The fictional Detectives
Lewis and Vera have in common that I did not immediate take to either
series but now they have become part of my essential viewing. It was always going to be difficult
for Kevin Whatley, the North East born and proud, actor, to take the lead role
in the series which has brought John Thaw lasting fame and which reminds I must
read and write about his life following the purchase of two biographies some
time ago, including that by his life and that of his wife Sheila Hancock.
The follow on series where university Oxford University
colleges and the riverscape have equal top billing reverses the roles where Thaw was the bookish opera loving red
jaguar car owning Oxford University educated detective inspector by giving the
Northern actor a sergeant side kick who is Oxford educated and once would be
clergyman. The interaction between the two men has developed well, especially
as both are bachelors with the original wife of Lewis having been murdered in
what was thought to have been a road traffic accident on a shopping trip to London.
I enjoy the interactions between the two men and the sights
of the city, where I studied and lived in two spells totalling five years
separated by the year at Birmingham University, more than the stories, where
like the other John “Nettles” his Midsomer murders, are more about middle class
village life than the endless trail of multiple killings.
The most recent episode of Lewis provided a clever plot
where the script pointed to one of two men and not the culprit, a woman, and where
the sights of Oxford delight the
senses and reminds of a time when golden opportunities were all before me. The
final lines are about two successful people who buried themselves in their work
but end up alone, one dead also has meaning for Lewis and Hathaway as the
latter draws attention.
The story begins with an event which only has a loose
connection with everything that is to follow. The two men are at the perimeter
keeping the media at a distance while a raid takes place on a cannabis growing
operation of several acres worth several millions. The head of the plant
manages to resist arrest but warned that he is attempting to break out Lewis
and Hathaway use police vehicles to ram the getaway 4 by 4 and it is Hathaway
who delivers the punch which leads to the arrest before the cameras after Lewis
is hit and injured on his face. The two become local celebrities as a
consequence and the subject of banter within the local force.
The significance of good publicity is soon placed against the bad when a Professor of English who once
wrote a book about women not needing
men, is found dead by one of her students after someone had posted the
video she in turn had posted on a dating
site seeking a male partner. Surely she did not commit suicide because of this?
The facts suggests otherwise except to Lewis who is nor
convinced and persuades his colleagues, senior and junior, as the events
unfold, who did it as there are several suspects all of whom they discover were
undergraduates together two decades before.
There are two principle suspects. She once dated a fellow
student whose happiest moments was in a meadow adjacent to one of the colleges
which he is now proposing to develop for housing in a deal with the college,
who are hesitant about agreeing after a successful campaign against the project
by Professor. It emerges that the reason the couple broke up was the outcome of
a successful malicious campaign by another student who she had beat to become
President of the union. This individual
now runs and Internet site which attacks individuals, releasing confidential information
about their lives including home addresses and telephone numbers. He and his
team are responsible for gaining access to the video and releasing it on the
net.
One of the helpers is a bright young woman/student/former
student who Hathaway takes a shine and asks her to help trying to find the link
between the deceased, and the two men. The secret is that the man managing the
site had put it out that the Professor was sleeping around, taking revenge on
his defeat in the ballot for President
of the Union. This young girl is found brutally
murdered and this confirms Lewis’s belief that the Professor was also murdered.
The girl is the friend of another young
assistant with the site, who has a grudge against the Professor because she was
unwilling to give him the kind of reference which would have got him a post
graduate post at an Ivy League USA University after his graduation. The two
young people with others have paid work recording the works of Shakespeare for
the BBC.
A third suspect is a journalist who dated the Professor
recently despite being married with children having responded to the Dating
site advert and who had also known the other suspects and the Professor as an
undergraduate. The police discover that he appears responsible for the over 20
messages left on the answering machine and subsequently wiped off with the recording
cassette taken had destroyed. He had
done this after finding the body although it was his wife who had made the
calls after finding out what her husband had been up to.
