For the JCPCP: Norma Varden, the Norman Yoke, Being Normal and Norman Bowler

I've just sent another of my columns off to the The Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy, so it's time to publish an earlier one here again. The theme for this issue was "Norma, Norman or Normal".

Goodbye Norma Jean. This obviously had to begin with someone called Norma, but Marilyn Monroe didn’t make the cut. Instead, I’ve gone for the English-born piano prodigy turned Hollywood actress Norma Varden, who appeared in both Casablanca and The Sound of Music.

In Casablanca she’s the wife of the Englishman who has his wallet stolen right at the start of the film. In The Sound of Music she’s the housekeeper who tells Julie Andrews, who has just found a frog in her bed, “You're lucky. With Fraulein Helga, it was a snake.”

There was talk of Varden playing the Mother Superior, but Hollywood elbows get very sharp when a top nun role is up for grabs.

******

Our next caller is Gerrard Winstanley. Gerrard, what’s on your mind this evening?

O what mighty Delusion, do you, who are the powers of England live in! That while you pretend to throw down that Norman yoke, and Babylonish power, and have promised to make the groaning people of England a Free People; yet you still lift up that Norman yoke, and slavish Tyranny, and holds the People as much in bondage, as the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War.

Winstanley was the leader of the Diggers or True Levellers during the Civil War and Commonwealth. His words here are a quotation from The True Levellers Standard Advanced, published in 1649.

The idea that the people of England laboured under the Norman Yoke – ruled by the descendants of William I and his generals – had a shadowy existence through the Middle Ages and came into the light when central authority broke down during the Civil War.

And that yoke is still round our necks today. In 2011, Gregory Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, published research showing that people with Norman surnames – Mandeville, Percy, Darcy – live three years longer than the rest of us and leave significantly larger estates.

Studying the probate records of those with "rich" and "poor" names for every decade since the 1850s, he found the extreme differences in accumulated wealth had narrowed over time. Yet his conclusion was still that:

Over the last 150 years, the rate of social mobility revealed by surnames is slower than most social scientists have estimated – and is possibly slower than in the middle ages.

Or to put it another way, the wealthy hold us as much in bondage as "the Bastard Conquerour himself, and his Councel of War".

******

I’ve never been that keen on being normal, so I was heartened by the rise of the neurodiversity movement and its insight that conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia weren’t disorders to be fixed, but part of the rich spectrum of human cognitive diversity.

But that movement worries me now, both because it accepts the coherence of such diagnoses, even welcomes them as providing an identity, and because it takes it as axiomatic that cognitive differences are a reflection of differences in people’s brains.

When I began to consider these questions, I was sceptical about the concept of ADHD. Weren’t the disorder’s supposed symptoms just a list of the things about children that most irritate teachers? Don’t pharmaceutical companies famously “sell the disease, not the drug”? Wasn’t Ritalin marketed as a treatment for depression and fatigue – particularly “Tired Housewife Syndrome” – before ADHD was invented? I once wrote an article for OpenMind along just these lines.

This view is deeply out of fashion now, but I’m not convinced it’s wrong. When I see a headline like “Third of UK parents have sought special needs assessment for their child, survey finds,” it still seems to me that we should look at the social and educational pressures on parents and children rather than unthinkingly locate the problem inside the child’s brain.

Not only has the concept of ADHD won near-universal professional acceptance, it has escaped into the wild, evolved and bred with autism to sire AuDHD. This diagnosis may not have received its clinical imprimatur, but it’s everywhere online.

You may see its arrival as an important new insight into the causes of cognitive differences, or you may reflect that when the symptoms of ADHD and high-functioning autism are as loosely drawn as they are, at least online, there’s bound to be some overlap between the two clusters.

These days I don’t get to see the professional literature so often, so the ADHD discourse I come across is on social media or in conversations overheard in coffee shops. What strikes me about it is the confidence with which people refer to “the ADHD brain” or even “the ADHD nervous system”. That confidence, I believe, runs far ahead of the scientific consensus on how far the condition can be identified by neuroimaging or any other technology.

People obviously derive comfort, meaning and membership of a community from their diagnoses, but that in itself doesn’t guarantee their validity. I don’t have a conclusion to offer here, but I’ll remain an interested, if worried, observer of developments.

