Nice Guy Eddie
Shoestring Series 1 on DVD
Shoestring occupies a very special place in my heart. I have vivid memories of my family watching the stupendous Christmas 1980 episode ‘The Dangerous Game’ – about Eddie chasing after lethal “Lunar Race 2000” toys before Christmas Day exploded in some unlucky child’s face – especially since at the time I was a Scalextric fiend. Seventeen years on UK Gold, then in its glory days, had a Saturday night strand called “Cops, Spies and Private Eyes” which kicked off with Shoestring and climaxed with Callan (with a perfectly timed break during some American rubbish when I could swap tapes and record Tales of the Unexpected on Carlton Select) which me and my friends would crowd around my television and devour. Even back then, the era of television Shoestring came from seemed far away, and those watching with me who remembered it found it just as good as they’d remembered, and those too young to have seen it first time around were clearly impressed.
Here in 2011, despite UK Gold long having ceased to be something you stayed in to watch, 1997 doesn’t have quite the same nostalgia value, but the prospect of seeing Shoestring in another medium does. And somehow, watching it now on DVD takes me back not to 1997 but straight back to childhood. And has made me fall in love with it all over again a third time.
Television loves detectives. It’s easy to see why. The crime is the hook and the investigation is the structure. It’s worked for decades and probably always will. In the Sixties, it was Z Cars that first really took advantage of the opportunities that episodic crime drama offers as an audience friendly entry point to exploring more than just standard cops and robbers. In the Seventies, as Z Cars began to look a little rusty, The Sweeney brilliantly laced dramatic action with surprising moments of ennui. But the two shows that came most obviously in its wake, The Professionals and Target, were both cruder attempts to continue the trend of the tough cop show, and by 1979, there was considerable restlessness amongst critics and some members of the audience with the increasing thuggery in British crime drama.
Shoestring couldn’t have come along at a better time. Intelligent, unusual and devil-may-care, it was an antidote to the more animalistic crime dramas of the day and its influence lasted a whole decade, as regional detectives with more brain than brawn moved in and car chases through London streets were largely out.
All popular detectives, however hard their creators try, are descendants of Inspector Cuff from The Moonstone via Sherlock Holmes: they are outsiders, loners, brilliant at detection but rubbish at life. One dash charisma to two dashes of quirkiness. So on paper perhaps Eddie Shoestring sounds a bit like a masterclass in detective making by numbers. Troubled private life: well, he’s a former computer programmer who had a breakdown and smashed up his workplace, but after a touch of art therapy he’s reinvented himself as a private detective. Eccentricities: he is known to sometimes wear pyjama jackets instead of shirts etc etc. Other new angles: he’s based in Bristol, and he’s not a private eye but a “private ear”, that is, he is paid a retainer by local station Radio West and solves listeners’ cases in return for doing a weekly broadcast.
It’s taken a long time for Shoestring to reach DVD, due to the tricky music clearances for a show based around a radio station, but now it’s here, was it worth the wait?
Absolutely. Watching the first series, which looks wonderfully crisp on DVD and which has survived almost entirely intact despite the musical difficulties, it’s no wonder this series was such a major success in 1979 and has been craved for on DVD for so long.
The brilliance of Shoestring isn’t just due to Trevor Eve’s simply astounding performance, but that is a major factor. Revelling in eccentricity, he holds the attention throughout and his sheer decency and unpredictably is, for an actor new to television, quite stunning. He’s particularly good in those moments when Eddie’s instability comes to the surface again: in one episode, when he’s cornered by two thugs in the grounds of Ashton Court, he launches into a monologue on the great British outdoors in a desperate attempt to try and hold himself together and to confuse them. But he’s also capable of bullshitting his way into a witness’s trust like no other telly detective I’ve ever seen: there’s a marvellous scene in one episode where, bespectacled, he poses as the head of an organisation for undiscovered writers and berates a librarian on why none of his clients’ books are on her shelves as a way of throwing her off the scent. The concept too is genuinely intriguing, the stories are interesting and unusual, with plenty of humanity, and the location is more than just somewhere different for the actors to be filmed against: somehow these stories wouldn’t belong in London. Although interestingly Bristol is never named, the city which I now live in and have had great fun recognising in one of its earlier lives, becomes a central character in the series, small enough to be united by a local radio station and yet big enough for people to disappear, hide and also, crucially, need help.
