PODCAST 16 - PUBLIC EYE

Somehow I managed to stagger through reading this in the latest "Round The Archives" podcast from Lisa and Andrew (available at https://soundcloud.com/user-868590968/rta036-episode-36) - this is the text for anyone who couldn't understand my burbled nonsense...

PODCAST PODCAST 16 - PUBLIC EYE

A long, long time ago, I was working my way through the DVDs I’d picked up of the series “CALLAN” and, as I tend to, I found myself looking up bits and pieces of background to the programme in order to fill in those gaps that an enquiring mind will sometimes decide it needs to fill, and, as I did so, one of the shows that kept on getting mentioned in the same breath was a series called “PUBLIC EYE” which I had precious little memory of other than vaguely remembering it turning up in the afternoons when I was a youngster sitting devouring anything and everything the telly would throw at me in those three-channel years during the school holidays.

I know that “CALLAN” tended to be on during those afternoons featuring such fare as “THE SULLIVANS”, “CROWN COURT”, “A FAMILY AT WAR”, “LOOKS FAMILIAR”, “THE AMAZING WORLD OF KRESKIN” and “PAINT ALONG WITH NANCY” because my mum rather liked “CALLAN” – although I suspect that this meant that she rather liked Edward Woodward - but of such mysteries are our parents’ lives made.

Much of the content of that line-up, incidentally, probably explains a lot about how I ended up, but I digress.

“PUBLIC EYE” also got rave mentions in the sorts of magazines like “PRIMETIME” which I started buying later on, when the serious interest in all things telly-related started to bite deep, but still somehow I still managed to stagger on through several decades without ever seeing one, or, at least, without remembering that I’d ever seen one at any rate.

And that’s a bit of a shame because, as I’m about to explain, it is, quite frankly (Ha! Ha!), an exceptional piece of television.

A few months ago, you see, I realised that there were some HUGE gaps in my archive television knowledge, and I went on a bit of a spree in order to acquire at least a few examples of several series about which I was not really all that clued up about, and happily I was able to scrape together the pennies to pick up something called “A Box Called Frank” which contained several dozen episodes of what remains of a series which spanned ten years on ITV from the middle of the nineteen-sixties to the middle of the nineteen-seventies, and which, like “CALLAN”, spanned the transition of ABC television to Thames, and the arrival of colour television itself to screens across Britain.

And yet… Having heard such good things about the show, I still wasn’t sure. I struggled to commit to such a huge chunk of telly to have to watch, and I avoided getting around to seeing any of it for several weeks, before popping in disc one and having a look at what it was all about.

The first episode in the set still existing is the second one made, and is called “Nobody Kills Santa Claus” and it involves our hero, Frank Marker, in a murder plot in which he gets beaten up quite horribly in a case of mistaken identity, and there are a lot of symbolic jigsaw pieces in shot, presumably to justify their place in those early caption cards.

Frank doesn’t actually feature all that much in this particular episode and, whilst I was impressed by the story, I found myself drawn away to some of those other DVD sets picked up during my spree, and promised myself that I’d return later on, once I’d got much of the other more “fun” stuff out of the way.

Anyway, fast forward a couple of months and I decided it was about time I returned, and I popped that same disc into the player and watched the other surviving episode from the end of that first series entitled “The Morning Wasn’t So Hot” and I was utterly mesmerised, because it really is an astonishing piece of television for something shot in an ITV multi-camera studio in the mid-nineteen-sixties.

Honestly, I was blown away by how good it was.

So much of the story of the descent of an ambitious but naïve young girl arriving in the big city and being exploited is told through Carole Ann Ford's truly expressive face - why didn't she get more work after DOCTOR WHO? - and the episode also features Philip Madoc going the full slimeball.

The Director Kim Mills really uses Carol Ann Ford’s facial expressions in extreme close up to tell the story of her rise to relative riches, and her subsequent decline and fall, and it’s truly terrific stuff for studio work, and which  ticked all of my "gritty" and "bleak" boxes.

I was particularly impressed by the use of the limitations of studio multi-camera being turned into strengths, simply by the use of close-ups. Much of the story told in that episode goes unsaid, but the expressions speak volumes. Excellent stuff.