******

I can remember the Sixties and lying in bed at eight o’clock, hearing the theme music of the police drama Softly Softly and wishing I could stay up to watch it.

When I did get to see it, I adopted Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler, as my hero. Clive James once suggested he did little but open and close doors:

In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in.

But I liked him. And years later he reappeared as Frank Tate, the keystone of the relaunched soap opera Emmerdale, so he must have been able to act. 

What I didn’t know then was that, in the Fifties, Bowler had been a member of the Soho set alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.

So never despise a Norman – unless it’s Norman Wisdom, of course.

Harry Hawkins heaven on YouTube

This is a plug for the British Detective Series Of The 50's / 60's / 70's YouTube channel. It has Maigret, Z Cars and Gideon's Way. Above all, it has lots of Softly Softly. It's Harry Hawkins heaven.

It even has episodes of Softly Softly from the pre Task Force days. When I listen to the theme music for those, I am a little boy in bed wishing I could stay up to watch it.

Not everyone saw Harry Hawkins as a hero. Here's Clive James writing in North Face of Soho about his days as a television critic:

My first breakthrough came when I realized that the most fascinating thing about the supposedly realistic police series Softly, Softly was the unreal frequency with which the powerfully built Inspector Harry Hawkins (played by Norman Bowler) opened and closed doors. 

In any given episode, he would open or close every door in the police station. Sometimes he would open and close the same door in rapid succession. He would leave the room just so that he could open the door, close it behind him, open it again, and come back in. He gritted his powerfully built teeth while opening and closing doors, as if opening and closing doors were a feat not just of physical strength, but of mental concentration. 

I wrote all this down in my column, giving him the nickname Harry the Hawk.

Now read Kingsley Amis wrote an episode of Softly Softly: Task Force and it was about his relationship with his son Martin.

Michael Caine and Norman Bowler in a 1961 television play

Now here's a find. 

The Ship That Couldn't Stop is a television play from 1961 about a vessel powered by a nuclear reactor. It's heading for the port of New York and can't slow down.

And down the cast list are both Michael Caine and this blog's hero Norman Bowler.

If you play the video here you will see a short extract in which they both appear. Play it on YouTube to watch the whole thing.

I was going to say that this is the earliest screen appearance by Bowler I've seen, but I note from IMDb that he made an uncredited appearance in Tom Thumb (1958). And I remember seeing that at the cinema as a little boy in the Sixties.

A photograph of Norman Bowler in his Soho years

Embed from Getty Images

Norman Bowler played an early television hero of mine, the detective Harry Hawkins in Softly Softly: Taskforce. He later surprised me by turning up as Frank Tate, the star of the relaunched ITV soap Emmerdale.

But back in the Fifties he was a member of the hard-drinking Soho set - you can see him remembering those years in an interview clip about the painter John Minton.

This photograph shows her with his first wife Henrietta Moraes. They are standing in front of a painting of Bowler by Minton.

Henrietta was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 Great Lives programme with Maggi Hambling, and you can read her Independent obituary from 1999. 

It all makes the Soho of those days sound a thoroughly miserable place.

A signed copy of Bryan Magee's Men of Ideas with a Market Harborough connection

I've blogged before about my discovery that the broadcaster Bryan Magee, who died in 2019, was evacuated to Market Harborough as a boy and lived literally around the corner from where I did as a teenager.

His television series Men of Ideas, in which he interviewed leading contemporary philosophers about the discipline's greatest figures, was broadcast while I was having my interviews for a university place to read philosophy, so it was wonderful preparation.

In his Growing Up in a War, Magee describes his time in Harborough. For most of it he lived in Logan Street (yes, it's named after this blog's hero J.W. Logan MP) with the Toombs family - like Norman Bowler, he was one of those children who were happier in their new home than back in London.

And his special friends was the Toombs's daughter Kath. Which probably explains this signed copy of the book of the Men of Ideas series that I got from a Market Harborough charity shop some years ago.

It wasn't my discovery. Someone I used to work with at Golden Wonder was volunteering in the shop and put it (and a couple of other signed Magee books) aside for me. And I'm very pleased I own it.

Later. Since I wrote this I've remembered my mother talking about a woman called Kath, whom she knew at least to say hello to. I think it's the same Kath.

