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. 

Britain's two most famous TV policemen on screen together in 1964

Between 1962, when he first appeared as Charlie Barlow in Z-Cars, and 1976, when he played the character for the last time in Second Verdict, Britain's most famous television policeman was Stratford Johns.

That baton was then taken on by John Thaw, who had begun playing Jack Regan in The Sweeney in 1975. He continued in that role until 1978 and then played Inspector Morse between 1987 and 2000. (I don't remember their being any clear holder of the crown during that interregnum.)

And here they are together in a Z-Cars episode from 1964.

Trivia fans will be pleased that Sheila Hancock, who was married to John Thaw, played Miss Hannigan opposite Stratford Johns' Daddy Warbucks in the original London production of Annie.

GUEST POST Shut it! Two words of advice from Jack Regan

Peter Chambers doesn't want any Barney Rubble as he looks forward to owning some television history.

tl;dr – Series One of The Sweeney is shortly to be released on Blu-Ray.

More – Initially in 4:3 with original ad-breaks, later in 16:9 continuous, somehow.

Any mention of the 2012 shambles – Shut it!

To describe The Sweeney as iconic would be a damp British understatement. It drew a line under what had gone before – Dixon of Dock Green, Z-Cars, and Softly Softly – and then threw the book away.

It did this using a small team of ‘guerilla film-makers’ at Euston Films, a subsidiary of Thames. Directors such as Douglas Camfield – who made Inferno for Dr Who – were given 10 shooting days and £40,000 budget to go out on location in London in small teams carrying 16 mm equipment and using the background they found. 

Producer Ted Childs created the role of Jack Regan for John Thaw and picked writers such as Ian Kennedy Martin to provide the outstanding scripts. Much of the action happens in pubs, where the characters consume unbelievable amounts of alcohol and smoke like chimneys.

The dense use of London criminal slang changed crime writing forever after. Many later shows pay obvious homage – Endeavour is replete with seemingly linked references. Swapping the Ford Granada for an Audi Quattro – and adding SF – gives Ashes to Ashes. Swapping the genders of lead characters, and shifting to Manchester gives Scott and Bailey (“Ours not to reason why. Ours just to catch the bastards.”). Moving the Jags from the villains to the cops, and re-locating to Oxford is the obvious evolution to Morse – losing the London lager and gaining real-ale. Your round George.

Now I am sure I had fifty quid around here somewhere…

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

Redcap (1964-6): John Thaw's first starring role

What would Inspector Morse really have been like in his twenties? For the answer, don't watch Endeavour, watch Redcap. Because this drama about a detective in the Royal Military Police gave John Thaw his first starring role.  

It ran for two series and 26 episodes between 1964 and 1966. All but three of the episodes still exist and many of them have been posted on YouTube.

I've been binge watching these over the past few days with some interest.

Thaw is very good, and must have been to be cast in this part aged only 22. Sometimes, in his exasperation with authority, he sounds almost comically like the middle-aged Morse. but there are few hints of The Sweeney's Jack Regan.

The series as a whole is a reminder of how many overseas commitments Britain still had in the mid-Sixties: Germany, Cyprus, Aden, Malaysia.

But the real joy of Redcap is the supporting cast in each episode: you never know who will turn up next. In an episode about bullying in a cadet establishment, for instance, the cadets include Richard O'Sullivan, Barry Evans and a young actor called John Mitchell who was about to reinvent himself as Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

And here are Thaw and Leonard Rossiter. Rossiter's platoon also includes Ian McShane and John Noakes, sporting a dodgy Welsh accent, which is a reminder that he was a promising actor before Blue Peter came calling.

Yes, there's much to enjoy in Redcap.

Freda Jackson and Stratford Johns in Serjeant Musgrave's Dance

When I saw the cast of this 1961 television play included two Liberal England heroes - Freda Jackson and Stratford Johns - I had to have the DVD of it.

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is a play by John Arden, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1959 to a less than ecstatic reception. Arden himself adapted it for television, and the general view after it was broadcast was that he had made the story easier to follow.

As Wikipedia explains:

The work follows three privates in the British Army and their sergeant, all of whom are deserters from a foreign imperialist war. Serjeant Musgrave and his men, Hurst, Sparky and Attercliffe, come to a northern English coal mining town in 1879, posing as a recruiting party. The community is in the grip of a coal strike and cut off by winter snow.

The soldiers have with them a store of arms and the body of Billy Hicks, a soldier from the town they are visiting who died in that imperialist war.

