Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show Shoestring

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

Much of British television can be hung round the shoulders of a lead actor. They come to prominence, and we then see vehicles created for them. It is perhaps lazy to claim that for the likes of Helen Mirren – DI Jane Tennyson, John Thaw – Morse, Amanda Redman – Silent Witness, The Commander, or Martin Shaw – Judge John Deed, Dalgleish – this has been the case and rather than them having to audition, they simply had their sizzling good looks or their impeccable ability to capture an audience across the small screen land them their next role.

But their first appearance can be the one which defines them. Recently I have been searching for one of my all-time favorite TV series in which I saw for the first time, Trevor Eve. That was the BBC series, Shoestring and it has always defined Trevor Eve for me.

Unfortunately, I have been unable and may always be unable to unearth a copy of it…

It was a daring idea and perhaps a little ahead of its time but the originality of it made for an interesting crossover between a drama and a crime procedural, without the pesky police.

The premise was a simple one – take a private detective, Eddie Shoestring, who is more than a little disheveled, give him a radio show to present, give him a back story where he suffered a nervous breakdown when he was a computer expert – when computers were shiny new toys for people to play with – have him rent a place which is owned by a barrister, get her to introduce him to the radio station where there is a scandal brewing, let him solve it, let them offer him that slot on their station and then invite folk in to allow Shoestring to solve their cases. Boom, 2 series and 21 episodes to follow.

His radio show, “The Private Ear of Eddie Shoestring” proves such a hit that Trevor Eve in the title role, needs a brilliant cast to support him in his development of a really rounded character. He gets the excellent ensemble of Michael Medwin as station boss, Don Satchley (who struggles with his decision to hire him at times because his meddling in public can lead to commercial tensions in private within the station), Doran Godwin as his landlady, Erica Bayliss (with whom there are hints of more than the landlady/tenant relationship) and Liz Crowther as the receptionist, Sonia, who plays far more than the background role might suggest!

Running from 1979 to 1980, the series tapped into the times of our disenchantment with state run industries and the challenge of seeing a new government under Margaret Thatcher taking that state apart. The police and other state agencies like them were also struggling to find their place. Conflicts including riots and the miner’s strike were still to come but Shoestring showed that private industry and things outside of the state could be just as effective as calling for support from your local police office – in fact he would consistently show them up as he solved case, after case.

It captured us and it captured me.

Eve was to bring the curtain down on the series as he wanted to see the curtain raise on his performances – he wanted more diverse roles in theatre. Of course, he was to return to the small screen often during the next 40 plus years and continue to smolder with his presence but for me the slightly down at heel guy with the endearing manner and backstory of a reality that was difficult for him to deal with will always be where I saw him first and from which I anchor my view.

The series had been repeated but I cannot find it anywhere now and the DVDs promised by many seem to have been out briefly and then disappeared. Sometimes though it is the memories that work best when you want to luxuriate in what was a seminal series and not worry too much about how accurately you remember it all. And so, from the corner of my mind, Trever Eve shall always have a dodgy moustache and shamble into genius…

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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