An Eye to the Main Chance

I've followed and enjoyed a few series from the seventies on Talking Pictures TV, especially Public Eye, with Alfred Burke as luckless private detective Frank Marker. My current favourite is The Main Chance, with John Stride as an unorthodox, and now struck off, solicitor David Main.

Like Public Eye, each episode of The Main Chance looks at a social issue of the time (housing shortages, juvenile delinquency, child custody). Last night it was the bête noire of the right-wing press in the seventies, and now, trade union militancy, with Main intervening in an industrial dispute on a large building site.

As with the films The Angry Silence and I'm All Right Jack, it goes out of its way to avoid being seen as anti-union per se, reserving its ire for picket line violence, intimidation and unofficial strikes sparked by an outside agitator or individual  militant (played by Alfred Burke in the former and Peter Sellers in the latter), with trade union officials portrayed as equally keen to stop these things and root out those responsible for them. Here the thorn in the bosses' side is played by Ray Smith (a change of part from his role as the policeman DI Firbank in Public Eye) as a militant who combines a genuine concern to improve working conditions, delivering an impassioned speech about health and safety and victimisation in the building industry, with running various scams for his own private gain, while attempting to outwit Main's assistant, an ex policeman played by Glynn Edwards who goes undercover on the site to gather evidence against him.

No doubt for technical and cost reasons, a lot of these series from the seventies are quite stagey, with little in the way of outdoor location shooting, and the script quality can be a bit uneven, but the acting and themes often lift them, and it's always fun to spot some retro features, whether in the pubs the characters frequent or the vehicles they drive.

 

Out of the Public Eye

The programmes on Talking Pictures TV, broadcast on Freeview channel 81, are fast becoming some of my favourite on television.

As well as documentaries, like John Betjeman's elegaic early sixties train trip from Kings Lynn to Hunstanton, on a now closed north Norfolk branch line, and films such as the social realist late forties film noir "The Blue Lamp", with its superbly-shot finale at the White City dog track in west London, there are lots of repeats of sixties and seventies drama series.

My current favourite is the detective series "Public Eye", made for ITV between 1965 and 1975. I hadn't heard of it before and am not sure why, unlike many other, in some cases inferior, shows from the era, it hasn't been repeated on a more mainstream channel.

Although the central character, private detective Frank Marker, might seem like a bit of a TV cliche, a loner, slightly dishevelled and with a somewhat murky past, the writing and acting really lift it (as with my favourite TV detective, Columbo, it's now impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role apart from Alfred Burke, despite neither he nor Peter Falk being first choices for the part), and span the comedy of the Christmas special "Horse and Carriage" to the pathos of "The Man Who Said Sorry", a terse, almost hour-long, two-hander, apart from the dialogue-free opening scene and the final one, where Marker chats to his sometime ally, sometime adversary, DI Firbank, at their usual public bar meeting place.

The location of the series moves around southern England, but for the latest, and final run, Frank Marker has setttled in Eton, renting a spartan shopfront office where he seems to subsist on instant coffee brewed on a single gas ring and takeaway meals from the adjacent Chinese restaurant. There are lots of late sixties and early seventies details, from keg fonts in the pubs to his fee of six guineas plus expenses (later decimalised as £6.50, a slight increase, no doubt the result of rising inflation, although given his seemingly sparse workload it appears doubtful that the operation would have really been commercially viable, especially in one of England's posher towns where he also rents a flat).

Perhaps the coolest feature of the series though is the jazzy theme tune, composed by Robert Earley.