Series 2 – Episode 1
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Frank Marker
Joe Lodge Steve Burrell Liz Lodge Beck Mrs Jarvis Arthur Holt Charlie Ridge |
Alfred Burke
Richard Leech John Carson Delena Kidd Basil Dignam Mary Chester Reginald Barratt Malcolm Taylor |
Production
Uncredited cast:
The rehearsal script also called for a telephone engineer and several non-speaking builders, including one named Bill, none of whom were credited in TV listings
The rehearsal script also called for a telephone engineer and several non-speaking builders, including one named Bill, none of whom were credited in TV listings
Series based on an idea by Roger Marshall and Anthony Marriott
Theme Music composed by Robert Earley Floor Manager: Patrick Kennedy Stage Manager: Shirley Cleghorn |
Production Assistant: Marian Lloyd
Designed by Richard Harrison Edited & Produced by Richard Bates Directed by Kim Mills |
Rehearsed from 10am on Monday 2 May 1966 at Rehearsal Room 2A, ABC Television Studios, Broom Road, Teddington, Middlesex
Camera rehearsed from Thursday 19 May 1966 at Studio 2, Teddington
Recorded on Friday 20 May 1966 at Studio 2, Teddington
Camera rehearsed from Thursday 19 May 1966 at Studio 2, Teddington
Recorded on Friday 20 May 1966 at Studio 2, Teddington
TV World Synopsis
Monday 9.30: Beck – Birmingham solicitor. Pay some bills – electricity, gas, phone, rates. Things can’t go on like this: London’s impossibly expensive. N.B. Rent due today.
Click here for detailed synopsis
Click here for detailed synopsis
Transmission
Monday 27 June 1966, 8pm (Rediffusion)
Friday 1 July 1966, 8pm (Anglia, Border, Grampian, Southern and Tyne Tees)
Saturday 2 July 1966, 9.10pm (ABC Midlands, ABC North and Ulster)
Sunday 3 July 1966, 11.05pm (Scottish)
Thursday 18 August 1966, 10.40pm (Teledu Cymru and TWW)
Wednesday 28 September 1966, 8pm (Channel and Westward)
Ratings: 4,950,000 (=13th)
Friday 1 July 1966, 8pm (Anglia, Border, Grampian, Southern and Tyne Tees)
Saturday 2 July 1966, 9.10pm (ABC Midlands, ABC North and Ulster)
Sunday 3 July 1966, 11.05pm (Scottish)
Thursday 18 August 1966, 10.40pm (Teledu Cymru and TWW)
Wednesday 28 September 1966, 8pm (Channel and Westward)
Ratings: 4,950,000 (=13th)
Archive
Rehearsal script – held in the BFI Special Collections
Story Notes
This episode laid the groundwork for Marker’s relocation to Birmingham for the remainder of Series 2 (and the whole of Series 3), with the inquiry agent finding life in London too costly and being hired to take on a case in the UK’s second city.
It is possible that some material was cut from Marker’s opening scene in his London office. When he is visited by the solicitor Beck in the rehearsal script, Marker “switches off the fire again.” However, this is the script’s first mention of the fire (presumably a gas or electric appliance), suggesting that, in an earlier draft, Marker had already been seen switching the device on.
In the script, Marker places Joe Lodge’s pipe on the mantelpiece, hoping to trick the man into rising from his wheelchair. However, a review published in the Daily Mail (see Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?, below) describes Marker moving the pipe to “a high and inaccessible shelf”. Lending weight to the latter interpretation, a surviving still photograph of Richard Leech as Joe in the character’s living room features a set of wooden shelves in the background.
All the Black Dresses She Wants takes place during summer, the same season in which it was transmitted in most regions. Marker’s exterior street scene with Liz Lodge in Act Two is headed “EXT. STREET. EVENING. (SUMMER)” in the script, indicating that it would still be light outside despite the time of day.
