I can't claim to have read the Wycliffe Mysteries, so I don't know whether the original stories were any good.But the photo shows what happens when the dredgers-sorry, UK mainstream television channels-went around looking for new 'drama', and came up with yet another derivative of a story-book.
Oh, and yet another 'Police' story.
The people in the photo look (and sound) like a couple of smug, whining, truculent schoolteachers, and we are supposed to suspend disbelief to the point where we (god help us) actually think that a couple of people who might make a meal of a single pint once a Sunday-month in an artificially quiet country pub are also capable of restraining savage murderers with nought but a flash of their 'authority'.
In real life such characters would be hopelessly outmaneouvred and violently abused by the criminals, and rightly despised by their colleagues, never having a hope of drawing their pensions.
But, for the comfort-food of stultified imaginations that the TV companies peddle, this is ideal, since the lame, inbred producers are not really able or willing to do more than regurgitate half-digested school memories where the scruffy patches on the corduroy jacket were the police badge of authority which to this day aids and abetts their own delusions of safety.
In case anyone fancies trying to get a real idea dramatised, the television companies have a cast-iron rule; you must have had it published somewhere else first.
Unlike:
The Avengers.
Danger Man.
The Prisoner.
Z-Cars.
Softly Softly.
The Professionals.
The Sweeney.
Only Fools and Horses.
Minder.
Porridge.
The Champions.
The Strange Report.
Space 1999.
Blake's Seven.
To name a few.
No comments:
Post a Comment