Norman Bowler as Wooly the rabbit in Wizbit

Time for a dive down one of this blog's rabbit holes: Norman Bowler, man about Soho in the 1950s and later a star of Softly Softly: Task Force and Emmerdale.

Wizbit was children's programme, screened in 1985, that starred and was partly devised by Paul Daniels. I don't remember it, but Nostalgia Central does:

This BBC children’s television show featured an alien magician called Wizbit and a large rabbit called Wooly, and followed their adventures in Puzzleopolis – a town inhabited by walking, talking (and often singing) sponge-balls, dice, magic wands, playing cards and 8-foot-tall rabbits (all magician’s props).

Wizbit’s year-and-a-day mission was to find out all about Earth, and the show made an attempt to be semi-educational.

The puzzles which Wizbit had to solve were also presented to the viewing audience at home, with the solutions revealed towards the end of the episode.

And in the very first episode - and only in the very first episode - says IMDb, Wooly the rabbit was played by Norman Bowler.

You can see Wooly the rabbit in the clip above. I let it run on because it's so weird. It must have given some children nightmares.

Wooly doesn't sound much like Norman Bowler - he doesn't have a Wiltshire accent, for instance - but it's quite possible for one actor to be inside a giant costume and and another to provide its voice.

That what happened in Gophers!, which is a programme I remember, but no one else seems to.

Thanks to Laura Sparling on Twitter.

A Little Silver Trumpet was the television programme that used Fauré's Sicilienne as its theme

In July 2012 I went to a recital in St Laurence's. Church Stretton, that was part of the town's arts festival.

One of the pieces I heard played was Fauré's Sicilienne, and I blogged the same day:

I am sure that it was used as the theme music for a detective series many years ago - probably one set in the Victorian era. However, no amount of searching will tell me what the series was.

I have solved the mystery. If I'm right then it wasn't the them of a detective series set in the 19th century but of a children's series set then: A Little Silver Trumpet.

It was screened in the afternoons when I was at university and didn't watch much television. The only repeat was in the spring of 1982 when I was working in Sutton Coldfield and wouldn't have been home in time.

But then I've never thought that I watched the mystery programme: I just remembered hearing its theme music. Well, maybe I did, but in a trailer.

I've another reason for thinking I didn't watch it besides my lack of any memories of it. It is that the cast included this blog's hero Norman Bowler, and I remember the shock of recognition I got when he turned up as Frank Tate in Emmerdale in 1989. If I had seen him before then and after Softly Softly: Task Force, I would have remembered it.

A Little Silver Trumpet is not on YouTube, but - miraculously - there is a live studio recording there. And in the section I have picked out above, you can see the banknote being discovered and then hear - after a long pause - Fauré's Sicilienne.

Tim Worthington has blogged about the series:

L.T. Meade’s A Little Silver Trumpet would probably have done nothing bar gather cloth-bound dust on the shelves of second hand bookshops were it not for a viewer who, having enjoyed – and presumably actually understood – The Moon Stallion, wrote in to suggest that this forgotten children’s novel was ideal source material for a run-up-to-Christmas adaptation.

There was no trace of olde-worlde-psychedelic fantasy in this straightforward social-status-swap melodrama, and the discovery of a fifty pound note somewhat implausibly stitched inside a dress was about as dramatic as it got, but it still won tons of awards and got a ‘lost’ book spruced up and reissued into the bargain so must have been doing something right.

It's easy to see how I could remember this as a detective serial, so I think I have solved the mystery.

And here is Sicilienne in all its insidious beauty.

Kingsley Amis wrote an episode of Softly Softly: Task Force and it was about his relationship with his son Martin

Well here's something I didn't know, even though I've seen the episode on YouTube before and even remember watching it when it was broadcast in 1974. 

Kingsley Amis wrote for Softly Softly: Task Force.

If you click on the picture it will take you to the whole episode. Many thanks to John Salisbury for posting it on YouTube.

That picture, incidentally, doesn't show Kingsley's son Martin Amis, though it looks uncannily like him. It's actually Simon Fisher-Turner, who we've come across before in Tom Brown's Schooldays.

