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.

The Killing is back

Get your Faroese jumper out of the wardrobe and brush up on your conversational Danish, the third series of superior crime drama The Killing starts on BBC4 tomorrow night.

Apparently this will be the last outing for Sarah Lund and the Copenhagen cops, in a case linked to the financial crash of 2008. No news yet as to who her partner is but hopefully he won't be shot dead before the end of the series as both her former partners were.

Murder in Mottram

The murder of two policewomen in Mottram in the South Pennines east of Manchester has led to calls for the police to be armed and for those who kill police officers to face the death penalty.

Whatever you think of the death penalty in general, it seems unlikely that it would deter criminals from shooting at police, especially those who are cornered and desperate after a long manhunt and looking at spending the rest of their life in prison.

The call for the police to be routinely armed is equally misguided. Not only would it not stop incidents like this week's, it would also inevitably lead to more incidents like the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 in which the police kill unarmed people.

Gun laws the wrong target

The mass shooting at a cinema in Colorado has inevitably sparked comparisons in the British media between our murder rate and gun laws and those in the United States.

I find a lot of the analysis unconvincing. I'm not saying that everyone should be able to walk around with thousands of rounds, as it appears the killer in Colorado did, but I do have sympathy with those who say it would have been better if some of the audience in the cinema had been carrying firearms.

Some people also seem to think that America's higher murder rate is solely because of its gun laws and ignore social conditions. America is scarred by poverty, inequality, racism and a lack of access to housing, health care and education. It's hardly surprising that it has a high murder rate. Tightening up gun laws might reduce mass shootings like last week's but wouldn't remove the roots of violence that lead some people to kill. Switzerland with its high standards of living and social provision, and where miltary reservists keep automatic weapons and ammunition at home, has low gun crime and murder rates.

Britain's gun laws are relatively recent. Up until the 1903 Pistols Act, anyone could buy a gun and until 1920 carry it without a firearms licence. Gun laws are almost always brought in in times of industrial or social conflict. Before the First World War, striking Welsh miners defended themselves against the police with legally-held weapons, just as miners in West Virginia in the 1920's and 1970's and the Black Panthers in the 1960's did.

It would of course be better if no one carried a gun. If you say that some people - such as the police - should be able to carry guns but not others, you're basically saying that you trust them not to misuse their firearms. I don't. Incidents like Dunblane, Hungerford and the Cumbrian shootings show that even relatively tight gun laws won't stop people intent on mass murder getting their hands on weapons but do leave unarmed victims without the means to defend themselves. As William S. Burroughs said, "After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military."

Vox pop vacuity

This week's shootings in County Durham led to a recurrence of the pointless media exercise where journalists hit the streets to ask people what they think of the incident and whether they were surprised by it.

The dialogue always runs as follows:

Journo: what's been the reaction in the town?

Local: we're all very shocked, this kind of thing doesn't normally happen here.

Journo: what about the killer?

Local: nice guy, kept himself to himself.

I'm genuinely bemused as to what news editors think they're adding to the story by broadcasting such banal guff.  If I were stopped in such a situation, I'd be tempted to answer "Pretty laid back, we have a massacre here most weeks." and "We all knew he was a nutter but no one would listen".

Death at the sales

Seydou Diarrassouba, the teenager from South London stabbed on Oxford Street on Boxing Day in what appears to have been an gang-related incident, and Anuj Bidve, the postgraduate student shot in Salford in the early hours of the same day and whose killing is being treated as racially motivated by the police, were as far apart as you can imagine. One a petty criminal awaiting trial for theft; the other a middle-class Indian with a well-paid career ahead of him.  But their deaths were united in one respect: consumerism.

Both men were killed as a result of the Boxing Day sales: Diarrassouba was stabbed after an argument broke out out in a trainer shop and Bidve at 1.30 a.m. while walking through the Ordsall estate in Salford in order to be at the front of the queue at a shop in Manchester city centre.

The BBC and other media outlets talked of the "traditional Boxing Day sales", despite them having only started in the last decade.  Politicians also seem confused about whether consumerism is a good thing or not.  Last summer, it was blamed as one of the factors that led to the looting of shops in riots across England. Now, the ability of the British economy to avoid recession is apparently dependent on the amount of money people spend in high street shops.  The supposedly liberal Guardian even ran an editorial blaming the train drivers' union ASLEF for putting "thousands of jobs at stake" after its members struck on Boxing Day over bank holiday pay.