When Musgrave calls a meeting in the town square:

Instead of recruiting townsmen, Musgrave takes out a Gatling gun. The gun is loaded and pointed at the audience. Then the soldiers hoist up the skeleton of Billy Hicks on a lamppost, still dressed in uniform. Musgrave dances below it reciting a rhyme:

... Up he goes, and no-one knows, who it was that raised him. ... He sits on your back and you'll never, never lose him....

Musgrave talks about the atrocities that followed the soldier's death, and explains that since this single death caused five on the other side, five times five townsfolk should be killed to avenge their deaths. 

Whether Musgrave is right or has been seized by religious mania is left open, but his plan fails when his men argue amongst themselves and the dragoons arrive.

First, a word about the look of this television play. Though it originates in the theatre, there is nothing stagey about it. This is television in the round. 

At one point the camera shoulders its way through a crowd for a tight close up of one actor's face and, though you don't see cameras or cables, it's obvious that the production is taking place in a studio. There is a strong sense that its makers were exploring the possibilities of a new medium and had not yet settled for making television dramas as much like cinema films as possible. 

Patrick McGoohan gives a powerful performance as Musgrave, and you can see a little of him in the video below, along with Ian Bannen, who played the role at the Royal Court,

You can also see Stratford Johns in the video, with stick-on whiskers, playing the mayor, who also owns the coal mines. Musgrave has marked him out as the first against wall and he is no leader.

One of Musgrave's men is played by a young John Thaw in what may have been his first screen role, with the result that the two actors who dominated British police dramas for almost 40 years, as Barlow, Regan and Morse, share the screen here.

And Freda Jackson, as she always seems to be, is magnificent. Sympathetic but no pushover, she holds her own with McGoohan's Musgrave.

Someone writing about her brassy Mrs Voray in the 1948 film No Room at the Inn said the performance looked forward to the powerful Northern women of Coronation Street more than a decade later. The soap opera had just started at Granada when Serjeant Musgrave's Dance was filmed at their studios. And again you feel she would have been wonderful in it.

As to John Arden, I can remember that when BBC Radio 4 broadcast his Pearl, a new play written specially for radio, it was treated as a big occasion. But looking it up, I find that was 45 years ago and I can't recall hearing him mentioned since.

In which Stratford Johns is a real gent

From the early Sixties until the rise of John Thaw as Regan of The Sweeney in the Seventies, Stratford Johns as Charlie Barlow was the most famous police officer on British television. 

The character was first seen in Z-Cars, then appeared in the spin-off series Softly Softly and was finally employed by the Home Office in Barlow. 

Which makes this story about him from Stan Collins - I was on the Liberal Democrats' federal policy with him years ago - all the more impressive:

I met Stratford Johns once in the gents outfitters where I worked after school and hols. He knew the owner and her late husband.
The shop was packed so he came behind the counter and helped until we'd cleared the queue. Then he bought what he'd come in for and left.
Real gent!

— Stan Collins (@NatsSnilloc) December 24, 2022

Stan added in a later tweet that no one said anything at the time, but several customers returned over the next few days to ask if it had really been Stratford Johns who served them.

John Thaw and Leonard Rossiter in Redcap

Redcap was a television series about Sergeant John Mann, a member of the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police. It was broadcast on ITV between 1964 and 1966.

It is significant because the lead role was played by a young John Thaw. It is interesting to compare him here with Shaun Evans' rendering of the youthful Morse in Endeavour.

But Redcap is interesting beyong the presence of Thaw, because so many good actors of the period appeared in it.

This clip features the great Leonard Rossiter and Mike Pratt, but in just this episode you could also have seen Ian McShane, Bill Treacher (you know, Arthur Fowler off of EastEnders) and John Noakes.

According to Wikipedia, 23 of the 26 Redcap episodes made still exist, and they are available on DVD.

Six of the Best 627

Peter Carrol reviews Ed Balls' memoirs.

"Lib Dem Glee Club is without a doubt, the weirdest event in British politics." Mikey Smith of the Daily Mirror ventures into the belly of the beast.

Roger Hermiston says the Liberal Democrats ignore one of their more recent heroes: Sir Archibald Sinclair. "Ultimately his legacy might well be, like Clegg, that he led the Liberals on a downward electoral path, but his is a compelling story, and there is much to chew over and admire in his years at the top of British political life."

Pop culture has worn out Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, explains Nick Murray.

Mark Cunliffe remembers Thick as Thieves, a 1974 TV sit com starring Bob Hoskins and John Thaw.

"There was always a hint of the West Country lumberjack to Trescothick's batting, defined by hefty forearms, scythes through the off side and a stubborn reticence to move his feet. But his runs underpinned England's progress to their 2005 summit." Tim Wigmore celebrates Marcus Trescothick.