Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show Inspector George Gently

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

With several television hits to his name, and a few less successful series under his belt, Martin Shaw has become a promise that watching a serial with him as the titular character might just be worth your while. From The Professionals to Judge John Deed, his characterizations of those who uphold the law but do so with a degree of fairness and equity suggests he plays people with a moral back bone that those who are in charge are unable to bend. This has been very true in further mavericks like a very poised performance as Adam Dalgleish and then as the second iteration of The Chief.

Perhaps though, his best portrayal of a man ahead of his time whilst being out of kilter with it was in Inspector George Gently. Created and written by Peter Flannery, Shaw was to play the eponymous character, ably helped by a younger sidekick in John Bacchus played by Lee Ingleby for 8 seasons. Gently was a copper who was now having to watch the world evolve from the early 1960’s through that decade and headlong towards a liberating decade that was to become the 1970’s.

What was quite a twist was that his younger sidekick was by far the more conservative of the two which led to a fascinating dynamic. Gently, having seen the horrors of the Second World War appeared to delight in the freedom they had preserved and was a tolerant member of the new world. Bacchus wanted the world to return to where his manly status was an assured position upon which he would get a whole load of kudos, respect and power. His relationship with his wife crumbles, and Gently takes a fatherly interest, which is misconstrued as we see the absurdity of accusing your older boss of sleeping with your young wife ensues and the relationships sours a little. But the moral compass of Gently’s character always surfaces to ensure the smooth running of the crime drama.

Loosely based on novels by Alan Hunter, this was a series set in the Northeast of England that had not been mined enough for drama and had the legacy of the hit and miss drama of local legend Jimmy Nail, with Crocodile Shoes as a legacy. It was time for a rethink, and it came with gusto. Of course, Vera has continued the faith when it comes to Geordie televisual masses so all good.

Interestingly of course, Inspector George Gently was not set originally in the Northeast. The move geographically gave us much more of the gritty and a better understanding of the shifting times and shifting sands of the opinions and prejudices within the country – we went from a sleepy Norfolk to the industrial areas up north, where your opinions were premium.

Those attitudes came out frequently as the first series began in 1964 – when we still had the death penalty – took us through its abolition in 1965 and then ended in 1970 for its eighth series.

There was never going to be a ninth as the final series saw Gently lose, quite dramatically, his fight against the British state, after having been asked to investigate police corruption.

The series was a gentle winner – just like its character – and the BBC who produced it managed to secure funding to see it right through. It was never a 20 episodes per series program but it was something special with storylines that drew on its own format by allowing character development and securing a quality sense of the time and detail whilst it also allowing the plot over the specials in the 5th and then 6th series to shine.

By the end of the 5th series there was a cliff-hanger, leaving us with a sense that we were unsure if these characters’ relationships had survived – Gently was suspended and Bacchus was wanting to move to London and had lost faith in his mentor. Of course, they had and we could go again on their journey with them but the sense of jeopardy was never far away. Gently was walking a fine line between being the copper of the time and being the maverick of our desires.

And so, with his lonely walk upon the sands of a beach in the Northeast of England, George Gently walked with the knowledge that a single shot from a sniper might just get him. The mysterious foe against whom he had railed in the 8th series was quite the way to end it all.

But for all the big issues and the set pieces that were memorable, my favorite part of the detail of the series was when they got a vending machine installed for their tea. Having made one of the constables make their tea day and daily they now had a machine where it could be made for them. As with many of the time who held onto the past, this was an unsuccessful ploy by those in command to make them move with the modern times. Both Bacchus and Gently could be seen trying their hand at the machine only both to conclude it was disgusting and the poor constable who thought his tea making days were over had to find the kettle once again and get on with making the tea.

Juxtaposed with the dangers of being a maverick in the 1960’s which could quite simply lead to your death it gave us a sense of realism and care for the times it was portraying which really did work.

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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