Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the Hit TV Show New Tricks

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

What to do with three well known and heavyweight actors who are getting on a bit? With their face recognition part of their obvious appeal, this was always going to bring in a certain age of viewer when whoever it was hit upon a quite brilliant idea That it ended up by being one of the biggest and most watched police procedurals in the BBC cannon for the early part of this century is testimony to the premise, the writing and the cast. How they pitched it to the BBC bosses, I can but imagine but with Alun Armstrong, playing Brian Lane, James Bolam as Jack Halford and Dennis Waterman as the rogue Gerry Standing to be joined by Amanda Burton, as Sandra Pullman, their boss, this was a cold case squad like few others.

There followed 12 series, 107 episodes, cast changes that brought in Denis Lawson, Nicholas Lyndhurst, Tamzin Outhwaite and Larry Lamb with the simple premise being that a group of three former policemen, get employed to work unofficially with official backing in the area of unsolved cases desperately needing review. Headed by a woman who held authority over them but often little discipline, they bumped heads, exposed their prejudices but ultimately played the game to get the bad guys, even if in doing so they exposed themselves emotionally.

Begun in 2003, and running till 2015, the Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad started with three likely misfits in the team. The tile came from the proverb – You can’t teach an old dog … new tricks…

It began life as a one off. But the reaction was so positive it got a 6 episode commission. It achieved some very strong viewing figures all the way to the 8th series when James Bolam who played Jack Halford announced he would be leaving as it had gotten stale. Halford, a retired police inspector had lost his wife, as part of his backstory, and was often seen talking to her in the garden where there was a small shrine to her memory. It was a significant loss as Halford provided a calm, almost conservative air to the work. He was to be replaced in series 9 by retied DI Steve McAndrew, a Scot played by Denis Lawson. Then Amanda Redman and Alun Armstrong announced they were leaving after the 10th series, and this was a bit of a body blow.

In came Nicholas Lyndhurst as Dan Griffin with a wheelchair using daughter, and Tamzin Outhwaite as Sasha Miller who were well known to the televisual viewing public. Redman had often been the catalyst for change within the police force as she championed the team against the more orthodox views in the Metropolitan Police Force – perhaps an indication of what should be happening there now!

Armstrong gave us a sensitive portrayal of Brian who suffered from a variety of mental illnesses which provided him with his genius and also all of his flaws. His long suffering wife Esther played by Susa Jameson, was often to be called upon to calm matters down.

It left only Waterman as an original cast member, and he stayed all the way to the 12th series before he too bailed out. The rumour was that he missed the other original cast members and playing Gerry a former detective with a rogue reputation, more ex-wives than even I have and the attendant daughters – one of who was played by his real life daughter – meant we were losing what we could reasonably call, characters from a character driven show.

Waterman was replaced for the final few episodes of the final series by Larry Lamb, another widely recognizable television actor who played Ted Case.

What I loved most about the show was, bizarrely, the ending. It was ended. Properly. There was little by way of obfuscation or trying to leave things open ended. There was a reasonableness about each of the final four having to move on and they were honest with each other, during a boat trip on the River Thames in the middle of London. It left it clean and satisfying.

Given that it was a cold case unit, there were obvious opportunities for a host of the “older” crew of British acting talent to make it into the series and again the appeal was for those of us who remembered people to go, oh yeah… when we recognized a face and then struggled to remember what they had been in before. It never took us too long to match them up!

Now in the annals it would not be a bad idea to revisit this concept at some point and see if the cybercrime period in which we find ourselves now could be resurrected to provide some of the well-known faces of today a suitable retirement fund in the future. Despite the travails of some of the cast, this does remain a bit of a classic and one worth dipping back into now and again to remind you of what it looks like to see people at the top of their craft, craftily making a few bob or two!

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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