We return to the final series of Dixon of Dock Green this week. The second episode, entitled The Job, originally aired on BBC One on 20th March 1976.
The Story…
The Job opens with a slightly cryptic monologue from George Dixon (Jack Warner). Before we can decipher quite what he means, we are with Sgt Wills (Nicholas Donnelly) in his panda car. He is beckoned by a young angler to see something in the river.
The something is a man in the water who has been bound and gagged. Wills drags him out and the episode then really begins.
The Dock Green team can’t find out from the shifty and vague Mr Harvey (George Innes), or his gormless wife, why this might have happened to him or therefore who is responsible.
Harvey’s car is found outside the office of a known–but almost uncatchable–criminal, Stephen Gilles (David Lodge). Following this, George makes contact with a former colleague now working in the Serious Crime department. DCI Basset (Stephen Greif) has been operating surveillance on Gilles.
George agrees to ask DS Bruton (Richard Heffer) and DC Clayton (Ben Howard) to lay off the case as Basset is close to being able to finally prosecute Gilles.
Before he can talk to them though, they decide to follow Gilles. They are convinced his associates are responsible for vandalising the Harveys’ flat.
Bruton and Clayton arrest Gilles. Initially Basset is angry as he thinks George broke their agreement. When he finds out the truth of things, he softens. Bruton apologises for ruining Basset’s three-month operation on Gilles. Basset is understanding and generous about the whole thing.
Mrs Harvey lets slip that she and her husband had cooked up a scheme because of money owed on their car. They confess that they still owed a lot of money. The lenders were making threats against them. So they decided to fake the attack. Mrs Harvey was the one who tied him up and gagged him, leaving him by the river. She then left their car outside Gilles’ office to give Police the impression it was all connected. They were hoping all this would keep their actual lenders at bay and buy them some time.
At the close of the episode, George tells us that although they were charged with wasting Police time, they weren’t actually prosecuted in the end.
My Impressions…
The Job felt stronger than the series opener Domino. Oddly we are back to having an opening monologue to camera, which Domino didn’t have.
It felt like they remembered how to write for Jack Warner. Derek Ingrey did a great job of writing a story which interconnected between departments of Police.
It is clear that series 22 was trying to return to Police procedural more closely than had been the case for several previous years. It is reasonably effective in this.
My issue is still that I don’t believe the characters of Bruton and Clayton ring true. They don’t match the mood of the rest of the show. Also they don’t have the realism in their manner or dialogue that all previous regular characters had.
Dixon of Dock Green always brought a sense of reality through its regular cast. Actors such as Peter Byrne, Jack Warner, Arthur Rigby, Geoffrey Adams and their like. They all injected the mundane and the occasionally sensational alike with a very satisfying and engaging truth. Their characters genuinely felt like people everyone knew.
Series 22 feels rather fragmented. It is trying to be too many things. It attempts the frustration and diffidence of competing shows’ investigator double acts. It tries to comment on the futility of police work by essentially accepting the inevitability of the career criminal always evading them. And it even tries to recreate the glory years of Dixon of Dock Green by reintroducing the idea of the small-time crook. But this comes with rather one-dimensional characters intended for light comedic effect and little else.
David Lodge puts in a great understated performance as Stephen Gilles. Possibly the most real character, apart from the masterful Wills and Dixon, was DCI Basset. I enjoyed the way he was written and what the actor did with it.
In Conclusion…
I accept that the overall quality in all areas cannot be what it was. I also appreciate the valiant efforts of Jack Warner, Nicholas Donnelly and some of the supporting guest actors, such as the underrated George Innes, to raise a bit of the old lustre.
I still await episode three with interest.