The opening episode, ‘Private Ear’, has a lot to do, introducing us to all the regular characters and explaining how Eddie ends up as a radio detective. The story concerns a prostitute found dead in a Rolls Royce belonging to a faded movie star cum radio presenter (played with just the right amount of slimy pomposity by William Russell). Fearing a scandal, station boss Don Satchley ( Michael Medwin) employs Eddie to investigate. Initially the story moves exactly the way we expect it to, with Eddie poking his nose into the seamier side of the city and ending up being driven to a vandalised railway carriage to be warned off by a local businessman and his bully boys. But soon things move into stranger, less familiar territory, and the surprise ending is the first of many occasions in the series where the end of a case means not redemption or satisfaction but sadness, meaninglessness, and few beyond the viewer ever finding out the full truth.
One of the strongest episodes of the first series, ‘Listen to Me’, tells the tale of the neurotic wife of a man imprisoned for murder (played to perfection, of course, by Sandy Ratcliff, who was a goddess of tough vulnerability), who threatens to jump from the roof of Radio West unless Eddie can prove her husband is innocent. All television crime drama has to face the accusation that it solves a crime in just fifty minutes, and even Eddie himself in this episode points out the impossibility of this, and yet in this episode, which takes place in less than twenty four hours, nothing feels like it stretches credulity.
Other highlights include ‘Nine Tenths of the Law’, in which Eddie is asked to find a tug-of-love child who has been kidnapped by her father, and which gets plenty of mileage out of Harry H Corbett as her menacing grandfather (an imaginative piece of casting). And then there’s ‘I’m A Believer’, the story of a religious cult, which, like many episodes of the series, plays with an audience’s preconceptions, setting up what seems like an open and shut case at the start and then making us to switch our allegiences as the story develops.
The wild card in the first series is ‘Find the Lady’, written by Gangsters‘ Philip Martin. Set in a suitably bleak Weston Super Mare, it’s on the surface the story of a drug-addled musician (Gary Holton) who is convinced his girlfriend has been murdered. No-one believes him, not his band, who respond by firing him, or even his policeman brother. Beyond its credentials as a crime drama however (plot wise it’s actually one of the least challenging of the series), the episode really comes across like a mercy plea for the music scene at the time. The band in question are played by Toyah and her band, and the episode revels in performances of tracks from the rather tasty Sheep Farming in Barnet album. Despite a few iffy attempts at youthspeak, it’s a fascinating fifty minutes. “They call US vicious?” Toyah responds incredulously at one point to her repugnant manager. Even if the band appear to have morals pure enough for them to have appeared in Summer Holiday, the episode is nevertheless strange and commendable for making a New Wave band the goodies of a Sunday night BBC1 drama of 1979, and also for allowing them not only the final word, but also to hold court over the closing credits.
The media is always hopeless at impersonating itself however, and sadly even Shoestring has feet of clay in this respect, as, despite the radio station background and the day to day dealings with the station boss being well realised and believable, the DJs are anything but. Even if this was 1979, this lot are some way beyond Tony Blackburn for sheer smarm and cheesiness. To a man they are all phoney Transatlantic lilt and insensitivity, and considering that the concept of a radio detective is a bit of an effort to imagine really happening in any case, the presentation of the rest of the station’s presenters being this ham-fisted is the single thing that interferes with all of the rest of the show’s fine efforts to sell the idea to us.
But amidst eleven episodes, if that is the most I can find to criticise, then that says quite a lot about Shoestring. Let’s hope series two, which is if anything ever better, appears soon. As one of those pun-crazy DJs at Radio West would doubtless say, there would have been more, if only Trevor Eve hadn’t given him the boot.
Shoestring Series 1 is available on DVD from 2entertain.