It is possible that some material was cut from Marker’s opening scene in his London office. When he is visited by the solicitor Beck in the rehearsal script, Marker “switches off the fire again.” However, this is the script’s first mention of the fire (presumably a gas or electric appliance), suggesting that, in an earlier draft, Marker had already been seen switching the device on.
In the script, Marker places Joe Lodge’s pipe on the mantelpiece, hoping to trick the man into rising from his wheelchair. However, a review published in the Daily Mail (see Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?, below) describes Marker moving the pipe to “a high and inaccessible shelf”. Lending weight to the latter interpretation, a surviving still photograph of Richard Leech as Joe in the character’s living room features a set of wooden shelves in the background.
All the Black Dresses She Wants takes place during summer, the same season in which it was transmitted in most regions. Marker’s exterior street scene with Liz Lodge in Act Two is headed “EXT. STREET. EVENING. (SUMMER)” in the script, indicating that it would still be light outside despite the time of day.
Production Notes
This was the final episode of Public Eye to feature Marker’s attic office in Clapham, as seen during the first series, and the only episode of Series 2 to make use of the set for those premises. All the Black Dresses She Wants was not, however, the first episode of Series 2 to go into production, but the fourth. The rehearsal script therefore described the set as “MARKER’S LONDON OFFICE”, to distinguish it from the Handsworth office already used during the production of Don’t Forget You’re Mine, I Could Set It to Music and It’s a Terrible Way to Be.
The telephone engineer who appears in the final studio scene is a speaking character in the rehearsal script, but no actor was credited as playing the role in TV listings magazines. It does seem, however, from the aforementioned review in the Daily Mail, that the character was retained in the final production. Describing Marker’s decision to relocate to the second city, the write-up by John Wells noted, “Eventually, crushed under the weight of economic pressures in London – the man has just been round to disconnect his telephone – he decides to stay in Birmingham.”
Once again, the scheduling of Public Eye by the ITV companies was somewhat haphazard, but this time at least almost all of the country took the programme at roughly the same time. Series 1 had been shown in different ITV regions at different times of year, covering a total period of more than 11 months. By contrast, most regions broadcast most episodes of the second series within a few days of one another, beginning in the last week of June 1966. In London, the show was now carried by the weekday franchise, Rediffusion, rather than ATV, the weekend operator. As such, Public Eye ran from Monday 27 June at 8pm to 8.55pm as a replacement for the second series of Redcap, while most other areas screened ATV’s romantic anthology series Love Story. In competition, BBC1 aired its heavyweight current-affairs programme Panorama. This placed Public Eye in a pre-watershed slot, similar to that adopted by the majority of the ITV network in England, which aired the show at 8pm on Fridays from 1 July, when it was seen by viewers of Anglia (the only area not to have taken the first series), Border, Grampian, Southern and Tyne Tees. Again, the Friday placement mainly saw Marker filling the slot vacated by Sergeant John Mann of Redcap and was scheduled against an imported line-up of the supernatural sitcom Bewitched and the medical drama Dr. Kildare on BBC1, while London screened No Hiding Place and other ITV stations took film series such as The Fugitive, Bonanza and Gideon’s Way. ABC retained the programme’s original post-watershed 9.10pm slot on Saturdays from 2 July, again as a replacement for Redcap (which would not be renewed for a third series). Ulster also took this broadcast, while most ITV regions ran the American soap opera Peyton Place and London screened ATV’s Victorian-era police procedural Sergeant Cork, all in opposition to comedy from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Not Only… But Also and oil-industry drama from The Troubleshooters on BBC1. The weekly cycle was completed late on Sunday night when Scottish ran Public Eye at 11.05pm from 3 July as a replacement for The Eamonn Andrews Show in the same slot that it had occupied during Series 1. As such, only Channel, Westward, Teledu Cymru and TWW had not screened All the Black Dresses She Wants by the end of the week.
