PODCAST 15 - GEORGE KITCHENER BULMAN

Bulman, Bennett, Willis (Henderson, Mollison, Blanch) in STRANGERS

My indistinguishable mutterings of the following text may be heard at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta034-episode-34
- this is the hopefully more distinguishable text version...

PODCAST 15 - GEORGE KITCHENER BULMAN

Over the last couple of months I’ve been re-examining the television career of one Detective Sergeant George Kitchener Bulman, the television sleuth portrayed by the actor Don Henderson across several television series made by Granada Television in the latter half of the 1970s until fairly late in the 1980s.

I should mention that any article that attempts to introduce you to three entire television series is bound to give the listener less than comprehensive coverage of any of them, so I hold up my hands and admit from the outset that this can only be seen as a general overview which I hope will intrigue you enough to want to go and explore further. You might, of course, just think “Well, my son, I’m not touching that with the proverbial…” (although I hope not) in  which case at least I’m saving you some time.

The character of George Bulman was first seen in the three-part mini-series “THE XYY MAN” in 1976, and continued throughout the subsequent ten-part series the following year, before reappearing alongside his sidekick Willis in the TV Cop show “STRANGERS” for five years nestled snugly around the start of the 1980s.

Finally, in 1985, a third series, simply entitled “BULMAN” reacquainted us with the old curmudgeon as he moved into retirement and considered the apparently far safer world of clock repair, until he was persuaded to become a Private Investigator by Lucy McGinty, the daughter of an ex-colleague, for a thirteen part run, followed by a return for a second, shorter, and absolutely final, series a couple of years later.

Because I remembered hugely enjoying the show at the time of first broadcast, I’d been considering picking up the DVD box set of “STRANGERS”, the middle of these three series, for several years now, but something else more attractive always seemed to come along and draw my cash off in another direction, and so I never seemed to get around to it.

Then, as luck would have it, I found out that both it and “THE XYY MAN” were now available in far cheaper slimline packaging, and, with the Complete series of “BULMAN” on the brink of release, it seemed like the right time to gather them all up and have a complete run-through of his many adventures.

Well about sixty-five of them anyway. Actually, it’s a couple fewer than that, because of the peculiar “Anthology” format the first couple of years of “STRANGERS” used to mix-and-match its lead characters in separate stories. This basically means that, despite being the “break-out” character, old George misses out on being in a couple of them.

Anyway, because I have the tendency to be a completest, all three were picked up and, because I prefer to do things that way, I started at the beginning, and put disc one of “THE XYY MAN” into the machine and…

Utterly loathed it.

It was one of those shows that just seemed full of unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, often to each other, and, whilst its premise is based upon a now defunct theory about criminal behaviour (also incidentally touched upon in the “By The Pricking of My Thumbs” episode of “DOOMWATCH” about half a decade earlier), perhaps I ought not to have been surprised about this, given than the central character of Spider Scott, played by Stephen Yardley (just a small career step beyond his turn in “GENESIS OF THE DALEKS”) is supposed to be an unreformed criminal just out of prison.

To be honest, it was the Apartheid South African trappings of the tale, and some of the language being used, that made me feel most uncomfortable, but so such things should, because that kind of society and the attitudes displayed ought to feel damned peculiar to our hopefully more enlightened modern way of thinking.

So I staggered through the original three-part mini-series (“The Proposition”, “The Execution” and “The Resolution”) in which Spider Scott, having been released from prison, and being determined not to get sent back, is persuaded by British Intelligence to do a little bit of thieving for them, in a tale of double-dealing, and double-agents, and with Detectives Bulman and Willis always on his heels, determined to lock him up again, and kind of left it at that.

Anyway, after dallying with several other series over the summer, I decided it was about time that I tried “STRANGERS” instead, and so, for the moment, I skipped the follow-up series of “THE XYY MAN” despite my mother having had a close encounter with the show when it was being made, and describing that Stephen Yardley as “A Lovely Man…”

They used the offices she worked in for some of the location work for the third adaptation, consisting of the three episodes “When We Were Very Greedy”, “Now We Are Dead”, and “Whisper Who Dares” which involves a rooftop break-in, and which are placed most illogically on the DVD releases in a 3 – 3 – 4 episode distribution when the stories are in four, then three, then three parts again.

