Cast your mind back to the 80s if you will. In the realm of crime fiction, ITV had largely been known for its police series: The Gentle Touch, The Professionals, The Sweeney et al. You know, great big action-packed, gritty affairs. Over on the Beeb, crime fiction had largely been confined to more sedate detective shows, such as Shoestring, The Chinese Detective, Bergerac and the like.
Now over on ITV on Saturdays, between 1984 and 1986, is ratings juggernaut Dempsey & Makepeace, in which upper class, blonde English police detective Harriet Makepeace is assigned a new partner, the streetwise New York police lieutenant James Dempsey and together they fight all manner of criminals in an implausible, slightly silly series of adventures, while flirting a lot in way that veers dangerously close to sexual harassment in Dempsey’s case.
Now for some reason, the BBC thought it would be a cracking idea to take the piss out of ITV, while simultaneously launching a new private detective show. And to do this, they decided to hire Roy Clarke, best known as the writer of Last of the Summer Wine but also of the comedy police show Rosie. His cracking wheeze – and it was cracking – was “let’s go meta”.
So he dreamed up the idea of Pulaski (which in the US was known as Pulaski: The TV Detective). This saw the eponymous hero, ‘Pulaski’, an upright, brave former New York Catholic priest turned private detecitve, fighting crime in a series of ridiculous adventures with the help of his beautiful blonde, upper class English wife, ‘Briggsy’. And their adventures were ridiculous… because they were just a TV show inside this particular TV show. Once the director shouted cut, they were just actors again – a married couple now no longer really on speaking terms. And Larry Summers (David Andrews), the actor who plays Pulaski? A pampered, selfish movie star, forced to slum it in the UK – a complete dick and a drunk.
But this complete dick of a guy lets the role mess with his head. While he’s filming this show, he decides that he’s also going to help solve real crimes, just like the Pulaski he plays – his motto at all times effectively being ‘What Would Pulaski Do?’. And he’s going to drag his wife, Kate Smith (Caroline Langrishe), along for the ride.
Here’s the first few minutes of the first episode to give you an idea of what the show was like. There’ll be more later:
Continue reading “Lost Gems: Pulaski (The TV Detective) (1987)/The World of Eddie Weary (1990)”
