The last episode of Shoestring: The Dangerous Game

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.

Tom's casting may have been aided by the fact that the director of The Dangerous Game is his half-brother Ben Bolt, but he is good in the role.

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. 

Jack Hawkins hunts for Michael Medwin: The Intruder (1953)

This post was written for Written for Terence Towles Canote's 12th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

What do we know about Britain in the Fifties? Well for one thing, people couldn’t get enough of films about the recent war, could they?

Not so fast. Here’s the beginning of a film review from Picturegoer (24 October 1953):

Hold your groans about yet another war film. This one really is different. The war flashbacks are just the frame for an enthralling postwar story about an ex-soldier who goes to the dogs.

What turns a good combat-man into a bitter delinquent? Colonel Jack Hawkins makes it his conscience-stricken duty to find out.

And to make sure you’ve got the message, it concludes:

If you're tired of war films, this is the one to kill the yawns.

It seems the conventional view of the Fifties needs a bit more work.

The great thing about Jack Hawkins

The film being talked about in Picturegoer is The Intruder, which was directed by the future James Bond director Guy Hamilton and based on the novel Line on Ginger by Robin Maugham. He was the nephew of the writer W. Somerset Maugham, and his first novel, The Servant, was adapted by Harold Pinter for the celebrated film directed by Joseph Losey.

That review tells you enough to see the parallel between The Intruder and another film involving Colonel Jack Hawkins and men who have not coped well since the war. And indeed, Hawkins’ Colonel Merton in The Intruder is a benign prototype of his bitter Colonel Hyde in The League of Gentlemen, who puts together a whole team of such former soldiers to rob the Bank of England.

The great thing about Jack Hawkins in such roles is that he has an authority that makes you absolutely believe he has commanded men in battle. And he did see action as an officer in the war, though he ended it with ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association), which organised entertainment for troops. He reached the rank of Lieutenant and was made an honorary Colonel in 1946.

In The Intruder, Hawkins’s Colonel Merton arrives home from an evening out to find an armed burglar in his house. He recognises him as Ginger Edwards, one of the men he commanded in the war – and one of the bravest. He starts to talk to Edwards, but then there’s a misunderstanding and Edwards, thinking the Colonel has called the police, flees.

The rest of the film sees Merton tracking down Edwards, who has escaped from prison, to see if he can help him. Merton has left the Army, but has a crisis of conscience that he has not, as a good officer should, still been concerned for the welfare of the men he commanded. In the course of the film, part of which is told in flashbacks to the war, we see why Edwards has turned to the bad.

There turns out not to be much of a mystery to that, but there is much to enjoy from the talented cast as we follow the Colonel on his journey.

The amazing Michael Medwin

Ginger Edwards is played by Michael Medwin, who was a popular young actor in 1953. Helped by his “cheeky chappy” looks, he often played Cockney characters. Yet his background was not what you would expect from his performance in The Intruder. He came from a Dutch and Irish background, but was adopted from an orphanage by two rather grand English ladies who were to send him to public school – for American readers, in Britain a public school means a private school. Obviously.

When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in its obituary:

"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."

And Edward Fox heard of Medwin’s childhood for the first time when he sat in on a press interview Medwin gave as the two of them were about to open a touring production of My Fair Lady (Fox was Professor Higgins, Medwin Colonel Pickering) in Glasgow:

Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.

As the years went on, Medwin acted less and became more involved as a successful producer in both films and the theatre. If he’s remembered now, it’s as Don Satchley, the radio station boss, in Shoestring, the late-Seventies private detective series that launched the career of Trevor Eve.

Jack Hawkins turns to his old comrades

The first old comrade Jack Hawkins turns to in his hunt for Medwin, is John Summers, who is played by George Cole. Summers has returned to running his wholesale greengrocery business in Covent Garden market. We learn that Hawkins promoted him from the ranks and that we see him struggle with the snobbery of the officers’ mess and go carousing with Edwards for old times’ sake. Nevertheless, Hawkins refuses to listen to him when he wants to hand back his commission.

After Cole, Hawkins meets his former second-in-command, and we find him played by Dennis Price in a typically cool, disengaged performance. We learn that an act of cowardice on Price’s part would have cost an injured soldier his life if Medwin had not risked his own to save him. Angered by Price’s lack of cooperation, Hawkins tells him that if it weren’t for Edwards he would have had him court martialled. After Hawkins has left, Price phones the police and tells them that Hawkins may know the whereabout of Medwin.

Then Hawkins visits Arthur Howard, who is now the headmaster of a private school. Arthur Howard was the younger (by almost 20 years) brother of the film star Leslie Howard and specialised in small comic parts. Sure enough, he is in The Intruder to provide comic relief. His character was not a member of Hawkins’ tank corps, but became mixed up with them and, through a chapter of accidents set in motion by his showing a good-time girl played by Dora Bryan the inside of a tank, was the subject of a famous photograph depicting a heroic British tank driver. Dora Bryan is, of course, wonderful – she brightened any film by her presence.

