Lockdown, Lowdown… A Look Back at the TV Show Dalziel and Pascoe

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

There are two versions of God’s own country in the United Kingdom. Firstly, there is the imposter, Yorkshire and then the real one – Scotland. Truth be told we don’t mind the gruff northernness of Yorkshire claiming the crown. We think it fits beautifully upon our heads so have no issue about it occasionally being borrowed. But the thing is that it is ours…

Yorkshire, nestled in England’s north is indicative of its divisions.

England manages to split itself unevenly between the sophisticated avocado munching south where London is its centric circle and people love the arts and are, as far as they want to believe, a sophisticated bunch. Then there is the gruff industrial north where the country got its industrialization and engine from which to power it into a world power.

The heavyset north fries everything and wonders about fruit and vegetables being eaten because they grow so many of them. The people in the north are uneducated and a tad rough – according to the south. What the north think about the south is generally unrepeatable.

And so, in Yorkshire we find set one of the longest running gruff detective series of the late twentieth and early twenty first century. It was a double act that traded upon the image of the gruff northerner and someone from the same place but with pretensions of being at least, civilized.

One scratched his bum and picked his nose and the other tried to find the good in people.

One was much older and the superior officer who was never going to get beyond the rank at which he sat and the other was ripe for promotion and a bit of a darling detective, now hampered by “The Fat Controller”.

Dalziel (Pronounced Deeyell) and Pascoe ran from 1996 to 2007 and in its 11 series and 47 episodes was slightly hamstrung by the premise. Andy Dalziel, the fat controller, as described by his sidekick, Peter Pascoe’s wife, Ellie, was an unreconstructed northern man who liked his beer and struggled with modernity. Pascoe married an academic who was not a fan of the police and struggled to reconcile the two sides of his life until a divorce and the loss of one.

The start of the series was the beginning of the trajectory of his relationship with his soon to be wife. It was not long before they were married in the series, having a child and then later on the cracks appeared and they divorced. As a narrative arc it worked well.

I had watched most of the series and despite some cracking bizarre storylines including Andy getting stranded in his car after the Pascoe wedding and ending up being a host of a Medieval banquet, at which the newlyweds became guests, it held its own throughout. I lost a little bit of my way towards the end and the opportunity that Sky has brought me of catching up with the earlier episodes during lockdown has been grasped with both hands.

The key ingredient that made the earlier ones work was the quality of the writing mixed with the interplay between the incredible Warren Clarke as Dalziel and, Scottish actor, Colin Buchannan as Pascoe. The writing came from the crime novels of Reginald Hill and his books gave us the first three series and sections of series four. By that time the series was beginning to generate its own heat and had the ability to take the whole shebang a lot further than Hill had managed in writing. From then on, the writing spiraled away from its origins.

It wielded, if you pardon the pun, the very first gay policeman I was aware of on TV as Detective Sergeant Wield came out and stayed for the first 7 series. By the time he was to leave I had begun, like so many, to find the series a bit of a strain and when it was cut in 2008, due to falling ratings I was little surprised. ITV who broadcast it, made the decision to revamp large swathes of their product, and Dalziel and Pascoe made way. The original books by Hill had given the core reason for its popularity – the attraction of opposites – but the stereotypes began to resemble clichés and the time for full time retirement was probably well past.

As a piece of Saturday night viewing it fit the bill beautifully. It is very hard not to love the mixture of two opposites who got on each other’s nerves and then found middle ground to love each other really and then just exist in each other’s wake, solving puzzles and being there for each other. I have really enjoyed reminding myself of what made it so good, and it has intrigued me over why I might have fallen out of love with it later. The viewing habits of the time may have eld me to just miss episodes that over time made it less prominent in my life but it still resounds in my head when I hear the theme tune… I am now on season five and the regular cast is beginning to show signs of altering. Always a tricky thing to manage, it should either give it a boost or I shall just pine over the ones who left. And such is the dilemma we all face…

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 programs 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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