It’s also very stark – apart from that opening haunting blues melody that accompanies the credits, almost no music at all is used in the series, and any music you do hear is usually on a radio or in a pub or nightclub, and you really don’t miss it because the words – and the performances - are so good.

After that first series set in London, the location switches to Birmingham for a couple of years, and, with a flash of a Bromsgrove Venus, (and a glimpse of a younger Ma Tyler), the few fragments of the ABC years are gone in the blink of a Public Eye.

You know a TV show has got under your skin when a shonky 7 minute clip of a lost episode from a showreel included as an extra on the DVD for the sake of completeness has you wondering how the story turned out.

There is a satisfying streak of underplayed melancholia about the programme, which I'm rather enjoying. It manages to become a wonderful series without being too flashy, a show that cuts away all the supposed glamour of those swinging times, and reveals a seedy world in which Frank Marker as often as not is acting more as a social worker than as the Enquiry Agent he is.

For Frank Marker is a dour, shabby, put-upon and cynical inhabitant of a grim and shabby version of the world that is a million miles away from the world of other television and movie Private Eyes of the Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade type, living in an era when James Bond was prancing from bed to bed with a merry quip and a brushed tuxedo with rarely a hair out of place.

Frank reeks of low-rent and broken lives and scrabbling around to find a shilling for the gas meter and people desperate to get out of the little boxes that the social order of the times would have them locked inside with the lid screwed down tight.

As ever with Black and White television of the mid-nineteen sixties, there’s an awful lot of episodes that are missing from the archives. In fact, of the forty-one episodes making up three full series made by ABC, only five episodes remain. Two each from the first two seasons, and one from the third, and that’s a great pity because, at least three of those five remaining fragments are so good that you can only weep at what has been lost, because as you work your way through those remaining B&W ABC episodes, it's enthralling.

You can see why it get mentioned alongside ”CALLAN” as it also set firmly in the seamier, seedier flipside of the colourful, let-it-all-hang-out nineteen-sixties in which those not prone to wild lifestyles featuring long hair and micro skirts somehow managed to stagger through.

I’m still wondering why it took me so long to investigate PUBLIC EYE – because these are intricate and satisfyingly bleak stories told with such a small cast, and often make for grippingly theatrical stuff.

We can only imagine the horror of the storyline in those last few ABC episodes which leads to Frank being set up for a fall by a crooked solicitor, and ending up being sent to prison for two years.

This leads to a short season of eight rather stark and generally quite bleak episodes set in Brighton, and specifically written by Roger Marshall to explore the trials and tribulations of a basically honest man being released from the prison system and being returned into the community.

After that series, three more follow, mostly in colour as Frank rebuilds his life and his business in Windsor, before moving on again for the final few episodes once his status as a loner gets threatened once again.

So, for this article, I thought I’d quickly look at one episode in particular, taken from that middle, Brighton-based series, because it that is a very impressive run from slap-bang in the middle of the series as a whole, and the one I’ve chosen is “Divide and Conquer”, episode two of that series, filmed in black and white, written by Roger Marshall, and Directed by Jim Goddard, because it left me with such a memorable impression on first viewing, not least because of the impressive amount of location filming.

The episode is atypical, of course, because Frank is no longer working as an Enquiry Agent, but, upon release from prison, has been given a job as a builder’s labourer, and it is early days in his attempts to rebuild his life, from the nothing it appears to have been reduced to by circumstances beyond Frank’s control.

It’s a story told, as many of such television dramas of this type were in those times, in three acts. The first involves a couple of biker boys – played by Terence Rigby and Richard O’Callaghan – running a con on a day out in Brighton whilst Frank starts his new job; The second involves Frank’s path crossing with theirs as he foils another attempt at running the same con; The third act is astonishing and involves a showdown on the beach when the bikers come looking for Frank, and how he gets out of the planned beating they had lined up for him.

After the Black and White version of the Thames logo expands in its familiar way, the more mournful mix of the already solemn theme tune plays out across silhouettes of Frank Marker walking along Brighton beach, and we fade to an extended sequence of two bikers arriving in Brighton in a manner that must have seemed terribly familiar to people watching the endless battles between the Mods and the Rockers back then.