The culprit was none of these but the woman who runs the
Dating agency and Internet site and who was a close friend of the property
developer and who wanted him but knew it was not possible while the Professor
lived. She had also killed the girl after she had worked out what had been
happening and why. The episode remains coherent and satisfying.
In the first of the latest series, it is the botanical
gardens close to Magdalene Bridge and from where there is pathway to
Christchurch Meadow and the Isis and the Cherwell conjoin which is the star and
which also has a complicated plot with blind alleys and red herrings. I do not remember this episode now as clearly
as I now should.
A botanist accidentally unearths the body of a recently
buried professor who was fixated upon solving a Lewis Carroll riddle which has
no significance except to pose the concept that some things cannot be
explained. The main deviation from the central plot is in the believed
existence of a secret Oxford Society for those of exceptional intellect and
character. The programme reveals that the founder and sole member of the club
is a Oxford Professor one of whose assistant/students died from a drug overdose,
or so it appears and his death and the Professor is pursued by the boy’s mother
who has turned her home into a shrine and police style Operations room in her
determination to get to the truth. I cannot remember if the young man was a
druggie or gambler or both with debts but he died after taking part in a
private experiment to find an immediate cure for cancer
The head of the fake genius society would pursue possible
members by sending them cards on which was printed statements such as “you have
been noticed”, “you are under consideration”, and such like, to create a sense
of being important. A student couple become obsessed with becoming members to
the extent of claiming they saw something at one point relating to one of the
deaths but create the likeness of Lewis and his sidekick Hathaway, such is
their obsession with being different and drawing attention to themselves.
All roads lead to the home of the wealthy brother of the
dead Professor and his wife where Lewis establishes that pictures are being
sold allegedly to keep up with the costs of running the Hall. When the truth unfolds it emerges that in
fact £2 million pounds of paintings have been sold in order to fund the
basement laboratory where the brother is trying to find an immediate cure for
the cancer his terminally ill wife is suffering. The complication is that
husband is having an affair with the Botanist head of the Gardens, in fact with
the approval of the wife who does not want her husband to be alone when she
dies. He had been using a poisonous plant from the Gardens for his experiments
and on which he tested on the student volunteer. I think the brother was
eliminated by the botanist because he worked out what had happened. In any
event the two killers are taken into custody leaving the wife to die alone. There is a good walk along the High from
Carfax to Magdalene Bridge into the Botanical Gardens and
Christchurch Meadow and the gardens next to the College and back to Carfax.
Vera can be considered a follow up to George Gentry, police detectives set in
the North East of England. Gentry was in fact written by an East Anglian author
who set all his many books in the part
of the country in which he grew up. Vera Stanhope is also a fictional character
from a series written by Anne Cleeves and who appears to have written the books
as set in the North East with a separate series set in the Shetlands which is
also being made into a TV series by ITV although she grew up in the South West
country.
Very is played by the double Oscar winning actress Brenda
Belthyn who has never looked fully comfortable pretending to be born and bred
in the North East, living in an isolated cottage on the Northumbrian coast once
occupied by her father, a man she appears to have dislike primarily because he
had an affair and as she discovers in the second series, with a woman who she
meets and learns she bore him a daughter.
In the first of the four part two hour slot films a respected senior social worker, Jenny
Lister, is murdered by drowning while swimming in a reservoir a number of
suspects emerge from one of social services past cases about an infamous case
involving the death of a child drowning in a bath. The child's mother was jailed;
a junior social worker was pilloried who lives with her daughter also in an
isolated cottage on the coast and where Vera’s visit leads to the woman being
outed in the local community. In a dramatic finale the pilloried social worker
and her daughter are nearly killed by the murderer. I have failed to remember
some of the key aspects of the story because of confusion with another story
about a former social worker in a different Police detective series with the
socially aristocratic Scotland Yard Inspector
Linley.
In this case a woman social worker and wife of a clergyman
had disappeared at the same time as a child had disappeared in the London where the woman then worked. The
mystery is solved after the duo
investigate the murder of a kindly clergyman where his death was initially thought to be one of accidental poisoning after he had died
eating a mistaken fungus and the hostess had survived after being
violently sick. The chief suspect is the sixties with it young housekeeper of
the clergyman although attention is also focussed on the daughter of the female
hostess. The complication is the
policeman son of the local police detective who had an affair with the
housekeeper before turning his attentions to the female hostess.