This meant that the collective viewing figures for the same episode shown in multiple regions could be recorded by Television Audience Measurement (TAM). As a result, Public Eye, which had never troubled the national charts during Series 1, entered the TAM Top 20 for the week ending Sunday 3 July, ranking equal 13th and attracting viewers in an estimated 4,950,000 homes. Even more notable was the fact that All the Black Dresses She Wants was that week’s most watched programme in the London ITV area, with a TAM rating of 46. A TAM rating represented the percentage of television sets capable of receiving both ITV and BBC broadcasts that were actually tuned, at a particular point in time, to a particular programme. Furthermore, as revealed in Television Today on Thursday 18 August, the transmission of this episode would make Public Eye the ninth most popular dramatic series for the whole of July.
Viewers in Wales finally got their chance to catch up with Marker’s Midlands cases from Thursday 18 August, when Television Wales and the West (TWW) and Teledu Cymru scheduled Series 2 at 10.40pm as a replacement for the ITC filmed wartime legal drama Court Martial. The Welsh broadcasters began with the first two episodes, All the Black Dresses She Wants and Don’t Forget You’re Mine, showing Marker relocating to Birmingham and setting up in a new office, after which the stations took the newest available weekly episodes. TWW would later double back on what it had missed, but Teledu Cymru dropped the series after five episodes.
Channel and Westward did not screen All the Black Dresses She Wants until the end of September. These two regions had joined the Friday feed a week late, and picked up the show by simply omitting the opening episode at this time and commencing with Don’t Forget You’re Mine. Rather confusingly, Channel and Westward chose to end their run of the second series with All the Black Dresses She Wants, finally showing Marker arriving in Birmingham on Wednesday 28 September at 8pm. The following week, the slot was filled by the American Western series The Big Valley.
The telephone engineer who appears in the final studio scene is a speaking character in the rehearsal script, but no actor was credited as playing the role in TV listings magazines. It does seem, however, from the aforementioned review in the Daily Mail, that the character was retained in the final production. Describing Marker’s decision to relocate to the second city, the write-up by John Wells noted, “Eventually, crushed under the weight of economic pressures in London – the man has just been round to disconnect his telephone – he decides to stay in Birmingham.”
Once again, the scheduling of Public Eye by the ITV companies was somewhat haphazard, but this time at least almost all of the country took the programme at roughly the same time. Series 1 had been shown in different ITV regions at different times of year, covering a total period of more than 11 months. By contrast, most regions broadcast most episodes of the second series within a few days of one another, beginning in the last week of June 1966. In London, the show was now carried by the weekday franchise, Rediffusion, rather than ATV, the weekend operator. As such, Public Eye ran from Monday 27 June at 8pm to 8.55pm as a replacement for the second series of Redcap, while most other areas screened ATV’s romantic anthology series Love Story. In competition, BBC1 aired its heavyweight current-affairs programme Panorama. This placed Public Eye in a pre-watershed slot, similar to that adopted by the majority of the ITV network in England, which aired the show at 8pm on Fridays from 1 July, when it was seen by viewers of Anglia (the only area not to have taken the first series), Border, Grampian, Southern and Tyne Tees. Again, the Friday placement mainly saw Marker filling the slot vacated by Sergeant John Mann of Redcap and was scheduled against an imported line-up of the supernatural sitcom Bewitched and the medical drama Dr. Kildare on BBC1, while London screened No Hiding Place and other ITV stations took film series such as The Fugitive, Bonanza and Gideon’s Way. ABC retained the programme’s original post-watershed 9.10pm slot on Saturdays from 2 July, again as a replacement for Redcap (which would not be renewed for a third series). Ulster also took this broadcast, while most ITV regions ran the American soap opera Peyton Place and London screened ATV’s Victorian-era police procedural Sergeant Cork, all in opposition to comedy from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Not Only… But Also and oil-industry drama from The Troubleshooters on BBC1. The weekly cycle was completed late on Sunday night when Scottish ran Public Eye at 11.05pm from 3 July as a replacement for The Eamonn Andrews Show in the same slot that it had occupied during Series 1. As such, only Channel, Westward, Teledu Cymru and TWW had not screened All the Black Dresses She Wants by the end of the week.
