Lockdown, Lowdown… A Closer Look at the BBC Show Pie In The Sky

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

I have been blessed with the opportunity to look back upon a series that I loved but never managed to see form beginning to end. Cookery and detection was its key selling point, and both were right up my street.

If you wanted a genteel and subtle drama with plenty of twists and turns then it was the right type of watching for you. Having the incredible Richard Griffiths in the lead was also inspired as he spent each week tussling with the encroaching administrative interferences of modern policing that was results driven and accountability focused. His weekly sighs were poetry in breathing as his nemesis in the force Freddie Fisher, the superior officer, was weekly thwarted by Griffith’s character, Henry Crabbe, neatly sidestepping him and outwitting him at almost every turn.

This was a rural backwater of a television show that had almost all of the right ingredients to make it work. It had an idyllic location – the gentile English countryside; a sympathetic protagonist who was doing what he loved half the time – running a restaurant – and solving crime the rest of time – always better than anyone else; a policeman with a heart that allowed him to employ an ex-con and suffer many indignities sent to try his patience; and an array of peculiar characters that appeared to reflect the weather in the UK – they were constantly unpredictable.

The premise was simple. Crabbe was a police Inspector who had had his fill of the police force. He wanted to retire but his abilities, whilst constantly questioned by authority, were never less than brilliant so they would not allow him to retire and leave. He had an outside nemesis who was there in the first episode and was a shadow of occasional appearance throughout the series, played by Michael Kitchen. Dudley Hooperman, was a high level villain against whom Crabbe was pitched but people thought he was a bit too close to Hooperman, so when he escapes with a fortune after shooting Crabbe in the leg, some wondered if that was part of their plan together. In that “final” case, and the pilot episode, Crabbe had further been tricked into accepting a bribe and Fisher used this to blackmail Crabbe to stay on the force; Crabbe was entirely innocent but an investigation could have led to him losing his pension and therefore losing his real love, the restaurant.

His restaurant is established in his wife’s name and it gave the series its name. Pie in the Sky. The restaurant is so called because Crabbe’s signature dish is steak and kidney pie, seasoned with anchovies; apparently impossible to resist. Set in the fictional county of Westershire in the town of Middleton, the setting was part of the old style charm. There were no car chases or violent exchanges. The most likely heated argument would be over the temperature of the soup or the treatment of a feisty waitress.

His long suffering wife, played by Maggie Steed, was unimpressed by his cookery but an accountant so the profit and loss, was her bread and butter. The work between them was a brilliant set of interplays between two exceptional character actors which drove the 40 episodes over the full 5 series. Our anti-hero, Crabbe was not the typical detective. He was intelligent and diligent. There was no tick or type of quirk to make him stand out but he was exceptionally successful at solving crime.

The range of support characters was similarly inspired and we got plenty of faces that were to go much further. Griffiths, himself, was, of course, to go on and have an even more distinguished stage and film career, best known for playing Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter franchise. We also got an early look at Marsha Thomason who went on to NCIS Los Angeles as Nicole Dechamps, Vanessa Ryan in SEAL Team, Norma Dorrit in Lost, Nessa Holt in Las Vegas, Dr Isabel Barens in The Good Doctor and most notably, Diane Barrigan in White Collar.

Running from 1994 to 1997 it was a staple of the British TV market that shone brightly before it disappeared when decisions about how to take it beyond the fourth series lead to a misstep that would allow Crabbe to retire and the series to come to a conclusion. It was a shame as it still had plenty to give. The change was the role of Crabbe as a detective being altered to a community initiative that Crabbe was forced to head up. Cast changes also came in for season five and with the restaurant also being changed in décor and layout, the familiar started to become altered. It was its reliability and the way of gentile investigations that was its mainstay attraction. Now it was trying to reboot something that was the antithesis of the very idea. However, it did lead to one conclusion which was Crabbe got to retire at the end of it all, thus making it a more complete narrative arc than most.

A co production between the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Company, (ABC) they both gave it a decent send off, but the fact was that we all loved it enough to have been looking for extra helpings. Griffiths is, of course, no longer with us, but the fact that we can still find it online and watch with undisguised glee is a comfort. Like the food it served, that was the whole point of it all!

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programmes made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…

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