This pair are definitely more of the Rocker type and, as we will learn, are more prone to ignorance and bullying than those around them, but they get away with it because they can appear at first to be terribly amenable, but also terrifyingly intimidating.

Meanwhile, on an ordinary day in the life, and back in the studio, Frank is sleeping and is brought tea in bed by his rather wonderful landlady Mrs Mortimer (played by Pauline Delaney) who seems to have taken rather a shine to our Frank, as they discuss the fact that it’s his first day at work.

Despite being something of a “loner” throughout, to do the job he does - and get people to like him enough to betray confidences – Frank must actually be a quite personable person really, and people do seem to take to him. This is especially evident as throughout the series he always does find several people like Mrs Mortimer, who are prepared to help him out and who genuinely do seem to like the old curmudgeon.

Later on, when things might get too serious, Frank will disappear from her life quite suddenly, and that’s something of a shame really, but then Frank really doesn’t like to let anyone get too close, although the ties he makes in this particular set of episodes will actually take three full series to be fully cut.

But that’s for the future, and we ought not to be getting too far ahead of ourselves, let us return to the episode in hand.

On the seafront, the bikers pull up outside a café run by Ken (‘orrible Ives) Jones and helpfully bring in the crates of milk bottles, and involve themselves in some matey banter and chair dancing as they ingratiate themselves with the owner over breakfast.

Meanwhile, over his own breakfast, Mrs Mortimer laments Frank’s lack of post (and therefore people in his life) as they discuss fellow guest Mr Enright, another ex-con and former solicitor (with his recent history that sets Frank’s alarm bells tingling) and the holidaymakers who have come to stay on eight consecutive years. The whole thrust of this is that the probation people seem to think that Frank needs to engage with people, whereas Frank really does seem to think that he’s better off alone, and, whilst he is sent off with a friendly box of sandwiches for his lunch, the fear that crosses Frank’s face is palpable.

Meanwhile, back in the caff, the bikers – a right pair of rogues not above putting their feet on the table – draw cards for who should pull the con and it is Terence Rigby’s character who gets to play the old “fiver in the envelope” switcheroo on Ken Jones, and they quietly roll their bikes away leaving him as yet blissfully unaware.

Frank, meanwhile, arrives at work in a builders yard and there are references back to the timber yard outside Frank’s old Birmingham office as he discusses post-prison confusion with his new boss, Mr Kenrick, as played by William Moore who you might remember as Timothy Lumsden’s Dad (“Language, Timothy!”) in “SORRY”.

As they leave for the site of Frank’s allocated task, namely “Black Rock” (where he is soon to have a bad day), and Frank is given some workman’s clothes, there are some moments with Frank’s Employment cards and the secretary which will seed into the next episode – a particularly tense one called “Paid In Full” where Frank comes a cropper at the hands of Brian Croucher, another bleak yet brilliant episode about Frank Marker and the missing pay packet from hell which really will crank up anyone’s tension levels.

But again, we’re getting side-tracked – it really is that kind of a series.

As the works vehicle takes Frank to Black Rock, we also spot the bikers in a portent of meetings yet to come, and Frank is dropped off, and, after sharing a joke with the boss about what should be do for water to mix his cement – they are standing right by the sea - and a little insight into why Mr Kenrick is prepared to help out ex-offenders – his brother in Parkhurst – Frank is left alone until 5:30 to work on shoring up sea defences.

Meanwhile, back in his caff, Ken Jones cracks and tears open the envelope to find out – surprise, surprise – that he’s been conned, which marks the End of Part One.

After the ad break, the bikers are playing in the surf on their motorbikes, and generally having fun, as Frank toils away. He is met on the seafront by a day fisherman, Mr Cooper, played by Norman Jones, who seems to know Frank from prison, and they discuss this notion of needing friends, or otherwise..

Café Ken, meanwhile, has gone off to the police station to report the theft of five pounds (still a significant chunk of cash back then) and is treated less than seriously to be honest, but a report is taken which may, or may not, prove significant later on.