But if you read this 2006 Daily Mail account of Kingsley Amis leaving his wife Hilly for Elizabeth Jane Howard, it's hard not to see him and the teenage Martin in this script:

When they arrived - at midnight because their plane was delayed - Amis opened the door in his striped pyjamas, 'rearing back from us,' as Martin recalled, 'in histrionic consternation.' The telegram Hilly sent announcing their visit hadn't arrived.

'It wasn't just that he was surprised to see us. He was horrified to see us. We had busted him in flagrante delicto.' Amis's opening words to the boys were: 'You know I'm not alone.'

Martin describes Jane looming behind Amis 'in her white towel bathrobe, with her waist-long fair hair, tall, serious, worldly, already busying herself, cooking eggs and bacon, finding sheets, blankets, for the beds in the spare room.

'It would have been an impossible heresy for me to admit any woman was more beautiful than my mother. But I could tell at once that Jane, while also being beautiful, was certainly more experienced. I acknowledged the appeal of that with simple resignation and I did not feel disloyal.'

Philip's first impression of Jane was that she was 'obviously someone who didn't like children'. She watched the boys warily, while they watched her, she says. 'We were all trying to conceal our shock - they hadn't known I'd be there, and we'd had no warning of their arrival.'

There then followed a week of what Jane calls 'grandiose treats' (mostly visits to the cinema) and 'long and often tearful sessions spent by the boys alone with their father'.

Martin remembers Amis being 'outwardly calm, unusually quiet voiced' during these sessions, patiently taking 'whatever we threw at him', including, 'incredibly', Philip calling him 'a c**t'.

Softly, Softly: Task Force and the history of police on television

This post is written for the 9th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon on Terence Towles Canote's blog A Shroud of Thoughts.

It’s 1968 and downstairs I can hear the theme music for Softly, Softly playing. But it’s eight o’clock and I'm only eight years old. Not suprisingly, I long to watch the programme.

A couple of years later, when I could watch it, Softly, Softly had metamorphosed into Softly, Softly Task Force and it is an episode of this latter series - Copper Wire, first broadcast on 1 December 1971 - that I shall be writing about here.

But to set it in context, we need a bit history of first - the history of police series on British television, or at least on the BBC.

The fall and rise of PC Dixon

That history really begins in the cinema. Ealing Studios released its police drama The Blue Lamp in 1950. It dealt with the murder of a London policeman who’s coming up to retirement, PC George Dixon played by Jack Warner, and the capture of his killer.

As in many British films of that decade, the villains are much more sharply drawn than the good characters. So the young hoodlum who shoots Dixon after robbing a cinema of its takings, Dirk Bogarde, still seems sexy and dangerous today. But James Hanley as the new constable who lodges with the Dixons and acts as a sort of surrogate son comes over as a wet haddock.

But then The Times critic of the day complained that: 

There is an indefinable feel of the theatrical backcloth behind their words and actions ... The sense that the policemen they are acting are not policemen as they really are, but policemen as an indulgent tradition has chosen to think they are, will not be banished.

That didn’t stop George Dixon rising from the dead to become nearly immortal.

In 1955 the BBC began to screen Dixon of Dock Green, a police series featuring several characters from The Blue Lamp, including a resurrected PC Dixon - again played by Jack Warner.

Warner was to go on playing him until the series ended in 1976, by which time he was 80 himself.

Dixon of Dock Green is written off in the TV history books as being ridiculously dated long before its 21 years on screen were up. 

I remember watching it as a small boy in the Sixties - it was shown at Saturday teatime, so no bedtime issues arose - and each episode began and ended with a homily delivered straight to camera by Dixon himself. 

These generally ran along the lines of “Young Johnny wasn’t a bad lad, but he fell in with the wrong crowd.”

Before I move this history on, I should add that, out of curiosity, I watched a 1970 episode of Dixon of Dock Green and found it wasn’t dated at all. 

Yes, Jack Warner was visibly at least two decades past retirement age – even his son-in-law Andy Crawford, the equivalent of Jimmy Hanley’s character in the film, must have been disappointed not to have made it past Detective Sergeant at his age. 

But the rest of it felt like 1970 and there was good use made of then-derelict Dockland locations.

Even Dixon’s opening monologue, which was about how you could work with someone for years but never really know them, was haunting rather than cosy.

