Public Eye

It's been over 30 years since I last saw Public Eye on UK ITV, but having just watched some of the 1969 episodes released on DVD it's as I remembered it: grimy and gritty. There was a marvellously downbeat downtrodden atmosphere to all the series (I'm too young to remember the first from the mid-sixties, all wiped), partly thanks to the fact neither ABC nor Thames wanted to spend much money on it, and not just the acting or the stories. Those who remember the series have no chance in forgetting the lugubrious theme music, oft repeated per episode at the commercial break bumpers.

Welcome to Brighton? broadcast 30.07.69: Framed ex convict Frank Marker indelibly played by angular and craggy Alfred Burke leaves HMP Ford for a new start in Brighton. A few ordinary adventures later his cynical outlook is seemingly proved justified by our glimpse into a dull grainy world of varying but usually seedy human emotions. Being an "Enquiry Agent" was in his blood, as performing a simple favour to an acquaintance in prison brings out the bloodhound in him.

I don't go overboard for "realism" in films or TV - give me Abbott & Costello any day! But I do recommend Public Eye for something refreshingly different to today's type of TV drama, a realism at once hard but at the same time humdrum and fantastic too, and also basically portraying a non-colour, non-violent and non-CGI world too.