Meanwhile, the bikers have acquired stupidly under-sized seaside cowboy hats and are munching on candyfloss as Frank’s working day comes to an end. The biker boys are choosing the saucy seaside postcard for their next con when Frank has his first contact with them as Terence’s character nicks his newly bought newspaper.

Frank wends his weary way home where Mr Enright – Peter Cellier playing just the sort of slightly posh and slightly officious role he always seems to get – offers him a beer and they chat about prison life, despite Frank seeming very uncomfortable with this. Luckily, he is saved – for the moment at least – by the sound of the dinner gong.

Later that same evening, whilst a lot of play is made of Frank fiddling with his wristwatch as he eats his cheese – the luxury of choice being another of life’s little freedoms returning to him - he is once again collared by Mr Enright, who tells him his own sad tale of how he got caught, and persuaded – fatefully as it happens - to go down the pub rather than sit not writing letters to the nobody in the world who cares about him.

Defeated by this certain logic, after which he shares another joke with Mrs M, Frank and Enright find themselves in the same pub as the bikers who are “hilariously” comparing their noses to sausages after a day in the sun, and suggesting mustard as a cure.

Frank’s still frantically winding his watch and reflecting on the novelty of freedom as the bikers attempt to run their con again on the hapless barman as played by Norman Mitchell.

Frank intervenes and, as often seems to happen to our Frank, gets a punch in the stomach for his trouble. However, as a pair of ex-prisoners, they do manage to talk the grateful landlord – he only lost ten bob instead of a fiver – out of involving the police, and they head home, followed by the angry bikers who narrowly avoid running them down in the street and who lurk outside the boarding house as Frank brushes his teeth and puts out the light marking the end of part two.

Part three is pretty much shot all on film and is, quite frankly, brilliant.

The bikers have stayed overnight in Brighton by breaking into a beach hut, and, after a bad night’s sleep, are out for revenge upon the “know all” who involved himself and ruined their little scam.

Frank leaves for work and is watched, and followed to where he is left alone again and, as he prepares his cement in the foreground, the bikers, menacingly roll into shot in the distance behind him, giving a growing sense of threat and foreboding as we are itching for Frank to notice their presence.

When he finally does, the three close-ups reminded me of the shoot-out scene at the end of “THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY” in many ways, and the sense of growing threat and menace is very similar.

Terence Rigby’s character goes into full-on intimidating bully mode as he finds Frank’s box of egg sandwiches and mockingly raids it, and, whilst the camera momentarily favours Frank’s shovel, it is left to him to use his words to talk himself out of a probable beating, if not worse.

This he does admirably, once he’s aware that the bigger chap really wants his pal to keep out of it so he can administer the beating one-on-one. He boasts of the five times his little con worked the day before and Frank is able to undermine him by pointing out to him – and, more importantly, his pal - that they got too greedy, and that they must be amateurs because a professional would have known when to stop.

And when his pal pipes up that he said that himself, and despite Terence’s threatening assurances that Frank’s going to need a far bigger spoon to stir with than that, Frank persists, saying that he would only ever partner up with someone smarter than him, leading the pal to crack and for Terence to accidentally name him (another Frank coincidentally and – more significantly – not a name our Frank is likely to forget) which gives our Frank more ammunition, as the less than stable bully - finally revealed to be a Harry – loses his cool and threatens our Frank with his own shovel, the one which we spotted earlier.

Frank is then able to weave a tale about coppers in the pub that we know weren’t there, swiftly responding squad cars, and the probability of two years inside for assault and battery or GBH, and whilst Harry claims that Frank doesn’t scare him, Frank points out that he would be, and weaves a further picture of slammed cell doors and lonely nights as he cleverly gets Frank’s motorcycle number plate and ultimately persuades Frank the biker to flee as all these little pieces of the jigsaw are likely to narrow down the list of suspects to, basically, him.

Harry’s rage escalates and, once potential accessory to murder seems the likely outcome, Frank the biker is off, and our Frank is able to expose the bully Harry as the do-nothing braggart “type” that he reveals himself to be, despite the big rock he threatens Frank with for a time.