This meant that the collective viewing figures for the same episode shown in multiple regions could be recorded by Television Audience Measurement (TAM). As a result, Public Eye, which had never troubled the national charts during Series 1, entered the TAM Top 20 for the week ending Sunday 3 July, ranking equal 13th and attracting viewers in an estimated 4,950,000 homes. Even more notable was the fact that All the Black Dresses She Wants was that week’s most watched programme in the London ITV area, with a TAM rating of 46. A TAM rating represented the percentage of television sets capable of receiving both ITV and BBC broadcasts that were actually tuned, at a particular point in time, to a particular programme. Furthermore, as revealed in Television Today on Thursday 18 August, the transmission of this episode would make Public Eye the ninth most popular dramatic series for the whole of July.
Viewers in Wales finally got their chance to catch up with Marker’s Midlands cases from Thursday 18 August, when Television Wales and the West (TWW) and Teledu Cymru scheduled Series 2 at 10.40pm as a replacement for the ITC filmed wartime legal drama Court Martial. The Welsh broadcasters began with the first two episodes, All the Black Dresses She Wants and Don’t Forget You’re Mine, showing Marker relocating to Birmingham and setting up in a new office, after which the stations took the newest available weekly episodes. TWW would later double back on what it had missed, but Teledu Cymru dropped the series after five episodes.
Channel and Westward did not screen All the Black Dresses She Wants until the end of September. These two regions had joined the Friday feed a week late, and picked up the show by simply omitting the opening episode at this time and commencing with Don’t Forget You’re Mine. Rather confusingly, Channel and Westward chose to end their run of the second series with All the Black Dresses She Wants, finally showing Marker arriving in Birmingham on Wednesday 28 September at 8pm. The following week, the slot was filled by the American Western series The Big Valley.
Home and Away
Whereas the London-based first series of Public Eye had been almost entirely studio-bound, Series 2 benefited from extensive exterior work, in particular using ABC’s Mobile Division, an Outside Broadcast (OB) videotape unit. Primarily used for sports coverage, this team – which was based at ABC’s Didsbury studios in Manchester – was being increasingly employed in drama production. In 1963, David Mercer’s A Way of Living, an episode of the ABC anthology series Armchair Theatre, had been the first television play to videotape substantial amounts of material on location, with the Mobile Division operating at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea in Northumberland. Though videotape was used, the process of recording exterior footage was nevertheless sometimes referred to informally as “filming”.
“The OB unit at Didsbury was only used for football at weekends,” recalled Richard Bates in July 2012, when interviewed by Andrew Pixley for the Public Eye reference book Six Guineas a Day, Plus Expenses, “and the company suggested that we should move Marker’s office to Birmingham so that we could meet up with the OB unit halfway down the M6 and use it for location work. This appealed to me, as I had always had a problem with matching video studio interiors with filmed locations. The results were always unsatisfactory: different sound quality and different picture quality. This way, we achieved a perfect match. This was pioneering stuff; nobody had attempted to do a drama in this way before, and the workload was heavy, but it was a very happy time and the series was well received.”
Bates, who had risen up the ranks to replace John Bryce as producer, and now fulfilled a dual role for which he received the on-screen credit “Edited & Produced by”, discussed the location work with Television Today (Thursday 12 May 1966) during the production of Series 2. Of the studio-bound nature of the first series, he admitted, “This was an error, but we realised it too late,” adding, “For this series, we have moved Marker to Birmingham and we are using ABC’s OB Mobile Recording Unit to get as much action stuff as time allows. I was given the choice of setting the second series anywhere I liked in the Midlands and I picked on Birmingham, partly because of its marvellous new City Centre and attractive countryside, and partly because it is a city that nobody has used to any great extent.”
