Eighties TV Season: The Chinese Detective: Secret State
Continuing a series of posts on 1980s TV shows which haven't appeared here before. I have very mixed feelings indeed about The Chinese Detective and I'm aware that quite a lot of what I want to say about it isn't about the show at all. To get the essential bit out of the way, The Chinese Detective was a BBC detective show broadcast from 1981 for two series, about British-Chinese Detective Sergeant John Ho (played by David Yip), who tends to be rather unconventional and have ongoing confrontations as a result with his superiors. It is also about the reaction he gets from being British-Chinese and is set in London, heavily focusing on the east end or dockland, as far as I can tell. If you haven't seen it the closest I can think of is that it's similar to The Sweeney without the violence and has the confrontation with authority with added racism from everyone else. My mixed feelings begin with the reason you may not have heard of it and this is for what I would call pu...