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The Sixties as we think of them are here! Or so the first episode of this short run of Inspector George Gently seemed to be determined to point out. Teenagers in the school corridor are talking about The Beatles! The girls are wearing funky short skirts and lots of eyeliner! A pervy old man is leering at pretty young things on a brightly coloured TV set! Unfortunately, with all this being thrown at the screen, the eponymous detective gets rather lost in the middle of it all.
There was just too much going on in ‘Gently Upside Down’, and the most interesting elements were skimmed over in favour of a supposed generation clash that didn’t go anywhere. Instead of looking at the relationship between Mary and her parents, or giving some indication that Margaret was unstable, the episode focused far too much on the TV programme, which ended up being pointless filler. A good detective story needs some red herrings, but “Uncle Tone” (an unnecessarily ripe Neil Morrissey) was a suspect for such a short amount of time that it rendered the whole thing pointless, and the identity of her murderer seemed to have been plucked out of mid-air without any real lead up to it. That the older man with poetry in his soul was Peter didn’t surprise me at all; that his timid daughter murdered his pregnant lover and then was able to keep it together for so long did. Louise Delamere is a great actress, but this was just nonsense.
Thankfully, things picked up considerably with the much more engaging ‘Goodbye China’. In ‘Gently Upside Down’, it seemed that Bacchus was the main character, not Gently, but the balance was restored in the second outing. Despite the sharp differences in their styles and characters, Martin Shaw and Lee Ingleby have a lovely quiet chemistry together and the moments of humour between them brought some welcome lightness to the episode. Shaw is a brilliantly small and subtle actor; in terms of British TV detectives, he almost rivals the stillness of Michael Kitchen as Christopher Foyle. Putting him firmly at the centre of an episode of Inspector George Gently is absolutely the right decision, something that the quality of ‘Goodbye China’ proves.
It does help, of course, that he’s given a great deal of great actors to work against, not least Dean Lennox Kelly as the suspect policeman Molloy and Christine Bottomley as his wife; she really deserves to be better known than she is. I’ll admit to being suspicious of Alan Shepherd from the off, but that’s probably more to do with having watched Neil Pearson too many times in Bridget Jones’s Diary than anything else. The story flowed beautifully, particularly the way it all stemmed from Gently’s guilt and his instinct that something was wrong in the other district. It was darker than one might imagine, but then Inspector George Gently always has been. The personal elements of the story worked well, particularly Gently’s moments with Liz and his final scene reading China’s letter, all stopped from becoming silly or sentimental thanks to Martin Shaw’s restraint and class.
If there are more episodes of Inspector George Gently, I sincerely hope they stop trying to force Gently into superficial culture clashes. Rather than lots of scenes of girls in short dresses dancing around, we need more about Gently’s inherent morality bringing him into conflict with the world around him. That’s where the true interest lies, and I hope the writers of Inspector George Gently realise it.
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