However, series co-creator and lead writer Roger Marshall saw the choice of location as being more specific for ABC. “It was to justify the fact that they were a Birmingham-based company,” he told Andrew Pixley in July 2012. Nevertheless, Marshall was delighted to have this extra ingredient to incorporate into the scripts: “I think it opened up the series a lot more. When his [Marker’s] office was in Clapham, the nearest you could get to atmosphere was that you could hear the station announcement from Clapham Junction.”
Alfred Burke echoed this sentiment when he was interviewed by Kenneth Maxwell for Television Today (Thursday 15 October 1970), feeling that screen drama could become too claustrophobic without exteriors: “It’s valuable because that is what it’s all about. People would miss it if a play just started in a room. Location helps set the scene.” On Friday 6 January 1995, in a videotaped interview prepared by Dave Rogers for the Kaleidoscope event Raiders of the Lost Archives ’95, Burke added, “No one location worked better than another. That was the whole point about him [Marker]: you could put him down anywhere and he’d find work.”
Although the Mobile Division had been the main reason for the revamped format of the show, the thirteen new episodes would, in fact, use a combination of videotape and 35mm film for their exteriors, with five episodes (All the Black Dresses She Wants, Don’t Forget You’re Mine, You Can Keep the Medal, No, No, Nothing Like That and What’s the Matter? Can’t You Take a Sick Joke?) benefiting from OB work in the Birmingham area. Four episodes (It’s a Terrible Way to Be, It Had to Be a Mouse, There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth and Twenty Pounds of Heart and Muscle) made use of film, sometimes in the vicinity of Teddington rather than Birmingham. The remaining four (I Could Set It to Music, You’re Not Cinderella, Are You?, Works with Chess, Not with Life and Tell Me About the Crab) were studio-bound, with any establishing exterior shots achieved via the use of stock footage. All studio interiors were still realised at ABC Television Studios in Teddington.
“It was a bit of a nightmare getting the production team up to Birmingham from Teddington when we only had two days on location, and the Outside Broadcast unit – which was enormous – coming down from Didsbury,” Richard Bates explained to Andrew Pixley in July 2012. “But it was fun and it was different.” As producer, Bates preferred the fact that, when using the OB crew, he could see immediately what images were being captured by his directors on location: “I could sit there all day and watch exactly what the director was shooting. But the problem with film was that you stood around like a spare whatnot and couldn’t see what was going on at all. I always liked to see what my directors were doing and comment accordingly.”
OB recording for All the Black Dresses She Wants took place in Birmingham from Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 May 1966. This included scenes at the building site (Joe Lodge’s accident in Act One and the lorry backing towards him in Act Two), and on a pavement leading to a bus stop (Liz Lodge talking to Marker in Act Two). The latter scene was shot in Little King Street, in the Hockley district of the city, according to the Sunday Mercury (see Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?, below). Recording also took in two well-known Birmingham landmarks: the Bull Ring Shopping Centre (where Marker meets Liz in Act One) and Snow Hill railway station (where Marker arrives in Act One and returns at the end of the episode). See Nobody Wants to Know, below, for further information about these locations.
For the second building site sequence, Martin Worth’s script suggests the use of high elevation to provide visual excitement. The sequence begins “Somewhere on the building – high up, if possible”, with Steve Burrell talking to Charlie Ridge, who is working there.
Marker’s initial arrival at Snow Hill station is described as follows in the script: “Marker arrives, carrying a small case, and takes a taxi from the forecourt.” When he returns to Snowhill [sic] at the end of the script, the text reads: “Railway platform. Train arrives. As it comes to a stop, cut to sign reading “Snowhill station” – and pan off to see Marker getting out of train.” As Marker walks out of the station, the action then mixes to the end title sequence – which, for Series 2 and 3, showed Alfred Burke (on 35mm film) trudging through Birmingham city centre at night, heading down an underpass off Smallbrook Queensway towards Dudley Street and Station Street.
