This is from late 2007 (I found it here on Vox today) but it may still be valid:

Funny how your memory plays tricks. In 1984, I watched the pilot for Dempsey and Makepeace and thought it was fab. Over dinner, now that my DVD of series one has arrived (as predicted—sooner than the Amazon US order that was placed earlier), I have to say the première episode, written by Ranald Graham, has more holes and cheese moments in the plot than I remembered.
   It was also pretty obvious where London was masquerading as New York: my, how Docklands has changed.
   It was in desperate need of good direction which series producer Tony Wharmby failed to give.
   Graham has written some duffers in his time—the Sweeney! movie had the right amount of action but it made as much sense as Ian Macaskill reading the weather (did anyone understand him?)—and D&M’s first outing was so weak it was a surprise that a series was green-lighted.
   At a guess, British viewers on LWT were mourning the demise of The Professionals and with no real competition, the series was indeed green-lighted for three seasons.
   No wonder the Brandons said they could not understand the plot, in an earlier video I posted here. And they were in it.
   Audiences did deserve better, after the higher production values of The Professionals.
   I still have a few of the 1985–6 episodes on video cassette, which were better than the pilot. Let’s hope it gets better. I have not seen these first series ones since 1984; then the politically correct camp intervened and got Dempsey and Makepeace pulled for TV violence (yet The ‘A’-Team continued). It only re-emerged in New Zealand in 1990 at a later hour—five years after the original UK airing of the second and third series. TVNZ would have been fuming over lost ad revenue.
   A few bonuses on the DVD: an interview with Michael Brandon and Glynis Barber, and commentary over the first two episodes by them. The pilot was shown with the bumps inserted. Missing were subtitles.
   I would have watched more but Life on Mars was starting.

Note to Vox: an auto-save feature, please, considering Maxthon crashed just as I finished the original and superior version of this post. Dammit, I really, really hate retyping. Here’s the short, short version.

   Right: ordered. Amazon. Saturday. Mission: Impossible, fourth season. Still good. But Martin Landau has left because he asked for a pay rise and Paramount said no, and they kicked out Mrs Landau, Barbara Bain, as well.
   In came the other guy who auditioned for Spock but won, but even Leonard Nimoy, playing the new master of disguise, began getting itchy feet and buggered off to England to play a racing car driver who solves crimes.
   Spock’s called Paris—like Kramer, before we found out his first name was Cosmo, we never learn if this is his first or last name. In this season, the IMF was still combatting spies and undermining régimes in the good ol’ American way, before anti-Vietnam types scared the producers into forcing the good guys to combat local hoods and finks in the sixth and seventh season. (Capt Kirk played one in 1971, but Spock had gone by then.)
   You wondered why the IMF was even involved when the US Government could have sent in the Feds, Popeye Doyle or even Popeye.
   Script quality for Mission: Impossible is inversely correlated to the size of Peter Lupus’s sideburns. His sideburns are growing in 1969 when the fourth series began airing, so there was basically one more year tentatively before the rot really began setting in.
   Amazon UK. Sunday. Discussed before: Dempsey and Makepeace, first series. Script quality inversely correlated to how typically ’80s Glynis Barber’s hairstyle got. Plot summary: a New Yorker (Michael Brandon) and a South African (Glynis Barber, née van der Riet) are teamed up. ‘Will they? Won’t they’ in the stories—‘they did’ in real life. They spar off each other verbally to see if Michael will say, ‘Thomas the Tank Engine had a hard night’s shunting,’ or if Glynis would go relapse into an Afrikaaner accent.
   No, actually, they both play cops: Brandon’s character is from the NYPD and Barber’s is an English aristocrat sometimes in various states of undress during the series. (Like Diana Rigg on The Avengers, she could beat the s*** out of someone, but did so wearing less PVC.)
   Best scripts from Murray Smith (The Paradise Club—sinfully still not on DVD) and even Ronnie Blythe appears in one episode but as a very evil villain.
   Darn you, Google: I was checking for the name of the actor who played Ronnie Blythe when Maxthon crashed. I won’t be checking again.
   Bets are that despite having a longer distance to cover and having been ordered later, the British package will arrive earlier thanks to Royal Mail being more efficient than the USPS.

This was from 2006 but still: damn, they look good! From Richard & Judy.

   Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon recall their first kiss and what their son thinks of the two-hour pilot on the series where they met, Dempsey and Makepeace.
   A later interview with Glynis Barber appeared on This Morning, where she discusses the prospect of a TV reunion special.

I decided how to spend the Amazon UK coupon. It costs more than the £9, but at least with the savings it’ll cost less than what it would to buy here. Hey, I haven’t seen this in 24 years! I give you the Brandons …

Another great Billy T. gag, perhaps a bit more Kiwi in its execution—and in its targets.

To Jessica and my other Japanese friends, please forgive this post: it’s not meant to cause offence. This is the late Billy T. James, regarded as New Zealand’s greatest comedian, and a clip from his show in 1984. It was regarded as one of his most memorable gags. He also made fun of his own race a lot, too, so he certainly was not sparing!

Some more photos to share from around Wellington, New Zealand, and to show it’s not always sunny!

   This is actually Chews Lane but I thought it was strange seeing a second sign, on the opposite side, reading Tow Away Lane—but in the style of a regular street-name sign. Hence the filename Odd Name for a Street. Across the road is the local HQ for the Fairfax Press.    A lot of cities have fleets of so-called “green cabs” and Wellington is no exception. There are these ugly little eggs running around called Toyota Priuses, which may have looked good for about, ooh, one Oscar telecast’s arrivals. After that, they got pretentious.
   This one has the licence plate 0 SMOG. But it’s a hybrid, so when the petrol engine is in play, it does generate something out of the exhaust, surely? I know we have unleaded fuel and catalytic converters, but from what little I know of emissions this still generates more pollution than the regular Ford Falcon LPG cabs that run around Wellington—which, technically, should have this plate. If Wellington’s main taxi company is clever, it can tell us how many LPG Falcons it has running and compare the quantity to the fleet of these Green Cabs.
   I think Green Cabs is doing a good thing, generally, and certainly a Prius’s interior room is sufficient for most journeys, but I can remember the 1980s when most cabs here ran on natural gas, be they Holdens or Fords, and generated far less pollution than modern cars. We have, of course, the National Government of the 1990s to thank for their demise, and the Labour Government to continue its “rival’s” (ha ha) folly.    People my age will remember the Trades’ Hall and how it was the site of a bombing in the mid-1980s. Caretaker Ernie Abbott was the victim of the after-hours blast. I don’t think it was ever solved and I wonder if it qualifies as our first terrorist bombing.
   Trevor Loudon shares some theories on his blog but he admits they are hearsay. He refutes the rumour that it was a right-wing group and instead points to Marxists and various pro-Soviet groups committed to unseating the Muldoon Government. The irony is that the Labour Government that followed proved more anti-union and right-wing than they might have expected. One commenter on Mr Loudon’s blog wrote, ‘If your theory is true Trevor then the irony of the outcome was classic. They got a Labour Government alright, but it contained good’uns like Douglas, Prebble, Bassett, De Cleene, Caygill & Moore.’
   However, Loudon is also right in responding, ‘True Spirit, but the Soviets also got NZ's anti nuclear policies and the destruction of ANZUS. Which do you think the Soviets cared about most?’
   Whatever the case, we began losing a lot of our values and the integrity of our national system that decade, after the change in government. We can trace the growing gap between rich and poor right back to 1984, when we moved from a reasonably egalitarian and fair society to one which has an underclass and domination by foreign corporations.

Anyone remember the 1984 Apple Macintosh TV commercial? A YouTube poster called ParkRidge47 has made an edited version with Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Big Brother role. For a home-made vid, this is really good.
   Please note that this video was put together by a Sen. Barack Obama supporter and that his URL appears at the end.

Un parodie du pub de 1984 pour l’Apple Macintosh, avec Hillary Clinton, trouvé à YouTube.

The Toyota Hilux commercial in New Zealand many years ago, where the word bugger is the only thing uttered, is one of the more famous exports from this nation. But it’s not original, since many people say ‘Bugger’ when frustrated with their Corollas. Or when frustrated with making an ad for a Corolla.
   Here’s John Blackman in the 1980s, who utters this very word in these out-takes for a 1984 Toyota TVC in Australia. (Note: he also utters f***, s*** and c***.) Car buffs are right: Australia was still selling a locally produced 70-series model in 1984.

   Les gaffes des pubs australiens pour la Toyota Corolla, en 1984.