Cult TV Blog

This is the only remaining episode of the third series of Public Eye, and the last episode set during Marker's sojourn in Birmingham for me to blog about here. It is intended to be a depiction of the ins and outs of a particular relationship, however what most strikes me about it is the depiction of Marker's work. To come straight out with it, if  I was professionally approached by both a husband and a wife who just plain will not talk to each other, I would find myself very hard pressed not to slap them. The husband can't ask his wife why she appears nude in a photograph which has appeared in a photography competition in the library where he is chief librarian. The wife can't ask her husband what he knows about this and can't tell him that she has been blackmailed for absurdly small amounts for years. Most of the commentary on the internet focuses on the ins and outs of this relationship between Ainsworth and his young, beautiful, French wife Marie. In quite a go a...

You have to be in the mood to watch Public Eye, in my humble opinion. Or rather, one of two moods. One would be the mood where everything is going your way, you've just won the lottery, you're one of the few people left in the world with a pension which may actually support a retirement, you get the kind of thing. The other mindset is a deeply world-weary mindset. You've seen all the bad behaviour that human nature has to offer, you've spent the day wearing out shoe leather in your enquiries, and you're almost certainly wearing an old mackintosh. It may be incongruent, then, that this series of Public Eye is set in Windsor. It is location for our poshest public (private in US English) school, and we all know Who have Windsor as their surname. It almost seems to suit the show better when the earlier episodes take place up here in big bad Birmingham, and the down at heel world of Brighton also suits the show well. Nonetheless the world's problems manage to come th...

This second-series episode of Public Eye is an odd one which has survived from the series, which may be found among the extras on the 1971 series box series, along with a canalside interview with Alfred Burke during filming of the series. For the second series of 1966, Public Eye relocated here to Birmingham: Burke gives as the reason that Birmingham hadn't really been exploited on television up until then. Of course it was also to have use of the state-of-the-art facilities at the recently-demolished ATV studios on Broad Street. The scene is set with a wonderful view of the old Bull Ring market complex - with the moving sign on the side of St Martin's house set to give the title of the programme. Perhaps I'd better get the local colour out of the way now, since I realise that the majority of my readers live very far away from here. It is interesting that the scenes of Birmingham used in the show are actually of the very modern, futuristic Birmingham of the 1960s, which ...

Back to the 1960s, 1969 to be precise, for this episode of Public Eye. I am reminded that it is actually the first episode of the fourth series, although you wouldn't immediately know that on the basis of what is currently available. Virtually the whole of the series up to this point has been wiped, leaving only a few episodes of the ABC series remaining from the run up to this point. What this means for us now is that to all intents and purposes Frank Marker's career begins with him getting out of an open prison. Of course there are hints of his previous career as a private investigator and the mistake which caused him to be incarcerated. The mistake has obviously left him with a legacy of bitterness, which spills out periodically for the rest of the series. This series is usually considered an odd one out in the run of Public Eye, because it concentrates far more on Marker himself than on his actual work. The fact that Marker is taken from his life in prison to the rath...

I told myself I would resist blogging about the Birmingham-based episodes of Public Eye, so as not to get annoyed by fake Birmingham accents & the sixties scenery, so of course here I am blogging about one of those self-same episodes. I like Miss O'Hara (Valerie Bell) enormously, she has none of the drama school melodramatics & clearly comes across as the floozy in search of a quick buck. As a prelude to the main part of this episode it offers the wonderful cameo of Marker wining & dining her, all in the name of duty, of course. The morals of this part of the episode are very clear-cut in comparison to the very complicated relationships of the rest of the episode. I like the structure of two stories related by their characters in a single episode: if the episode had been built solely on the adulterous doctor it would have lost some human interest & been a much more sui-generis private investigator story. Here, however, Marker's character really gets...

I have commented recently on the unreality vs reality dichotomy of sixties TV. For some reason Callan didn't do it for me, but Public Eye does, & so this post will mark a rare trip into realism TV on this blog. In fact this approach was intentional: 'Roger Marshall and Anthony Marriott were the creators of Public Eye.�Roger told The Daily Express (1.8.69) "I got fed up with series like The Avengers, sick to death of the camp and the champagne. The series was created as an antidote to that kind of phoney material. I felt it was time to get down to reality." He had�an idea for a show about an enquiry agent but found TV producers struggling to believe that such individuals existed, wedded to the traditional idea of the tough private eye fighting serious crime. However Anthony Marriott found such a real-life agent in Brighton and this helped to convince them. It does seem that this agent's experiences helped to inspire some of the stories, particularly the e...