6 posts tagged “dempsey and makepeace”

The memory plays tricks. I remembered Dempsey and Makepeace’s pilot being a brilliant actioner and when it arrived on DVD last year, I was shocked to see how crap it was. In fact, I was surprised a series was even commissioned, let alone three. But by the second season, the show had improved greatly.
   Watch the first series of The Professionals, and there is bad dubbing and some cheap shows, including one where the location filming was done mostly at a bowling alley. Pamela Stephenson shows up twice in that first year as a guest star, in different roles, the producers hoping we would be focusing on her brassière in the earlier episode and not her face.
   So I watched Minder—which Channel Five in the UK was adamant in its being a sequel, not a remake—after having become curious with the British media’s reviews.
   Judgement: if I really think about it, some of those early original episodes were not that great.
   The media did feel that the original pairing of George Cole and Dennis Waterman was superior to Shane Richie and Lex Shrapnel, and on that they are right. Cole and Waterman felt at ease with their characters, and they were initially cast as equals. (Only after a while did Minder venture into self-parody and Waterman became more a supporting act, which led to him quitting the show, and replaced by the first of Cole’s on-screen nephews.) Here, it seems that it is Richie’s show, with Shrapnel the second banana—and I think it’s this imbalance that irks me.
   But people remember Minder as being a show about Arthur Daley’s exploits, so the new première sees his nephew Archie (Richie) in another spot of bother and needing newly released ex-con-turned-cabbie Jamie Cartwright (Shrapnel) to help as his heavy.
   It wasn’t terrible, mind, and as an item of television escapism, the new Minder stands up fine. I like the reworked theme, but I did not like how many scenes had music. That seems to plague a lot of modern TV shows and it doesn’t work for dramatic reasons. Purists might argue that it’s not really Minder, certainly without the grittiness of Euston Films products of the time (to quote Alas Smith & Jones: ‘From the makers of Minder and The Sweeney: Eusless Films presents Widows—exactly the same, but with women in it’), and maybe they are right. It’s still reasonably good telly.

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 …

A blast from the past. Glynis Barber from Blake’s 7, Dempsey and Makepeace and Emmerdale speaks on The Alan Titchmarsh Show on ITV. It’s great to see Glynis looking so fab as her second cop role comes to an end. The Emmerdale clip is missing between the two videos below. The second video sees Glynis discussing Dempsey and Makepeace and The Graduate.