Maybe there’s a reason other than the obvious ones for why I don’t like Ashes to Ashes: it reminds me too much of Gentle Touch spin-off C.A.T.S. Eyes. Yes, much like Fox Force 5, it featured an all-woman group of government spies (Covert Action – Thames Section) working undercover as private detectives at an agency called Eyes.
Oh dear God.
The Gentle Touch was something of a ground-breaker. A long-running series about a female police detective, Maggie Forbes (played by Jill Gascoine) and the pressures of the very male environment in which she worked, it was something of a pre-cursor to Prime Suspect.
So sending the character and the actress who played her to do grunt work in C.A.T.S. Eyes was akin to sending Helen Mirren and DCI Tennison off at the end of Prime Suspect to mop up the garbage on Captain Planet.
The rest of the team (for series one at least) consisted of posh bird Rosalyn Landor, playing the head of Eyes, Pru Standfast; and Leslie Ash, playing Fred Smith, casual racist and computer expert.
Yes, Leslie Ash. She was quite hot then – at least 13-year-old MediumRob used to think so at the time.
Running the whole operation from Whitehall was Don Warrington of Rising Damp fame. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
Pru left at the end of series one (allegedly because none of the actresses got on, but who knows). Maggie Forbes took over, and more obvious totty Tracy Louise Ward joined as Brunette A CipherTessa Robinson.
The titles for the first series changed each time, with the agent who was the focus of the story getting the main titles time. In a second, the titles from the first series’ ‘good episode’, Frightmare, in which Fred takes her date to the office and gets doused in hallucinogens so he can steal all the office secrets, IIRC. Apparently, girls don’t like to see centipedes on their keyboards or something.
Here they are, beamed to us directly from 1985 by a benevolent engineer who used to work for old ITV franchise TVS. Prepare to laugh and wonder if in fact Keeley Hawes is playing a snottier version of Pru Standfast in Ashes to Ashes.
For those who want to see how desperate things got, live from a VHS recording from The Family Channel, comes this six minute chunk from an episode of the second series, complete with funky new titles and new theme.
