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.
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