This post is written for the 12th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon on Terence Towles Canote's blog A Shroud of Thoughts. Click on the image above to go to a video of The Dangerous Game.
Shoestring was different. Both the character and the programme were different. A rare BBC show built around a private detective, it ran for two seasons and was screened in 1979 and 1980.
Eddie Shoestring, Radio West’s “private ear”, was a modern hero – so modern that he had suffered a breakdown after working with computers – and his eccentricities immediately cohered to form a believable character.
I remember my mother complaining that the show was “puerile” and, while I wouldn’t agree with that, there was something boyish about Eddie himself, with his innocence and curiosity. Though he did run into some serious bad hats from time to time, he was to an extent living out a fantasy of being a private detective amid the benign home of a Bristol local radio station.
Two Shoestring novelisations were published around the time the show was screened. In one of them he was warned off a case because “this is a businessman’s city,” and as a young councillor later in the Eighties I identified with him. No one was going to ask me to join the golf club or the Freemasons.
Enter Trevor Eve
Trevor Eve, who played Eddie, was little known when he was cast in the lead of this new BBC show. He had come to notice playing Paul McCartney in Willy Russell’s play John, Paul, George, Ringo ... and Bert, which opened at the Liverpool Everyman and later transferred to London’s West End.
Robert Banks Stewart says in the BBC documentary The Cult of Shoestring that he had seen Eve directed by Laurence Olivier in a Granada TV production of Hindle Wakes and been immensely impressed by him. He championed Eve against the better-known actors who were being considered for the role of Shoestring and got his way.
Helped by an intermittent ITV strike, the early episodes of Shoestring won audiences of up to 21 million in its Sunday evening slot – a figure that is unthinkable for any British show now in our multi-channel world – making Eve a star.
Essentially playing himself
The regular supporting cast was Doran Godwin as Shoestring’s long-suffering landlady and occasional love, Liz Crowther as Radio West’s receptionist and Michael Medwin as the station’s boss.
Doran Godwin was a more experienced stage and television actress than Eve whose credits included the lead role in a BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma 1972. Liz Crowther is the daughter of the popular comedian and television host Leslie Crowther, who as a child played Lucy in a 1967 BBC adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She had returned to acting a year or two before she was cast in Shoestring and is still working today.
I wrote about Michael Medwin’s childhood and acting career when I covered The Intruder for Terence Towles Canote's 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon. By the time Shoestring was made, he had long been concentrating on the business side of the film and theatre business, and with notable success.
So when Medwin played the smooth station boss Don Satchley, who was always fretting about how much Eddie’s investigations were going to cost Radio West, he was essentially playing himself.
All sorts of interesting actors turned up in the series. Harry H. Corbett, playing one of the nastier villains Eddie encountered, shook off years of Harold Steptoe to remind you he had once been Joan Littlewood’s star Shakespearian at Stratford East. Kevin Whatley made his first screen appearance as a professional footballer, and Daniel Day Lewis his first adult screen appearance as a DJ.
Trevor Eve after Shoestring
Shoestring came to an end after two series because Trevor Eve wanted to move on with his career and feared he might become known for only this one role. He soon found success on the stage, winning an Olivier Award for his performance in Children of a Lesser God, and has appeared in films, but has remained best known for his work on television.
He played the equally unconventional much angrier Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, head of a police unit that investigates cold cases, in Waking the Dead, for nine series between 2000 and 2011, totalling 92 episodes.
He is now seen, like John Thaw and James Bolam, as a first-rate actor who has made his greatest contribution on the small screen.
The last edition of Shoestring ever made
The episode I have chosen is episode 10 of its second series, The Dangerous Game, which was the last edition of Shoestring ever made – it may be because the series finished so soon that it is fondly remembered. It certainly went out on a high with this one, which displays both Eddie Shoestring in knight in shining armour mode and the series’ sense of humour. He quizzes a department store buyer who turns out to be acting as Santa (“One of the perks of the job. Market research, if you like. I do it every Christmas.”), only to find he is a big Eddie Shoestring and Radio West fan.
A nurse talks to Eddie about a boy who has been admitted to hospital with burns and an eye injury – she is concerned that he and his father are not telling the truth about how he was hurt. After making himself a thorough nuisance to the father, the father admits that his son was injured when the transformer of an electric game he had bought him (the boy’s birthday s a couple of days before Christmas) blew up in his face. Eddie is then faced with the task of tracking down all the games that have been sold before they are opened as presents on Christmas morning.
We see him haunting the shops and markets of Bristol as seasonal music spills from every radio and even the Salvation Army band. This diegetic music makes the show feel absurdly Christmassy, and the city was always part of the show’s attraction, notably here in Eddie’s last-minute dash over the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the small hours of Christmas morning to retrieve the one dangerous game he has not yet located.
Son of British film royalty
The supporting cast in The Dangerous Game is impressive. The importer of the toy, who turns out not to be the villain we imagined, is played by Bert Kwouk, who was the go-to Chinese actor in British films and television for decades – he was in everything from Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Deep End to Last of the Summer Wine via the Pink Panther films.
The injured boy’s parents are Michael Elphick and Celia Imrie – the former a big name in British television and the latter about to become one, as well as enjoying great success on stage and in films to this day. And the boy himself is played by Tom Bolt who, as I discovered while writing this, is the son of British film royalty. His mother is the Oscar-nominated actress Sarah Miles and his father the double Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Bolt.
The Duke of Wellington's daughter
Writing this has reminded me just how much I enjoyed Shoestring and how much fun it was. I have linked to a video of The Dangerous Game at the top of this post – just click on the image. (I’m sorry about all the advertisements.) If it disappears from the web because of some nonsense about “copyright”, I shall replace it with the documentary The Cult of Shoestring, which is well worth a watch anyway.
If nothing else, you will learn how the Duke of Wellington’s daughter played the key role in persuading the BBC to broadcast the show in the plum Sunday evening slot.
The team behind Shoestring went on to make Bergerac, an equally successful police detective series set on the Channel Island of Jersey. But we leave Eddie Shoestring asleep among the ruins of a Christmas party that he has missed while saving children from injury.
The streets of Bristol were only intermittently mean, and perhaps Eddie was a little tarnished by experience and sometimes afraid, but he was far from mean and people loved him.
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