Finally, with Frank pointing out that a pro would be far away from here setting up a cast-iron alibi, Harry is finally overwhelmed by his own fears of the actual consequences of his actions, and throws away the rock, and finally walks away, leaving Frank to wash his face as they ride off.

Having brilliantly survived this situation solely by using his words and his wits, the fisherman returns and, after a few reflections on his departing new and unpleasant friends, and whether he can begin to pick up the threads of his new life, there’s a moment of reflection that the weather might break tomorrow, and Frank returns to his work as the camera pulls back revealing him tiny and alone in the vast landscape, and the audience can all relax and breathe again.

But then Brian Croucher is lurking to bugger it all up for Frank again next week.

I'm still wallowing in the later colour series via DVD at the moment, but it is proving to be to be a rather long and yet totally enjoyable journey.

Later on, in an episode called "The Beater and the Game", Terence Rigby would return to PUBLIC EYE to play an "Oirish American" gangster in a role which is almost as disconcerting as Alfred Burke's "American" hitman was in an episode of “GHOST SQUAD” I watched during the same week.

Those later series are, as I mentioned earlier, in colour and set, at least for a time, in Windsor, which gives them a very different backdrop, and a very different feel, especially given the general air of bleakness in the Brighton series.

Somewhere along the way, I think UK TV Drama seems to have lost this knack of creating understated bleakness - I think it's why Swedish WALLANDER felt quite wonderful and the UK remake really didn't seem quite the same.

There's a quote somewhere by the author of the WALLANDER books about the most satisfying thing being when Kurt goes into a room and contemplates it quietly... ...and I think that modern UK efforts have lost this ability in a sea of shouting and explosions and nonsensical plot developments, just in case we lose our concentration and switch over.

Despite the age sometimes PUBLIC EYE feels as fresh as a daisy, possibly because it is generally populated by more “ordinary”, and less ”way-out”, characters than other series of those times. The scripts are still relevant and so the only thing dating it, really, are the now “classic” cars all around the streets, and the occasional loud shirt, short skirt, or ridiculous haircut.

Public Eye does also have the pleasant air of a series less inclined to objectify women and be far more even-handed to all aspects of society unlike so many of the programmes surrounding it in the schedules during the times it was made. You only need to look at the casual sexism and racism in other well-remembered mainstream shows like PORRIDGE, FAWLTY TOWERS, or THE SWEENEY, to see how easily they slipped into that sort of thing.

I watched a GALTON AND SIMPSON PLAYHOUSE recently that was like watching a car crash when it came to attitudes to women, and that came from 1977, and highly respected writers. PUBLIC EYE did manage, on the whole, to avoid making those mistakes at least.

Meanwhile, Frank Marker and PUBLIC EYE faded from our screens in 1975, never to be seen again. This is apparently due to the fact that Alfred Burke himself thought that the series would lose a lot of its character if it was moved, as was apparently planned, completely onto film, although, given the extended film sequences in episodes like “Divide and Conquer”, I don’t believe it would have been so bad.

Whether or not this refusal to continue had anything to do with it, PUBLIC EYE seems to have been the high point of Alfred Burke's career. He did have another lead role in ENEMY AT THE DOOR for a couple of years, but that seems to been his lot as a lead actor in a television series, and that’s something of a shame because his performances throughout are nothing less than superb, especially given that, apart from a few recurring characters over the years, he is pretty much the calm centre around which the whole series revolves.

With the loss of so many early episodes, it is difficult to gauge whether the eclectic mix of hardness and whimsy of the later Thames series was following the pattern of the earlier ABC series due to those huge gaps in the archive, but I like to think that the sixties series wasn’t all relentlessly grim, but you never know.

Maybe Frank Marker did, after all, mellow with age. And we’ll probably never know unless by some miracle more of the ABC series turns up.

As to what we do still have, well, the series might appear anti-establishment, dour, cynical, world-weary, but within his own world, Frank, the eternal loner, a man who still needs to cut out bits of cardboard to stop his shoes from leaking, and still runs out of coffee from time to time, remains a calm constant, and, if you’re looking for a good, solid slice of contemporary telly drama from the sixties and seventies, PUBLIC EYE is, quite Frankly, well worth trying out.

Martin A W Holmes, Nov/Dec 2018