Enter Barlow and Watt

In 1962 the BBC embarked on a new police series set in a new town in the North West of England.

The first episode of Z-Cars began with Detective Inspector Barlow (played by Stratford Johns) and Detective Sergeant John Watt (Frank Windsor) meeting by the graveside of another version of the original PC Dixon – an old constable gunned down by a young hoodlum.

While the makers of The Blue Lamp could only suggest more bobbies on the beat, Barlow and Watt have a modern answer to the problem. 

Watt says:

“If we had crime patrols like other divisions, Reggie Farrow would be alive today. If we had crime patrols in Newtown, when the burglar alarm went at the factory it would have been two tough commandos that tearaway met instead of old Reggie and his bicycle.”

And the rest of the episode shows them assigning suitable officers to these new motorised patrols.

The original run of Z-Cars between 1962 and 1965 – it was one of the last British TV dramas to be screened live – had a strong impact and was hailed as presenting the police as they really were.

When it returned in 1968, it was without Barlow and Watt, who had become the dominant characters in a new show. These later years of Z-Cars was never as ground-breaking as the original series, and scheduled like a soap on two evenings a week, it was in danger of turning into a soap.

Still, the Z-Cars theme tune remains one of the greats.

I finally get to watch Softly, Softly

Barlow and Watt had moved on to Softly, Softly. This new drama series again tried to keep up with developments in British policing by covering the work of a regional crime squad – in this case in a fictional region called Wyvern located somewhere near Bristol.

The series took its name from the motto of Lancashire Constabulary Training School: ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey.’

In 1969 Barlow and Watt, by now promoted to Detective Chief Superintendent and Detective Superintendent respectively, moved to a new series called Softly, Softly: Taskforce. Set in the fictional town of Thamesford (and filmed in the Medway towns in Kent), this concentrated on a team of uniform and plain-clothes police establish to carry out large operations.

It was this series that I got to watch as a boy.

Copper Wire

I’ve chosen Copper Wire for two reasons: the first is what it tells us about policing in 1971 and the second is the quality of the acting.

To get a result, the Task Force relies on either catching the criminals red handed or getting a confession out of them. There is little mention of forensic science beyond fingerprinting - the analysis of blood groups could eliminate suspects but not convict them.

And to get catch criminals in the act you needed a tip off, either from police intelligence – another force hearing rumours that one of their regular customers is planning a job in Thamesford – or from an informer. Every detective has his informers and their identities are jealously hidden even from superior officers.

If you wanted a confession, then Barlow was your man. This was the age before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, but I can’t remember an episode when he beat it out of a suspect. He could be a bully, and he was sometimes shown bullying the innocent, but he also used cunning and psychology. In Copper Wire he resembles a priest hearing confession.

Barlow is being driven home by his sergeant from a dinner where he has drunk too much. Listening in on the police radio for entertainment, he hears a name he recognises from his days in the North West. Partly out of mischief and partly out of nostalgia, he inserts himself in the investigation.

What follows in the second half of this episode is a wonderful two-hander between Stratford Johns as Barlow and Peter Kerrigan as Tiger Mulholland.

Stratford Johns was a mighty actor. Before Z-Cars he had been with the Royal Court in its glory years and he would later shave his head and play Daddy Warbucks in the first West End production of Annie. When he left Softly, Softly: Task Force in 1972, initially to play Barlow in a series of his own, it was never as good.

But Peter Kerrigan is marvellous here too. In what could be a stereotyped Liverpudlian role, he underplays beautifully. Kerrigan had been a docker on Merseyside and was later to appear in many of Alan Bleasdale’s television plays.

Not that good acting in Task Force was a surprise. Thamesford’s Chief Constable was played by Walter Gotell, whose granite face and gravelly voice made him a regular Bond villain. And the dog-handler PC Snow was played by Terence Rigby, who was one of Harold Pinter’s favourite actors.

Frank Windsor devoted much of his career to playing John Watt, but when the series ended he went back to the stage and won warm reviews for his comic acting.

My favourite Task Force character as a boy was Inspector Harry Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler. I was later to learn that Bowler had been a member of the Soho set in the 1950s - here he is talking about the artist John Minton.

