Oddments

Perennial heavy Pat Roach gets heavy in 'Gangsters', and I'm not just talking about his jewellery.

Gangsters: The Bottom Five

As a final 'Gangsters' note, I just wanted to revisit the bit about the ‘abysmal’ acting. I can’t think of another show that has such a poor cast. I’m not sure if there was a dearth of black and Chinese and Asian actors around at the time, but the ones they have (with the exception of Sayeed Jeffrey) are terrible, and elaborate, overwritten dialogue plus unconvincing performances / mangled diction leads to a number of strange, stilted, uncomfortable scenes that do nothing apart from highlight that it’s all a big panto. Perhaps given the show’s experimental leanings this was deliberate, but either way it makes for a slightly awkward and jarring experience.

Anyway, in reverse order, here, in my opinion, are the five worst actors.

Maurice had a long career as an actor, latterly appearing in 'Howards Way'. He was always pretty wooden, but here he has to keep it all together as the star and he starts creaking as soon as he's asked to convey anything out of the ordinary. One of his signature bad acting traits is a soundless, mirthless laugh, and he uses it a lot here and it really gets on your nerves because because it's so poorly executed and incredibly fake.   

This is writer Philip Martin. He can obviously act (he played the villain in the original play very well), but his second series impersonation of W.C Fields is funny for approximately two minutes and then just seems staggeringly self-indulgent, especially when he can't quite keep up the pretence in key scenes.

Familiar to British audiences in both Chinese and Japanese roles, Lee always seems fast asleep. When he speaks, you can neither hear nor understand him, and his face doesn't form any kind of expression, so you're fucked if you're trying to follow the plot.

Aside from the fact that we share a first name, Mr. Satvendar does very little for me apart from to annoy. Shrill, slow to react, fond of rolling his eyes and almost forgetting his lines, Paul adds insult to injury by suffixing almost every sentence with a high-pitched hollow giggle and killing virtually every scene he's in stone dead. Awful.

This fellow is just terrible. He can't even walk around convincingly and his laugh (bit of a  recurring motif - I often find you can judge an actor by how they laugh and cry) is a thing of cringing terror. Luckily, his character is written as something of a joke (he has a ridiculous hat and keeps quoting from gangster films) and he gets knocked off pretty quick so it's not like he's given much to do - but what he does do is SHIT.

Who's your favourite terrible actor? And your least favourite? And what's the difference? 

Gangsters 2

 

Series two of 'Gangsters' followed three years later and goes off the rails almost immediately by introducing the Chinese Triads as a new adversary for the increasingly weary looking Kline. The Triads here are ridiculous, inscrutable stereotypes that owe a lot to Fu Manchu, but this seems deliberate, as this series seem intent on examing popular cliché and subverting the idea of the crime show. This also manifests itself by some bizarre fantasy interludes, an intermittent voice over in which the writer of the show (Phillip Martin) dictates instructions to a typist and Martin later appearing as a hit man who, for cover, impersonates W.C Fields (badly) all the time. This time around, the pretty decent theme tune has turned into a pretty awful theme song.

Clever clever, occasionally infuriating, totally self-indulgent, the series ends with one of the main characters simply saying ‘well, that’s that’ and walking off set followed by the writer throwing his script into the air. It’s not a completely satisfying show in any of its forms, but it is a great example of a time when the BBC had much more faith in its creative people, and was fully prepared to fund their stupid, bizarre, brilliant ideas, as long as at least a dozen people watched it. Them was the days.

Gangsters

'Gangsters’ is a weird show that, over time got weirder and weirder. Starting off as a ‘Play For Today’ before becoming two (very different) series, it is ostensibly about the murky world of organised crime in Birmingham, but also works as a treatise on race, society and the nature and conventions of drama itself. If that sounds heavy, don’t worry, it does it all in a tongue in cheek, often bizarre way. Oh, and a lot of the acting is abysmal.

 Maurice Colbourne plays John Kline, a former SAS man who is the archetypal tough, good man in a rough, bad situation, inexorably caught between rival underworld groups that are characterised by both their particular line in crime and their ethnicity. There are the Asian gangsters, who specialise in human traffic, illegal immigration and extortion; black gangsters who concentrate on drugs and prostitution and, over-seeing the whole bun fight, there are white gangsters, who sit back and take the lion’s share of the profits. The initial play was straightforward enough, a quirky but basically conventional drama that, apart from the racial diversity, and Brummie setting, could have starred Jimmy Cagney.

The two series that followed, however, go to strange places, eventually ending up somewhere between post-modernism and disappearing up its own exhaust pipe. In Series One, Kline battles to keep a nightclub open, keep the Law happy and play opposing criminal factions off against each other. He also falls in love with a posh junkie and part time prostitute. It’s far from conventional, but has structure and an element of realism, albeit a reality that could quite easily be imagined. Heavily stylised, the characters are many and mad as hatters, a multi-racial rainbow of thugs, twisters, bullies, bastards and undercover Pakistanis.

‘Gangsters’, in all its incarnations, is, like so many flawed things, absolutely fascinating, and far more interesting retrospectively than any number of tighter, tauter, straight crime dramas. Yes, it can get on your nerves, but it provokes a reaction, and that is assuredly a very good thing.

Twit Of The Week

from 'Action' comic, 1980

Tony Sannio from Birmingham says:

"Twit of the week (any week) is Dr Who. I wish he'd trip over his long scarf and stop him being so daft. Anybody else would choke himself while fighting while wearing it to his toes. In any case, I think it's dangerous for kids to copy him in this fashion as it could happen to them. I only watch it for the monsters anyway. Maybe Knowall knows why?"

What an angry little boy.

Portrait Of A People

009: A Brummie.

Telly Looks At...Disco

One of the pivotal sequences in 'Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham' is the 'incredible' over forties disco competition held in the 81 acre Cannon Hill Park. Styles range from the slightly shambolic to the unneccessarily sexually suggestive, but the star has to be indefatigable, knicker flashing, high kicking Mrs.Taylor.

As Mr. Savalas rather archly remarks of Mrs. T: "I'm sure somebody loves you, baby". Cheeky twat.

Telly Looks At...Architecture

More Midlands moments preserved for posterity in 'Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham'. This time, it's some of the striking modern buildings associated with the city that have earned it the nickname 'the Brasilia of Britain'.

I made that Brasilia bit up. Sorry, I just got excited. What does Telly say? 'You feel like you've been projected into the 21st century'. Can't argue with that, as most of these buildings are still there.

Telly Looks At...Art

I am obsessed with the 1981 short film 'Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham' and have been for some time. This incredible period piece, filmed in 1979, was the work of prolific director and producer Harold Baim, and it tickles and enthralls me for a number of reasons: it's extremely funny, hugely informative and very redolent of the world at the time I was growing up and starting to take notice.

I'm not from anywhere near Birmingham, but I know the second city quite well thanks to an ex-girlfriend from Harborne, and I think it's a very under-rated place which just happens to be full of the urban architecture I'm utterly fascinated by, especially the pre fucked with civic centre, a magnificent mess of the long gone and future past, a ramshackle and run down modernist vision characterised by a sign reading 'Paradise Place' affixed to a concrete ramp leading up to the Ballardian library complex.

Anyway, I'm incapable of not sharing gold like this, so let's start as we mean to go on - randomly - with some shots from the Gerald Irvine exhibition held at the premier Strathallan Hotel.

What does Telly have to say about this dazzling visual feast? Just that he 'looked in' and it 'nourished his brains'. Beautiful, baby, just beautiful.