Inspector George Gently: Gently Evil - review

Inspector George Gently is back, and I recorded the first episode of the new series, Gently Evil, catching up with it last night. Martin Shaw is again the gruff cop with a heart, and his irksome sidekick, Bacchus, is played very well by Lee Ingleby. The series is based on the late Alan Hunter's novels, and written by Peter Flannery.

In this episode, a youngish woman is found battered to death at her home. Her ex husband is a suspect, and her rather odd brother is too. And what about her daughter, who seems both precocious and naive? The story takes an unexpected turn, moving into the realm of child abduction, and a mystery about a young girl's death a year earlier.

The story moved along well, and there was also some worthwhile discussion about the nature of evil. The series is set in 1966, and the atmosphere was pretty well done, though did people really talkl about the mentally ill being 'sectioned' back then? I'm not sure.

The relationship between the cops is very well done, and Bacchus's hapless love life is an interesting plot strand. An attractive lawyer with a conscience (yes, they do exist) featured, and I suspect she may well return in future shows. Definitely worth watching.

Gently in the Night

The second episode of the current series of Inspector George Gently offered an urban setting in contrast to last week’s story centred around a lonely old building in the countryside. Gently in the Night featured the murder of a young woman called Audrey, who told her parents she was a nurse, but in fact worked as a ‘fox’ in a seedy night club under the name of Blaise.

Martin Shaw, as the eponymous cop, had a nice variety of suspects to question, including three couples. There was the husband and wife duo who ran the club, the parents of the deceased, and a religious campaigner, married to a solicitor with links to the club. Gently’s sidekick, Bacchus, turns out to have been a patron of the club, and he fancies another ‘fox’, who disappears after being questioned.

Setting the series in the early 60s has given script writer Peter Flannery the chance to give modern audiences a flavour of long-gone times. This was the era just before the legalisation of abortion, but something I had not known (and found truly startling) was that prescribing the Pill to an unmarried woman was actually illegal.

The show was worth watching, but I have to say that Bacchus is shaping up to be the stupidest detective sidekick since Captain Arthur Hastings was banished to the Argentine. He lied to his boss, became improperly involved with a witness, and foolishly taunted Gently about his boxing prowess. When challenged to a charity boxing match, he was, predictably, knocked out by a single blow from Gently’s fist. That will teach him.

Inspector George Gently

It’s a tragic irony that Alan Hunter’s novels about George Gently should only be televised subsequent to his death, at the age of 82, back in 2005. The Gently series began in 1955, and Alan went on to write roughly one a year for over forty years. I never met him, though we were in touch briefly when he contributed a story to Anglian Blood, an anthology I co-edited with Robert Church. It was, in fact, a story he’d originally written before that first novel appeared, at a time when he was working as a book-seller and was known as a poet rather than a crime writer.

I’m not sure what he’d have made of Inspector George Gently, and my own feelings about it are rather mixed. I saw the pilot episode, but missed a couple of episodes shown last year. This story, Gently and the Innocents, featured the murder of an elderly man at his large, dilapidated home, which was just about to be bulldozed to the ground to make way for a building development.

Gently is played by Martin Shaw, in a performance I thought strongly reminiscent of his interpretation of Adam Dalgleish, another widower capable of being both sharp and benign. Shaw has a compelling presence, but the casting decision strikes me as unadventurous. I’m also baffled by the decision to move the setting from East Anglia to the North East – and then to film on location in Ireland!

The script was written by the acclaimed Peter Flannery and it was something of a curate’s egg. The ending was strong and effective – Flannery did a very good job of drawing out the theme and implications of the story. The story was set in 1964, and the period was well conveyed for the most part, although there were a couple of jarring notes. But I did experience despair when the Chief Constable threw Gently off the case for no good reason – only, of course, for Gently to carry on investigating and solve the mystery. One can only conclude that Flannery believes this cliché is a compulsory plot element in all television police dramas. And the moment it was revealed that the dilapidated house had once been a children’s home, I had a sinking feeling that child abuse would loom large in the unravelling of the mystery. And guess what?

Despite the flaws, Inspector George Gently is a well, and no doubt expensively, made show, and I shall watch it again. But I hope that the detection part of the script has a fresher feel to it next time.