69. New stuff on the box - good and bad!

GEORGE GENTLY (BBC1, Easter Day 2007)

After Foyle's War and Life On Mars we have George Gently, an early sixties crime buster played by the former randy Judge John Deed, Martin Shaw. This was a one-off, which is probably just another word for pilot. It certainly looked good to become a series.
Martin Shaw always impresses. He has televisual looks and enough acting ability to be comfortable in any company. His gruff "Fabian of the Yard" character in this decent detective drama was incorruptible and believable. It is not always easy to convince as both but he did. He was splendidly supported by Phil ("Shake me up, Judy") Davis as Joe Webster, the sort of villain everybody has read about in the Sunday papers and prays will not move into their manor. He was also given the ambitious, well-connected, smart-arse of a juvenile lead Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) as his assistant.
This was a promising first adaptation of a book by Alan Hunter and a quite neat attempt to find a replacement for the late lamented John Thaw's late lamented Endeavour Morse. I just hope that it will not be used (as it rather tended to be with Philip Glenister's DCI Gene Hunt in Life On Mars) as a back door means of absolving the politically incorrect. Any device used to perpetuate values since discarded as valueless has to be viewed with suspicion.

IGNORING BIGOTRY.

I was brought up in the thirties. As a boy, the only black people I ever saw were in films. They threw spears at Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) or carried parcels on their heads for actors like Leslie Banks (Sanders of the River. 1935) and Sir C. Aubrey Smith (Tarzan The Ape Man. 1932) The only P.C. in our upbringing was a fat old copper on a bike: nobody liked him. East was east and west was west (Kipling, I believe, but no matter). Our schooling allowed for no awkward questions and was strong on the principle that everything coloured pink on the globe was ruled by us.
We have ruled nobody for almost as long as I have been alive, of course, but there are still many people who would like to believe that we do; that we are still a nation to be reckoned with. Pro rata we have as many bigots in this country as there are in America and that says something.
Nowadays I try to avoid all the jingoistic crap, the blatant sex discrimination and the puerile political (let alone religious) beliefs still popular with many of my fellow countrymen.
That having been said, I find, to my shame, that I offer no word of reproval when an old friend and contemporary tells me that he has stopped supporting his local football team because if he wanted to watch Kenya play he'd go to bloody Africa.
I may even have laughed.
It is as well that Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent does not read stuff like this. I would not want to add to her despair at the state of the national psyche. But there you are, concerned lady, an awful lot of old buckets will have to be kicked before this country becomes a haven for any but the likes of Al Murray's Pub Landlord or, more insidiously, those like me who sadly can condone bigotry by ignoring it.

RUDDY HELL! IT'S HARRY & PAUL. (BBC1, Friday 13th April)

Bloody hell! It's absolute crap.