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Small Time Crooks

When it was first introduced, the Digital Versatile Disc transformed the so-called ‘home cinema experience', yet now that it has reached maturity as a medium, sales of DVDs of television programmes are beginning to overtake those of films. There's always been a huge market in supplying fans who simply must possess every episode of their favourite programme, but the current balkanisation of TV channels means that the DVD has become a viable alternative to watching broadcast programmes. Lost started out on mainstream broadcaster Channel Four, moved to Sky, and now, because of a spat between Sky and Virgin's cable TV company, isn't available on the latter. Rather than migrate to Sky, viewers can bide their time and buy the box sets instead. A few years ago, the only way that UK fans of Homicide: Life on the Street could catch up with its last two seasons, which Channel Four decided not to air, was to buy box sets from the US (box sets are now being released in the UK by Fremantle Home Entertainment). Some TV series, like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Oz, have complex, multi-stranded storylines that span an entire season and are best appreciated if watched over the course of several consecutive days -- box-set streaming -- rather than at the rate of one episode per week. And then there's the nostalgia factor. While some programmes never seem to be off the air -- if you have access to Freeview, satellite or cable services, it's just about be possible to watch nothing but Friends twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for the rest of your life -- others have for various reasons long been consigned to the vaults or are revived only infrequently, and the DVD box set has breathed new life into much loved but rarely seen classics. Here are two of them.

When pop star Adam Faith turned to acting, Budgie immediately cemented his new career with the role of the eponymous anti-hero, Ronald ‘Budgie' Bird, a small-time player in Soho's underworld of drinking clubs, strip joints and dodgy bookshops. Created by Keith Waterhouse, and written by Waterhouse, Willis Hall and Douglas Livingstone, the two series, first broadcast in 1971 and 1972, are loosely organised into story arcs that each follow Budgie's release from prison, his untiring attempts to find a get-rich-quick scheme that will catapult him into the big time, and his eventual fall from grace. Budgie is an irrepressible chancer whose many money-making schemes -- theft, confidence trickery, insurance fraud, kidnapping a greyhound -- invariably fail: not for nothing was the original title of the show The Loser. But although he's a feckless, unreformable criminal, Budgie is also as eternally optimistic and irrepressible as any cartoon character, a perfect fit for Faith's cheeky charm that quickly won the affection of a huge audience.

The first episode of the first series sets the pattern: fresh out of prison, Budgie devises a simple plan to steal one of the vans full of confiscated pornography that make regular trips to the police incinerators, but gets into serious trouble when he tries to sell the stolen porn. After ritual humiliation at the hands of Soho kingpin Charlie Endell, Budgie ends up with nothing to show for his troubles but a slot machine which he hauls from place to place, like the Ancient Mariner and his albatross, through the rest of the series. Role model, father-figure, and tyrannical boss, Charlie Endell (an iconic performance by Iain Cuthbertson that effortlessly combines urbane charm and psychotic thuggery) looms larger in Budgie's little world than either the wife he's left behind in Watford, or Hazel (Lynn Dalby), his long-suffering girlfriend and mother of his young son. By turns amused and enraged by Budgie's antics, Charlie Endell always gets the upper hand, but no matter how badly he's treated by Charlie or Charlie's loyal right-hand man, Laughing Spam Fritter (John Rhys-Davies, long before he found international fame as a Tolkein dwarf), Budgie always comes back for more.

This odd-couple relationship, playing Budgie's petty ambitions off Charlie Endell's worldly ruthlessness, is the lynch-pin of the series, but Budgie is also a vivid portrayal of a bygone underworld of petty criminals and eccentrics. Filmed both in the studio and on location at a hectic pace that left little time for rehearsal and even less for retakes, most episodes feature fluffed lines and moments of shaky acting, but their character-driven stories feature a wonderfully judged mix of comedy and potent human drama enlivened by cameos by a huge variety of guest stars, including Derek Jacobi (originally slated for the part of Budgie), Georgina Hale (playing Budgie's scary estranged wife), John Thaw, Betty Marsden, Jack Shepherd, James Bolam, Alfie Bass, Kenneth Cranham, and Gordon Jackson. Some episodes, such as Twenty-Four Thousand Ball Point Pens or Glory Of Fulham, are perfectly judged farces; others, like The Man Outside, in which Budgie and Charlie Endell stumble onto a dark family secret when they take refuge from a gunman, rival Dennis Potter at his best; and Budgie's final fall from grace is both brutally bathetic and blackly funny. Network's box set includes all twenty-six episodes as originally transmitted (the first four were shot in black and white because of a technicians' strike), with extras that include two brief but informative featurettes, an audio commentary for one episode, and an interview of Adam Faith by Russell Harty from 1974.

