of the flesh and of the spirit, allows him to feel a moment of intimacy which is not without its sexual overtones, and then cuts him off when confession is on his lips. The fish is firmly hooked.
Barlow's foil, Detective inspector Watt, played by Frank Windsor with sensitivity and economy, watches the process with a mixture of compassion for the two men as they grope towards the truth and of unease at the out- come. He is right in his instinct that there is something wrong in the situation, some hidden danger. The boy, played by Ray Brooks, goes home and commits suicide. These were two excellent performances to add to Stratford Johns's.
Thinking of Barlow and Wilder together after I had switched off, I was struck with the thought that what differentiates the two characters and makes Barlow, in my view, the more interesting, are the ambiguities of the man. Admittedly in the opening sequences, when he was taking over the murder HQ in his bow-wow manner, I felt that he might, like Wilder, have become stereotyped, a bundle of predictable reflexes and attitudes. But the interrogation showed how wrong I was. For there he was jovial, kind, frightening and brutal. After the interrogation came a moment of self- loathing, soon shaken off, and a burst of anger,
as if a raw nerve had been touched, when Watt suggested that the boy was in no state to be left alone all night.
I am speaking about Barlow as if he had a corporeal existence; what I am, I suppose, saying is something about the quality of the writing. I have seen Wednesday plays and other offerings presented with a good deal more beating of drums and yet not be half as effec- tive in terms either of characterisation or of dramatic effect. It is one of the curiosities of television that such acts of creation can go almost unremarked, almost unnoticed, swal- lowed up in the frightening voracious maw of the schedules. It is another that a character like Barlow, or Wilder for that matter, should have been evolved over the years by not one but many minds and many writers. The phenomenon raises some interesting questions about the act of creation.
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