In this instance it emerges that the up and coming former
City based clergyman had buried himself away in the countryside after his baby daughter
had died in infancy and then his wife was thought to have committed suicide on
a ferry trip to the continent. Her body was never found. By coincidence he had
chosen or been appointed to a parish where he discovered his former wife was
living under a new name with a daughter who is about the same age as their lost
child. It emerges that the woman had faked her death before kidnapping the baby
and bringing her up as her own. The story does not cover what happens to girl
now a teenager when she discovers that she had a mother living in poverty in London with other children.
In the most recent case for Vera
a shoe is found on a Tyne Bridge over a
motorway link which is later connected to another shoe of a man found dead in a
skip in Portsmouth. It is later established that the man was
attacked and thrown over the bridge or managed to get in the bridge rail and
fell onto the roof of a passing transport en route to Portsmouth and a
Continental bound Ferry and had been dumped in the skip by the driver determined
not to delay his work assignment.
It is then discovered that the
man in his early forties was living with his mother who did not report he was
missing for three days. It transpires she had been away or a trip with a local
doctor also to the continent from the North Tyneside based
overnight Ferry service. It also emerges that the young man had developed an
early drug habit and his mother had used her inheritance, re-mortgaging the
property and establishing major debts to a drug supplier in order to maintain
he son’s habit and where she also kept detailed of records of how much she
spent and also in the periods when she had been successful in getting him to
stop.
There is an involvement between
the man and a young woman and also an elderly dying homosexual man with whom
the young man had established a relationship and was intending to leave his
mother to live with and who was also to inherit the man’s property. During the
fist part of the story it is made to appear that the mother was responsible for
the death of her son. The “who done it” is in fact the mother’s boyfriend,
causing the unintentional death of the son from the best of intentions and also
that of drug dealer is found dead on a beach. The woman owed the dealer money
and had gone to Amsterdam as a
courier for him.
I have also been watching the
second series of Silk with Maxine Peake
playing Defence Barrister Martha Costello and Rupert Perry Jones as Clive
Reader fellow Barrister and Neil Stuke as the Chambers Senior Clerk Billy Lamb.
The first series centres on he ambition of both barristers to become leading
Counsels Q.C’s and the machinations of the senior clerk to get them “briefs”
commission’s from solicitors to represent their clients. He deals with a
solicitor who represents a well known villain and it is this relationship which
concentrates the first episode of the new series. There are two defendants. The
first the crime boss walks because there is a lack of evidence to continue to
the hearing but the fall guy is a man of low intelligence and high dependency
who did carrying out part of the instructions to destroy the five senses of the
victim, going as far as blinding him but then calling an ambulance which saved
the man’s life. Although as a consequence of a powerful speech, the client is
found not guilty (diminished responsibility) despite a steer by the Judge to
the jury to the contrary, he is then tortured and killed by crime boss.
In the second episode Martha is asked to defend an Army
officer charged with being responsible for the death of a member of his team by
disobeying orders not to leave their compound in Afghanistan. The man refuses to go into the
witness box, to explain his actions or have a senior friend speak for him. A
side story is the potential relationship between Martha and the friend who
arranges the representation.
The story that emerges is a moving one in that the dead
colleague was a trained sniped who had unintentionally shot a child used as a
shield by the enemy at distance when they had been attacking the compound. They
had attempted to save the child but the death had haunted both of them
especially the man who shot the child and who became unstable and unreliable.
Facing a similar situation he had agreed to the young man going out to
investigate leading to his death rather carrying out the orders and putting all
the team in jeopardy. He had not wanted to reveal the truth before the parents.
While the officer is found guilty of disobeying orders and is penalised the
chairman of the Tribunal expresses the wish that the man remains with the
service and continues to display the courage he has previously shown on the
field of action and in the court.
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