Finally, Medwin runs Hawkins to ground at a farm in Wales belonging to another of his former soldiers. There is at last some tension, as Hawkins has to reach him while avoiding the attentions of the police. Medwin is persuaded to give himself up and Hawkins promises to help him when he leaves prison.

What turned Ginger bad

What did happen to turn Ginger Edwards bad? The answer is simple: he came home from the war to found his girl (played by Susan Shaw) with another man. He also found his younger brother was being beaten by the uncle who was raising him (and had raised him the same way). When the boy was knocked down and killed running into the road, the uncle blamed Edwards, who punched him and sent him crashing down a conveniently placed flight of stairs to his death. Edwards was then imprisoned for manslaughter.

It's not a great film: the pleasure lies not in the unravelling of the mystery so much as the comic interludes and the tension at the end when Hawkins fears arrest himself for helping an escaped prisoner. And its unchallenging moral is that things would be fine if only a benign upper class helped the lower orders.

There is an unexpected twist involving Dora Bryan though, and I won’t spoil that for you.

"A handbag?" Edward Fox hears about Michael Medwin's childhood

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I've found it!

When I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the childhood of the British film actor and producer Michael Medwin in August, I came across an account of him talking about it at some event where he shared the platform with Edward Fox. But I couldn't find it again after I emerged into the fresh air.

Now I have. I was thinking of an interview with Andrew Young of The Herald - Medwin was about to play Colonel Pickering to Fox's Professor Higgins in a touring production of My Fair Lady that was coming to Glasgow.

Young writes:

It was my innocent question about what I supposed to be his own Cockney roots that brought about the most remarkable revelation concerning his background. Home truths about which even Edward Fox (who was sitting in on the chat) had been completely unaware.

''I was one of life's social indiscretions,'' he said. ''Adopted and brought up by two maiden ladies in Dorset. In other words, I'm a bastard.'' This bold, freely-offered information provoked paroxysms of mirth in Fox.

A lucky bastard, as it happened. ''It was a most felicitious adoption. I had a halcyon upbringing and was not prepared for the world at all. Things were very quiet and lovely. The maiden ladies were a Dr Mary Jeremy, OBE, and a Miss Clockton Roberts. The former was an OBE because there were not many lady doctors around at the time and she had done much good work in India before the 1914-18 war.''

The ladies then ''put me through the local public school and then sent me off to what you might call a finishing school in Switzerland. Being maiden ladies, presumably they had it in their heads that that was the natural progression.

''I was with them until they died, Dr Jeremy when I was 12, and Miss Roberts when I was in my twenties. So I have no-one in the world. I have no relations that I know about.''

In tracing his ancestry back to his mother and father, all he had ever learned was that his mother came from Dublin and his father was Dutch.

''For a long time I kept hoping that I would be traced by someone who would tell me that I was a Guinness heir and that all this was mine.''

Fox, who would be an asset to any audience, had by this time gone into spasms of laughter that were obviously causing him great pain. ''A handbag? A handbag?'' he shrieked, Lady Bracknell-like, although, so far as he knew, Medwin had not actually been found in one.

Honestly, what is Edward Fox like? I can't understand someone who finds orphans funny.

Daniel Day-Lewis's first adult screen role was in Shoestring

I say 'adult' because, perhaps helped by having the actress Jill Balcon for his mother and the boss of Ealing Studios Michael Balcon for a grandfather, Daniel Day-Lewis had a small, uncredited part as a child in the 1971 film Sunday Bloody Sunday.

So here he is, in his very first adult screen role. playing a self-satisfied local radio DJ in a 1980 episode of Shoestring alongside the stars of the series, Trevor Eve and Michael Medwin.

If you watch the whole thing on YouTube, rather than the short section I have picked out for you hear, you'll also find Pam St Clement with a Worzel Gummidge accent and the wife from Gourmet Night at Fawlty Towers.

The extraordinary childhood of Michael Medwin

Michael Medwin is one of those actors who often turns up in old British films and always makes them better. He usually, but not always, played cockney characters.

He also went on to have an influential second career as film and theatre producer. He was the producer behind Lindsay Anderson's If.... and O Lucky Man! and behind the first production of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, which helped establish the careers of Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis.

But I come from a generation that knew him as Don Satchley, the smooth boss of Radio West in Shoestring.

When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in his obituary:

"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."

Yes, Medwin went to a public school, but his childhood was far from conventional.

His family background was Dutch and Irish, and he was adopted from an orphanage by two elderly unmarried women, Dr Mary Jeremy and a Miss Clopton-Roberts. 