To end, and to prove there was some humour in Task Force, here from another episode is a short exchange between Inspector Hawkins and PC Snow, who is gently breaking in his new police dog.

The British Newspaper Archive: it's almost like stalking

Posting a clip of Norman Bowler in Softly Softly: Task Force the other day, I mentioned that his character's Wsst Country accent was probably the result of his having been happily evacuated to Wiltshire as a small boy during the war.

And having found Bowler reading extracts from his elusive memoirs, I knew that it was the remote village to Chitterne, surrounded by Ministry of Defence Land and Salisbury Plain, to which he and an older brother were sent.

So I thought I would see if the British Newspaper Archive had any record of him there. And, remarkably, he crops up in three stories from the Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser.

On 10 May 1941 he makes what may be his stage debut as John and Norman Bowler play pages in the schoolchildren's play Cinderella in Verse.

That summer, on 29 July 1941, the paper reports the results of the Chitterne children's sports. We find Norman winning the boys 7 to 9 east potato race and, what sounds like a blue ribband event, the boys 7 to 9 flat race.

And the following year, on 2 May 1942, Norman received a book prize at the Chitterne School Bird and Tree Festival.

So that's the British Newspaper Archive. It's almost like stalking.

Introducing a dog to the realities of police work

A moment of humour from a 1970 edition of Softly Softly: Task Force.

PC Snow is gently breaking in a new dog, Radar, after his previous one, Inky, had been shot. Inky had to appear on Blue Peter the following week to prove he hadn't been hurt in real life.

Snow is played by Terence Rigby, who was one of Harold Pinter's favourite actors and played Roy Bland in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

With him is my early hero Detective Inspector Hawkins, played by Norman Bowler. I later discovered Bowler had been a member of the Soho set in the 1950s.

I can't find a copy of Bowler's memoirs (he is, happily, still with us), but he has read some extracts online.

Hawkins's West Country accent is probably the result of Bowler having been evacuated to Wiltshire as a boy during the war. He seems to have been one of those children who was happier with his new family than he had been back home in London.

Watching Softly Softly: Task Force 50 years on

I can remember lying in bed at the age of eight or nine, hearing the theme music for Softly Softly playing downstairs and wishing I could watch it. But it started at ten past eight, which was late for a well brought up Sixties child.

By the time I could watch it, it had metamorphosed into Softly Softly: Task Force, and its those shows that I have been watching on YouTube over Christmas.

One of the things that has struck me is how little help the police could expect from forensic science in those days. There were fingerprints, but beyond that only blood tests - and they could eliminate suspects but never prove guilt.

So in order to take the villains Task Force have to catch them red-handed - and in a lot of shows they receive a tip off and are able to do just that - or they have to rely on obtaining a confession.

Which makes Detective Chief Superintendent Barlow a key figure in the dramas because of his ability to make suspects "cough" for a job. He can be browbeating, even thuggish, but there was more to him than that.

The other thing that strikes is the quality of the writing and acting. I will admit that Norman Bowler, who played my early hero Detective Chief Inspector Hawkins, had won a film contract for his looks before he had stepped on a professional stage, but Stratford Johns is magnificent and Terence Rigby, who played the dog-handler PC Snow, was one of Harold Pinter's favourite actors.

So here are the closing stages of Copper Wire from 1971. Barlow has been to a formal dinner and is being driven home when he hears from the police radio that an old adversary of his from his days in the North West (Barlow started out as a character in Z Cars in 1962) has been detained.

Barlow involves himself in the case and here is his interrogation of that adversary, 'Tiger' Mulholland, played wonderfully well by Peter Kerrigan, who was later to appear in several of Alan Bleasdale's plays.

Frank Windsor (1928-2020)

The death of the actor Frank Windsor was announced today.

In the 1960s he was, if not the most famous police officer on television, then the most famous sidekick. His character John Watt accompanied Stratford Johns' Charlie Barlow through the popular series Z Cars and Softly, Softly.

You can view them both in this clip from a 1968 episode of Softly, Softly. We first see Frank Windsor with my early hero Norman Bowler as Detective Sergeant Harry Hawkins and then the mighty Stratford Johns comes in.

BBC Genome tells me that this episode (Take Them in Singles) was first broadcast at 8pm on 10 October 1968. Which explains why I have memories of lying in bed, hearing the theme music for Softly, Softly and wishing I could watch it.