It’s as if the company doing the releases knew nothing about the series and its linked episodes, because, with a little bit of a shift, all four discs could have contained a complete story on each instead of three of them featuring incomplete stories.

Ah well, luckily you’ve got people like us to keep you wise to such anomalies, dear listener.

Anyway, all of this I found out later, because, before I went back to “THE XYY MAN” I did a run-through of the entire five-year run of “STRANGERS”, a show created by one of the writers from “THE XYY MAN”, Murray Smith, and built around the characters of Detectives Bulman and Willis, working as police “Strangers” – hence the title -who are brought in because they are unknown to the local criminal fraternity and are therefore more able to go undercover to freely infiltrate themselves into their villainous schemes, and bring them to justice.

At least, I think that’s the basic idea behind the series, although it sometimes feels like a fairly vague hook upon which to hang the show.

It’s an oddly inconsistent series, with the styles, titles and music in a constant state of flux, as is the cast. The location filming, coupled with studio videotape technique so familiar in television drama of those times, and also used in “THE XYY MAN” earlier, vanishes after the short second run, and the programme moves totally on to film from series three onwards.

As I mentioned earlier, it starts off as a kind of anthology of police stories featuring various individuals, but not necessarily all, of the main four cast members, with, alongside Don Henderson, Dennis Blanch as the ever-faithful Detective Constable Derek Willis, Frances Tomelty as Detective Constable Linda Doran, and a rather criminally under-used John Ronane as Detective Sergeant David Singer, who is nominally Bulman’s equal - in rank anyway.

The opening episode, “The Paradise Set” serves as a foretaste of Don Henderson’s later series “THE PARADISE CLUB” and finds Bulman and Willis relocated to Manchester (not that they’d ever really been anywhere else, this being a Granada series in which Manchester used to pretend to be London all of the time) and trying to fit in around Northern Coppers who resented their presence, and bizarre drinking clubs owned by peculiar Northern comedians giving a very eccentric feel to the series right from the off.

They have been seconded to a new kind of squad – later to be referred to “The Inter-City Squad” and, by the end of this episode, largely set inside a “Paradise Club”, Bulman seems content to leave a cat burglar he spots going about his unlawful trade be after spending his previous two television series appearances trying to catch Spider Scott “at it” - so maybe he’s mellowing, even though he “hilariously” misses the great big crane being stolen from right under his nose, something which even gets a mention the following week, which is almost unheard of.

The rest of the first series calms down a little after that, with tales of undercover operations, and the running storylines involving Bulman’s lack of promotion, and his ever-present attempts at getting an education via the Open University.

These telling character traits, alongside the ever-present woollen gloves he often wears, his “Will Power” Shakespeare T-Shirt, his literary quotations, the nasal inhaler he frequently brandishes, and the use of a carrier bag as a briefcase, as well as the fact that his knee twitches whenever it senses arch villainy is afoot, are the quirky little touches that help to transform George Bulman from being yet another run-of-the-mill, ten-a-penny television copper, into a genuine TV character.

Well, those, and the nature of the cases under investigation, and the fact that Don Henderson seems to be a pretty fearless actor when it comes to blending in with the seamier and seedier aspects of life beyond the edge. Bulman’s shabby demeanour seems very comfortable down amongst the dregs of society and in one memorable episode he does find himself living amongst the homeless around the docklands for a time, and, ironically, he does seems very at home there.

Don Henderson and the writers seem to have enjoyed that aspect of him, too, as they returned him to the very same situation in a sequel episode during the run of the later “BULMAN” series.

As far as I’m aware, however, those quirks were never quite enough to lift him to “COLUMBO” levels of public recognition, so he never got Yarwooded or Davroed.

Episode four of that first run, one entitled “Accidental Death” features, by the way, the former Ian Chesterton himself, William Russell, portraying a rather dodgy businessman, and the series as a whole does attract a rather surprising number of familiar and high profile guest stars across its five year run, as well as giving trial runs for various styles of TV cop show, a few of which (like “BETWEEN THE LINES” and “JULIET BRAVO”) appeared on our screens in very similar form several years later which at least proves some writers were watching closely and mining the series for ideas.