Alan Plater once wrote an episode of the seminal TV series Z Cars which consisted of little else but two policemen talking to each other during an eventless shift, an early exemplar of his talent for dry humour and preference for character-driven, dialogue-rich drama that's displayed to full effect in the Beiderbecke trilogy. Made in the 1980s, these eccentric comedy thrillers are gently surrealistic amalgams of the Thin Man films and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, guying the conventions of classic noir films by juxtaposing them with the everyday lives of two teachers, Trevor Chapman (James Bolam) and his girlfriend Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn), in a rundown North Yorkshire comprehensive. Trevor, an unambitious woodwork teacher, is a reluctant but competent and loyal supporter of Jill's commitment to save-the-whale green politics. The couple bicker and banter as wittily as Nick and Norah Charles, but rather than cocktails drink school common-room tea that in the words of fellow teacher Mr Carter (Dudley Sutton), who provides an acerbic counterpoint to their sunny optimism, ‘would make a brontosaurus puke', and their adventures, set in allotments and modern housing estates rather than high society clubs and apartments, are entirely free of gunplay and serious bodily harm, and unfold at a leisurely pace: the only chase takes place on foot, and doesn't even break into a trot, let alone a run.

In the first of the trilogy, The Beiderbecke Affair, Trevor receives the wrong records ordering a set of LPs by the 1920's jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke from a mysterious platinum blonde. When he and Jill track down the source of the records to a mutual help mail-order club run by a genial, community-minded, flat-capped spiv, Big Al (a lovely, laconic performance by Terence Rigby), they become embroiled in a plot loosely revolving around attempts to cover up a planning scandal that not only threatens to ruin Big Al's ‘white economy' but also sink Jill's campaign to become elected to the local council (already threatened by Trevor's enthusiastic endorsement over a home-made PA system: ‘My friends, vote for Jill Swinburne. A vote for Swinburne is a vote for freedom... what's more, she's terrific in bed!').

Graced by high-end production values (including sweeping crane shots and a repeated motif of characters marching through corridors and stairways of grim, utilitarian buildings) and a punchy jazz score, The Beiderbecke Affair's discursive story is informed by a sharp eye for the absurd, and gentle mockery of authority, represented by the hapless Detective Sergeant Hobson (Dominic Jephcott), the school's pompous, ineffectual headmaster (Keith Smith), and a businessman who's the only stock character in a rich cast of eccentrics and oddballs. The off-beat formula was repeated rather self-consciously in the two-part sequel, The Beiderbecke Tapes. After a tape-recording of a secret meeting falls into Trevor and Jill's hands, they're harassed by government security officers, and after a pursuit that encompasses Amsterdam and Edinburgh, discover that the tape, purporting to disclose a plan to dump nuclear waste in the Yorkshire Dales, was nothing more than an attempt at disinformation by the government. By the end of this second adventure, Jill discovers she is pregnant (echoing the ending of the second Thin Man film, After the Thin Man), and parenthood returns Trevor and Jill to a more appropriate domestic setting in The Beiderbecke Connection. After a chance encounter with Big Al, they give shelter to a Russian refugee, Ivan (Patrick Drury) and are subject to surveillance by a couple of slapdash police detectives. Complications ensue when Jill's ex-husband turns up and reveals that ‘Ivan' is actually a bank robber who has used computer technology to amass a fortune. Although the story sidesteps the ethical dilemmas it creates, sharp dialogue, good humour, and deft characterization carry the story to a satisfying conclusion.

Made during the height of Thatcherism, the Beiderbecke trilogy attacks creeping corporatism, uncaring bureaucracy and the surveillance society with moral indignation, deadpan humour, and a light, universal touch that's every bit as effective as the more polemical and confrontation dramas of its day. Its rambling narratives are illuminated by dozens of small, human moments that celebrate the triumphs of ordinary life in an uncaring world -- in The Beiderbecke Connection, for instance, Mr Pitt (Robert Longden), a helpful planning officer from The Beiderbecke Affair, has used his redundancy money to fund a series of jazz nights in the local pub (where the musicians who play on the soundtrack appear as Frank Ricotti's All Stars), and although he knows that it's doomed to failure, he's so full of joy at his small triumph that he can't help cutting a little jig in the beer garden as the music starts. The first story began with a search for the right kind of music; the theme of music uniting like-minded people runs through the trilogy; and just before he and Jill drive off into the sunset at the end of The Beiderbecke Connection, Trevor explains that most problems are caused by ‘People [who] don't hear the music . . . Music is the sanity clause.' Maybe it isn't a realistic solution to the world's problems, but it's a sweetly hopeful conclusion all the same.

Although, as is usual with Network's releases, the episodes haven't been restored for DVD, with slightly grainy visuals and occasional scratching or speckling, the box set contains a generous helping of extras. In addition to a soundtrack CD and a long and informative essay by Andrew Pixley, there are contemporary on-set interviews with James Bolam, Barbara Flynn and Alan Plater, a more recent interview of Plater and a feature on his images of Yorkshire, and best of all the four episodes of Get Lost!, a kind of trial run for the Beiderbecke trilogy in which two teachers at a North Yorkshire school become romantically entangled while searching for a missing person during half-term holiday.

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