COLUMBO: REQUIEM FOR A FALLEN STAR

A wealthy businessman, played (it usually seems) by Patrick McGoohan, thinks that he has come up with a way to commit the perfect murder and get away with it. Over the course of the next thirty minutes or so, we see him preparing to do the crime, and then actually going through with it. When his victim finally does lie photogenically deceased upon a thick carpet in an ostentatious office or apartment somewhere, this wicked villain will slyly smile to himself with a wry grin that is not really one of remorse, and the scene will fade to black and, just for a while, it really looks as if the smug little swine is actually going to get clean away with it.

What on earth kind of a murder mystery is this? We already know who “dunnit”. We even know how they “dunnit”. For a moment it seems highly unlikely that the producers of this are going to be able to sustain our interest for the full ninety minutes scheduled airtime. Where’s the remote…?

Uh-oh… Hold on… who’s that scruffy little man hanging around the bins? Could it be that there was a witness to this nefarious act? Perhaps the smug guy isn’t going to get away with it after all, although I’m pretty worried about the homeless guy’s chances of survival given what our villain has just done…

“Hi, I’m Lieutenant Columbo, can have a few moments of your time please, sir…?”

With the recent sad passing of the actor Peter Falk, I thought this was as good a time as any to reflect on that rather special television show – more a series of television movies really – that was “Columbo”, a character much parodied in cheap comedy (although the show was a lot smarter than it was usually given credit for by them), because of his easily mimicked range of mannerisms and look, and a show which was being produced for television for an almost unbelievable 35 years between 1968 and 2003.

We used to love watching “Columbo” in our house. Whenever “Mystery Movie” came on we were hoping it would be a “Columbo” rather than “McMillan and Wife” although my sister seemed to prefer “McCloud” but I imagine that was probably due to the horses. Actually neither of the others were that bad, and I probably looked forward quite keenly to a “McCloud” myself if I’m being really honest, but our hearts and hopes really belonged to “Columbo”.

Perhaps it was our own desire to always side with the underdog that did it, because, whilst we always knew he would get his man (or woman), physically the Lieutenant didn’t strike you as being the most impressive of figures. A shabby looking little one-eyed man in a badly cut brown suit and battered raincoat, always chewing on the end of a cheap cigar, and who  always seemed to be constantly bewildered and distracted by the strangest of details, and yet who had a mind like a steel trap and weaved a complex web before the very eyes of the villain he was about to snare and then politely allowed them to walk right into it. The criminals always thought that they far cleverer than he was, and they were always quite wrong.

William Link was the man who created the character of Columbo for TV, claiming that he was inspired by the character of Porfiry Petrovich in the book “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky. It is sometimes strange how the kind of great literature that no-one seems to actually want to read any more manages to get smuggled into our living rooms under the guise of being popular television. I once said “Well, it’s hardly Dostoevsky” out loud at work, trying to make the point that the allegedly confusing email hadn’t been all that complicated. It was a big mistake. I think they thought I’d sneezed as they looked at each other as if I was “The Idiot” (which, by the way, he also wrote…). Others have claimed to see elements of G.K. Chesterton’s “Father Brown” in the character, Inspector Fichet from “Les Diaboliques”, or even Inspector Clouseau, but that probably only proves that there are some basic fundamentals that feature in most fictional detectives. Anyway, none of that really matters, because it was Peter Falk who brought the character to life and embodied him most successfully to make him a true television icon.

There is just one more thing. In the end, what was so great about “Columbo” was that it taught us not to judge by appearances, and to never underestimate someone just because we thought they looked a bit unusual, and that’s not the worst thing to learn from a tale that’s supposed to be about that very worst of crimes, the killing of one human being by another.

RIP Peter Falk. (1927-2011)