For example, the episode entitled “The Tender Trap” in series five could almost be an episode of “JULIET BRAVO” with its no-nonsense female officer running a rural northern police outpost, and episode five of the first series, entitled “Briscoe”, finds Bulman going all-out to bring down a corrupt police officer played by Michael Byrne, in a kind of prototype for “BETWEEN THE LINES” a decade or so later, a series, you’ll remember which featured Siobhan Redmond, who we will be coming back to later on.

Strangely, however, a couple of episodes later on in that first run, Bulman then – very briefly - recruits the very same dodgy copper to assist him when he is trying (not very successfully) to protect a family in peril from some extremely nasty villains who want their money really badly, in the final episode of that series.

For a while, it looks as if this particular bad apple will be joining the team, but, in fact, he is never heard from - or referred to - ever again, a fate which also befalls both Frances Tomelty – a former Mrs Sting apparently – when she transfers out early on in series two, and John Ronane after the end of series four.

Series two opens with a strong story set in the now lost world of the northern docks – Liverpool I think, due to that reference to DS Singer driving thirty-odd miles up the motorway, but, being Granada, it might have been shot in Trafford Park.

Anyway, like much of “STRANGERS” (and “THE XYY MAN” before it), it gives many views of a Manchester resembling the one I grew up in, and much of which is now lost forever, so the rush of nostalgia I get from this show (or from just seeing one of those orange GM Buses like the ones I went to school on), is worth the price of admission on its own. We are also given views of both Piccadilly Station and Manchester Airport during the run, both of which are seen before they were turned into the shopping malls they have since become.

Early in series two, after the team seem to have bonded nicely during “The Wheeler Dealers” there’s only one more episode before Frances Tomelty does her vanishing act, and her abrasive and fiery Irish copper is quietly replaced by Fiona Mollison as Detective Constable Vanessa Bennett, who is an altogether more “glamorous” and “posh-girl” copper with a tendency to cram herself into the very tightest of denim jeans, and she remains in place for the rest of the show’s run.

I don’t really know why that casting change occurred, but perhaps those TV Times were just not ready for the kind of “real-world” police officer Frances Tomelty seemed to be trying to present, and the “Powers-That-Be” may have wanted someone more “easy on the eye” televisually.

Different times… but not so very different.

Or maybe she just wanted to leave, and Fiona Mollison knocked the audition out of the park. Who knows?

Meanwhile, perhaps one small factor is the fact that Derek Willis does have a habit of waving pornographic magazines at the camera in a way that actually leaves little to the imagination – perhaps simply offering a touch of unwanted realism from those times that seems rather surprising to modern eyes - or maybe the production team were just trying to see what they could get away with.

After the rather brutal end to Series Two, in which George is held hostage after an incident at an occasionally snowy Greek(ish) wedding - and Bill Tarmey makes one of his several appearances as an extra on both sides of the law in “STRANGERS” before he moved to “CORONATION STREET”  - Series Three brings Mark McManus to the team as the new boss of the squad, “Hangman” Jack Lambie, a kind of prototype for his far more famous turn as “Thezbinamudder” “TAGGART” a few years later, and who is, at least at first, also not averse to waving magazines featuring full-frontal nudity right at the camera and holding them there plain as day.

Something for the camera boys…?

Honestly, fellahs, it’s really not necessary.

As I mentioned before, Series Three onwards is all shot on film and does actually benefit from it. I suppose that there was now a gap in the market from the demise of “THE SWEENEY” that Granada were hoping to fill, and, at least for a time, “STRANGERS” looked as if it might fit right in there.

Certainly the filming does give the whole show a grittier feel, and helps with the editing, but it also seems to lose something with it, too, as if those little character interactions that you get when there’s a room full of actors all giving it their all are lost when just one of them is the focus of the camera’s attentions and the rest are otherwise engaged.

A pair of episodes are set in Scarborough, which shows up well on film, although it’s probably best not to get too attached to one bright new member of the squad introduced around this time, who features in this particular story arc.

