Dead Head: First Impressions

This is a blog post which almost never saw the light of day. I suspect that not that many readers of this blog will have come across the mini-series Dead Head from 1986, and yet strangely it is commercially available.

It is summarised as a crime drama about a petty criminal who is given a box which turns out to contain a disembodied head and this is part of a conspiracy to frame him for the crimes of a sadistic serial murderer of prostitutes. It is filmed with much of the sensibility of a 1940s film noir.

Sounds good, doesn't it? As soon as I read about it I started salivating and then when I found it was comemrcially available looked it out. It is expensive for a four-episode show. For the region two release on two DVDs you're looking at about £30 upwards from most sellers (the cheapest is CEX at £12 but it rarely comes up there), which means each episode is £7.50. As it happens I don't have money to throw around any more but would have been too cheap to pay that anyway. I suspect you could find it from one of those vendors who sell DVD-Rs usually in VHS quality, but I didn't look at any of them.

So I looked online to see if it had been pirated (as far as I can see, like most minority interest shows, it hasn't), but what I did find was an amateur documentary about the show on YouTube so I had a look at that to find out more about it ands whether it was worth spending the money. I expect it is me - as you know my attention is very patchy - but the documentary just didn't catch my attention. Even the excerpts from the actual show didn't attract me. It was very strange that the flat description of the show made me want to watch it at once but for some reason this documentary put me off.

And now follows one of the more spectacular extraneous tangents you will find on this blog, because I need to tell you about my problem with the energy company Eon-Next. To cut a very very long story short they made such a dog's dinner of my energy bill that I took them to the energy ombudsman who ruled that even in a notoriously horrible industry Eon-Next's performance was well below industry standard (all I can say is I've had no problems at all with Octopus and can highly recommend them). They ruled that Eon should apologise and pay me a small amount of compensation. In an act of the utmost idiocy they credited the compensation to my closed account meaning that I had no access to it. They certainly knew it was closed because they closed it themselves after sending me five different 'final' bills. Anyway I eventually got the money off them and have spent it on all things I wanted, including this DVD. I've also made a point of leaving a truly terrible review on Trustpilot.

And I'm glad I did. This show more than lives up to the brief description at the head of this post. And it is definitely cult, intelligent television. It is a complex, layered show which will take multiple viewings for me to understand and begin to write about properly. Apart from the straightforward plot there are elements about the British class system, about Thatcher's Britain, and of course much that is specific to the eighties. And it's all depicted with this 1950s film noir aesthetic which just can't help be anything but stylish.

For this reason I would advise that if you want to watch this show you really should buy the commercial DVDs. The reason for this is that I missed a lot on my first viewing. However there is a handy commentary track on the first two episodes by Howard Brenton, who wrote it, which explains much of what he was thinking. I would recommend watching the first two episodes with the commentary first and then watching the whole thing without commentary to get the most out of it.

There is a very fair criticism I see repeated online, and which even Brenton acknowledges, that it rather tends to run out of steam as it goes on and the third episode loses it a bit. However the reviews are also agreed that the sheer quality of cast and production mean that they carry it well and it is certainly still not rubbish.

There is an interesting aspect which I hadn't realized, that part of it is set in Birmingham because obviously London isn't hard enough. They even refer to having 'fond memories of that fair city' - I don't care if it's intended to be ironic, if you can talk like that about the woman I love, you're in with me.

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