Norman Bowler on Norman Bowler

Embed from Getty Images

One of the pleasures of Mark Gattis's documentary on the artist John Minton, which was screened last summer, was the appearance of Norman Bowler.

As I wrote when posting an earlier interview he gave about his memories of Minton:

One of my early heroes was Detective Sergeant (eventually Detective Chief Inspector) Harry Hawkins in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force. 

He was played for a decade from 1966 by Norman Bowler, who turned up many years later as Frank Tate in Emmerdale. 

Before Softly Softly, Bowler was an artist's model and bodybuilder. He was a member of the Soho set alongside John Minton, Francis Bacon and Daniel Farson. He married the model and writer Henrietta Moraes.

The other day I discovered that Bowler had published his memoirs, My God. Is That the Time?, in 2005.

It appears to be a scare and expensive book, but you can find Bowler reading six extracts from it online for free.

They don't cover the Soho set or Softly, Softly, but are well written and still of interest.

The six are:

• Any two - memories of being evacuated to Wiltshire during the second world war
• The tent - Just William adventures in Wiltshire
• Reg- a moving tribute to a beloved older brother who died in the war
• Classical music - how beauty and pain can be shared across wartime borders
• Going to sea - adventures as a merchant seaman
• Fit ups - Bowler learns to act in Ireland, after having already signed a film contract

These pieces do solve one mystery about Bowler. He is the son of the West Hampstead jeweller Clifford Bowler, yet in every part he speaks with a West Country accent. This must be a relic of his childhood Wiltshire days that he has kept or cultivated ever since.

It may be significant that he speaks with more warmth about the family he was evacuated to than about his own family in London.

Barlow and Watt investigate Jack the Ripper

Charlie Barlow, played by Stratford Johns, was television's most famous policeman in the Sixties and early Seventies.

He appeared in Z Cars, Softly Softly and Softly Softly: Task Force, and a number of spin-off series.

The most imaginative of those spin-offs involved Barlow and his long-term sidekick John Watt, played by Frank Windsor, investigating the Jack the Ripper murders. (Harry Hawkins must have been busy elsewhere.)

It was broadcast in colour even though this was 1973, but the version available online is in black and white.

This clip gave wide exposure to the theory that the murders were the result of a Masonic conspiracy to cover up a scandal in the Royal Family.

Joseph Sickert was really Joseph Gorman and almost certainly not the painter Walter Sickert's illegitimate or adopted son. He certainly was a fantasist.

Yet the idea of a Masonic conspiracy caught the public imagination. It was fully developed by Stephen Knight in his Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution and inspired the film Murder by Decree.

Norman Bowler on John Minton

One of my early heroes was Detective Sergeant (eventually Detective Chief Inspector) Harry Hawkins in Softly, Softly and then Softly, Softly: Task Force.

He was played for a decade from 1966 by Norman Bowler, who turned up many years later as Frank Tate in Emmerdale.

Before Softly Softly, Bowler was an artist's model and bodybuilder. He was a member of the Soho set alongside John Minton, Francis Bacon and Daniel Farson. He married the model and writer Henrietta Moraes.

Here he shares his memories of Minton.

Famous faces in Gideon's Way

I have now watched all 26 episodes of Gideon's Way on Youtube. As I said in my first post on the subject, one of the pleasures of the series is the regular appearance of actors who later became famous in other roles.

So it is that in one episode (Boy with Gun) you will find both Smiley's enforcer Mendel from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Wally Batty from Last of the Summer Wine.

That first post showed you John Hurt and Michael Cashman. Here are some more familiar faces.

A young Donald Sutherland in The Millionaire's Daughter.

Mrs Bridges from Upstairs Downstairs as a criminal boss in Big Fish, Little Fish.

Harry Hawkins from Softly Softly was on of my first TV heroes. Here is Norman Bowler in Morna before that (and long before Emmerdale).

Mr Lucas from Are You Being Served? appeared as a Constable in The Reluctant Witness...

...while Private Walker from Dad's Army was an Inspector in A Perfect Crime.

And here, before Heartbeat, before Yes Minister, before even Basil Brush, is Derek Fowlds in The Nightlifers.