There’s also that very good one featuring Bulman going undercover amongst the homeless community, a set-up, as I mentioned, that seems to have appealed so much that it actually gets a proper full-on sequel.

By the end of the Third Series, Bulman himself does finally get his promotion to Detective Chief Inspector, and thereafter, the squad is pretty much “his” to awkwardly manage as best he can.

The opening episode of Series Four, “The Moscow Subway Murders” is, however, the quirky and eccentric version of “STRANGERS” that I remembered it always being like, which only goes to show something or other I suppose, and features George Pravda as Pushkin, a similarly driven and eccentric Russian policeman out to discover the truth behind a series of murders at whatever cost.

Naturally, Bulman and Pushkin get on like a house on fire.

Because I remembered really liking “STRANGERS” when it was first on TV, but the series I remembered was ALWAYS like that episode which watching it all over again - and in order - did rather disprove. However, with the occasional interference of Thorley Walters playing the shady spymaster Bill - or Clarence – Dugdale, things were never likely to be quite as they might as first appear in the shady world of “STRANGERS”.

That said, the very last episode (“With These Gloves You Can Pass Through Mirrors” from 1982) goes into whole new areas of quirkiness, as Bulman, and his Russian ex-policeman pal Pushkin, head to the rescue (during a standoff involving Suzanne Danielle and a very “Oirish” Patrick Mower), riding along in a motorbike and sidecar with George decked out in a First World War flying helmet for comic effect, and this is very much a sign of things to come.

Having finished watching “STRANGERS” and seeing George quit the force for reasons of personal conflicts of interests, I went back and filled “THE XYY MAN” gap before moving on to the third show featuring the character, the eponymously titled “BULMAN”.

“THE XYY MAN” was still difficult to like, really, possibly because any examples of quirky eccentricity are quite toned down - naturally so as it really isn’t Bulman’s show back then - although he does have his moments. Well, I suppose he must have for the bosses at Granada to consider making that spin-off.

“THE XYY MAN” however, is generally just a rather nasty and brutal show about nasty and brutal people, and it’s rarely tempered by even a smidgen of self-deprecation. Mind you, the series is based upon several of Kenneth Royce’s original books, so maybe that’s a tad unfair of me, because it might be very respectful of its source material, and it does have its moments, and several of the Usual Suspects to look out for playing unusual roles.

After working my way through this series, and its interesting – if not very likeable – tales of double-dealing do-badders, I moved quite naturally on to “BULMAN” - a series that lasted twenty episodes across two seasons, the first thirteen of which were in series one.

Having it return for a mere seven more episodes almost makes it seem as if they didn’t really know what to do with the show, and it really feels as if they simply re-commissioned the second run to finish it off.

Which is a shame, really, because, of the three series, I think that it is “BULMAN” that, on reflection, is consistently my favourite.

For a start you’ve got Siobhan Redmond playing “Tom McGinty’s daughter”, Lucy McGinty, in one of her earliest TV roles, teaming up with Bulman to start STG Investigations, which runs in parallel to his ambitions to retire and set up a clock hospital, and she is, quite frankly, an utter joy to behold, and plays off the quirkier aspects of George’s character quite delightfully.

Siobhan has form, you know, in cop shows turning into something else involving P.I.s. Her later appearances in the series “BETWEEN THE LINES” would also involve her partners leaving the force and setting up as independent enquiry agents, although this would all lead up to a far more devastating finale for that show.

Other regulars and semi-regulars from the “STRANGERS” series do turn up from time-to-time, and it does take a few episodes before the series shakes off those shackles of its past and begins to soar.

Funnily enough, George Bulman playing a seedy Private Eye does seem like a perfect fit, even though it does remind me from time-to-time of that other down-at-heel Enquiry Agent, one Frank Marker from “PUBLIC EYE”, a series which I may be returning to look at another time.

Much like Frank did nearly two decades earlier, George even does a stretch “inside” for a time, but the two series – and the reasons behind their respective incarcerations - really could not be more different.

George’s betrayal of his fellow inmates leads to a death threat that has him skipping the country with Lucy and heading off to China at the conclusion of the first series, and it is quite possible that this is where we might have left the career of George Bulman, but it was not to be, as the series did return for that second, final, and shorter run, two years later.