I can't find anything about Clopton-Roberts online, but Mary Jeremy was a substantial figure - an early woman doctor who chaired the National Council for Women, which was an early feminist organisation. You can read a profile of her at the bottom of this page of the Poole's Health Record site.

She was also chaired the National Council for Women, an early feminist organisation that concerned itself with causes like equal pay.

And if you search for Michael Medwin on the British Newspaper Archive, the earliest story to come up is from the Western Gazette for 17 June 1932. It concerns a fete held to raise funds for the Hants and Dorset Babies' Home, Parkestone, at the garden of Meadowside, Colehill, the home of Dr Mary Jeremy:

Dr, Mary Jeremy was responsible for the serving of teas, and Mrs Kitching (Bournemouth) and little Miss Mary Medwin and Master Michael Medwin had change of stalls.

So it sounds as though we have discovered that he had, if not a sister, then at least an adoptive sister.

The Intruder (1953): A companion piece to The League of Gentlemen and another children-and-bombsites film

This is not a proto version of Royston Vesey, but another film about how soldiers fared after the  second world war in which Jack Hawkins plays the Colonel.

But, unlike in The League of Gentlemen, its not Hawkins who has turned to crime at the start of the film but one of his wartime NCOs, played by Michael Medwin. Hawkins comes home from an afternoon of golf to find that Medwin has broken into his house with burglary on his mind.

The rest of the film uncovers what has happened to Medwin to place him on the wrong side of the law.

It's a sad story, but there is humour along the way too. I can't think of a single film with Dora Bryan in the cast that isn't much the better for her presence.

The reason I am writing about The Intruder is that it is another children-and-bombsites film. Medwin comes home from the war to marry Susan Shaw (who turns out to have found another man) and take care of his young brother, who has been living with an aunt and uncle of theirs.

We first see the boy playing with a gang of others on a bomb site, happy and dirty. But when he returns home he is told off for playing with common boys and Medwin has to intervene to save him from a beating. It's clear this has been the uncle's way of dealing with the boy.

The bombsite scene is a short one, but the boys' play there is seen in a wholly positive light, perhaps for the first time since Hue and Cry in 1947. Medwin's uncle, who disapproves of children who play on bombsites, is a prig and a bully.

Thanks to Reelstreets, I know that this scene was filmed on a London E1 bombsite between Pennington Street and St George's in the East. Remarkably, the site remains undeveloped to this day.

The Intruder was on Talking Pictures TV the other night, but does not appear to be on its online catch up service TPTV Encore. It's certainly worth watching if you get the chance.

I wrote a long post on children and bombsites in September 2022, and my major discovery since then has been the 1958 film Innocent Sinners. One day I will rewrite that long post, incorporating my later finds.

The two series of Shoestring to be released as a DVD set

Good news! The series of Shoestring are about to be released on DVD.

The Network on Air site says:

Trevor Eve stars as radio "Private Ear" Eddie Shoestring in the massively successful BBC drama series. 

Co-created by Robert Banks Stewart, Shoestring also stars Michael Medwin as Eddie's long-suffering boss Don Satchley; Liz Crowther as station receptionist Sonia; and Doran Godwin as Eddie's landlady, on-off lover and occasional assistant Erica. This complete-series set also features appearances from Diana Dors, Harry H. Corbett, Toyah Wilcox, Geraldine James and Michael Elphick. 

Poison phone-ins and threats to a disc jockey lead Radio West to hire private investigator Eddie Shoestring – who discovers it may be a longer-running job than he first thought! 

This set also includes a brand-new book on the making of the series by archive television historian Andrew Pixley, with contributions from original cast and crew members.

The two series were broadcast by the BBC in 1979 and 1980, and made Trevor Eve a household name.

I once wrote of the programme's appeal:

Eddie Shoestring was always a bit of a fantasist. He had suffered some sort of breakdown while working in computers and his new image as a Philip Marlowe figure - stalking the streets, not of Los Angeles, but Bristol - was his way of coping. He life as a private detective did not represent an exploration of the real world so much as an escape from it. 

So Shoestring never was grittily realistic, In fact, like many fantasists, Eddie drew people into his world.

An interview with Michael Medwin

Following Michael Medwin's appearance on Heartbeat the other day, here is an interview he gave to the Radio Times back in 1980.

It comes from a site dedicated to television series Shoestring. This was the programme that brought Trever Eve to fame. He was a private eye with his own radio phone in, and Medwin played the station's boss.

Michael Medwin in Heartbeat

Three weeks ago Heartbeat borrowed a plot from an old British film. Tonight it borrowed an actor.

Hello to Michael Medwin (born 1923), who made his movie debut 1946 and is clearly still going strong. You may remember him as the radio station boss in Shoestring.

Later. I have now found an interview he gave to the Radio Times in his Shoestring years.