The problem, however, with finishing the first series on such a devastating cliffhanger is that – if you’re not going to simply leave it in the lurch like that - it takes an entire episode of Don Henderson sporting a Chinese style beard and ponytail - and a lot of convoluted plotting - to reboot the series back to where it was, and then, when you’ve only got six more to play with before saying goodbye forever to the show, it perhaps hardly seems worth it.

That said, however, those last six stories really are some of the very best episodes that series produced, as it loses all pretensions of being a normal detective series and goes off – at least in part – to a whole new level of quirkiness which includes the episode “The Chicken of the Baskervilles” which is, quite frankly, worth seeking out all on its own.

By this time, of course, because the series has lost those pretensions to be serious drama and has moved into the far more interesting “Bat-droppings crazy” phase, the story-telling can become quite frankly bizarre, although the scene that Don Henderson plays fully naked in a bath-house at a certain age – remember me mentioning earlier that he was an oh-so-fearless actor? - is something that my memory is struggling to forget.

Something else we ought not forget, however, is that Murray Smith was an exceptional writer, too. There was something about the way that he could make you know all you need to know about a character, and perhaps utterly dislike them, with just one line of dialogue that smacked truly of genuine genius.

There’s a scene set in a country house in the first series where some posh boys are bothering swans by a lake, and you learn all you need to know about just how unpleasant one of them is from his one remark at the lakeside, and I was reminded of this – because I’d forgotten the remark itself but remembered how it made me dislike the character - when Lucy meets up with an old flame in the second series and when she is introduced to a friend of his, who replies with:

“Is this the Lucy you write poems to but never post?”

Isn’t that truly wonderful?

It’s is an astonishing, devastating, almost poetical single line of dialogue which tells you everything you need to ever know about this lad, and his hopes, and his dreams, and his yearnings, and his failures, which any aspiring TV writer ought to pin above their computer to look at and weep over whenever they are thigh-deep in scenes crammed full of tedious exposition.

Sadly, this sometimes quirky, sometimes rather savage and brutal, set of programmes came to a rather abrupt end with George rather mournfully tootling on a saxophone, and Lucy heading off to Manchester and new opportunities, after they have been forced to fake their deaths after more devious machinations involving Bill Dugdale.

That melancholy saxophone solo drifting across the tense atmosphere that has developed between our two heroes over their recent dice with death immediately chimes with the memory of lonesome old Frank Marker, and is the last we would see or hear of former Detective Chief Inspector George Kitchener Bulman, formerly of Scotland Yard, and the best clock-fixer in Londonchesterford.

All three series are good, but all of them are inconsistent, too, if you know what I mean. That’s why I wrote this as a general overview of all three shows, rather than my usual focus on one particular episode.

However, if you’d like a few pointers at some of the very best episodes the shows have to offer to a new viewer, I’ll recap a little. For a "JULIET BRAVO" style fix, I'd recommend “STRANGERS” Series Five "The Tender Trap"; and Series Four's "The Moscow Subway Murders" shows the series at its quirky best. "THE XYY MAN" is hard to like, and the episodes are linked into three or four part stories, so that can be a bit of a commitment, but they are all watchable with the caveat of being “of their time” of course.

And "BULMAN" is pretty much all good stuff, although even it can get a little brutal from time-to-time, but “The Chicken of the Baskervilles” is a stand-out for me, although Series One’s “One Of Our Pigeons Is Missing” is an interesting sequel to “Tom Thumb And Other Stories” from Series Three of “STRANGERS” if you want to see George in full-on down-and-out mode.

There's a lot to be said for the era when TV drama as entertainment didn't have to always involve ordinary people being miserable, but could be more escapist - life's miserable enough without watching more of it when you're at home - and Bulman, in all his incarnations, with one foot in the real world, but another foot firmly planted way beyond the outskirts of ordinary everyday normality, was an astonishing television character, and one well worth getting to know.

I hope you enjoy the journey – just don’t forget to keep a pair of gloves handy.

Martin A W Holmes, Oct/Nov 2018

Guest stars across all three series include...