“The OB unit at Didsbury was only used for football at weekends,” recalled Richard Bates in July 2012, when interviewed by Andrew Pixley for the Public Eye reference book Six Guineas a Day, Plus Expenses, “and the company suggested that we should move Marker’s office to Birmingham so that we could meet up with the OB unit halfway down the M6 and use it for location work. This appealed to me, as I had always had a problem with matching video studio interiors with filmed locations. The results were always unsatisfactory: different sound quality and different picture quality. This way, we achieved a perfect match. This was pioneering stuff; nobody had attempted to do a drama in this way before, and the workload was heavy, but it was a very happy time and the series was well received.”
Bates, who had risen up the ranks to replace John Bryce as producer, and now fulfilled a dual role for which he received the on-screen credit “Edited & Produced by”, discussed the location work with Television Today (Thursday 12 May 1966) during the production of Series 2. Of the studio-bound nature of the first series, he admitted, “This was an error, but we realised it too late,” adding, “For this series, we have moved Marker to Birmingham and we are using ABC’s OB Mobile Recording Unit to get as much action stuff as time allows. I was given the choice of setting the second series anywhere I liked in the Midlands and I picked on Birmingham, partly because of its marvellous new City Centre and attractive countryside, and partly because it is a city that nobody has used to any great extent.”
However, series co-creator and lead writer Roger Marshall saw the choice of location as being more specific for ABC. “It was to justify the fact that they were a Birmingham-based company,” he told Andrew Pixley in July 2012. Nevertheless, Marshall was delighted to have this extra ingredient to incorporate into the scripts: “I think it opened up the series a lot more. When his [Marker’s] office was in Clapham, the nearest you could get to atmosphere was that you could hear the station announcement from Clapham Junction.”
Alfred Burke echoed this sentiment when he was interviewed by Kenneth Maxwell for Television Today (Thursday 15 October 1970), feeling that screen drama could become too claustrophobic without exteriors: “It’s valuable because that is what it’s all about. People would miss it if a play just started in a room. Location helps set the scene.” On Friday 6 January 1995, in a videotaped interview prepared by Dave Rogers for the Kaleidoscope event Raiders of the Lost Archives ’95, Burke added, “No one location worked better than another. That was the whole point about him [Marker]: you could put him down anywhere and he’d find work.”
Although the Mobile Division had been the main reason for the revamped format of the show, the thirteen new episodes would, in fact, use a combination of videotape and 35mm film for their exteriors, with five episodes (All the Black Dresses She Wants, Don’t Forget You’re Mine, You Can Keep the Medal, No, No, Nothing Like That and What’s the Matter? Can’t You Take a Sick Joke?) benefiting from OB work in the Birmingham area. Four episodes (It’s a Terrible Way to Be, It Had to Be a Mouse, There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth and Twenty Pounds of Heart and Muscle) made use of film, sometimes in the vicinity of Teddington rather than Birmingham. The remaining four (I Could Set It to Music, You’re Not Cinderella, Are You?, Works with Chess, Not with Life and Tell Me About the Crab) were studio-bound, with any establishing exterior shots achieved via the use of stock footage. All studio interiors were still realised at ABC Television Studios in Teddington.
“It was a bit of a nightmare getting the production team up to Birmingham from Teddington when we only had two days on location, and the Outside Broadcast unit – which was enormous – coming down from Didsbury,” Richard Bates explained to Andrew Pixley in July 2012. “But it was fun and it was different.” As producer, Bates preferred the fact that, when using the OB crew, he could see immediately what images were being captured by his directors on location: “I could sit there all day and watch exactly what the director was shooting. But the problem with film was that you stood around like a spare whatnot and couldn’t see what was going on at all. I always liked to see what my directors were doing and comment accordingly.”
OB recording for All the Black Dresses She Wants took place in Birmingham from Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 May 1966. This included scenes at the building site (Joe Lodge’s accident in Act One and the lorry backing towards him in Act Two), and on a pavement leading to a bus stop (Liz Lodge talking to Marker in Act Two). The latter scene was shot in Little King Street, in the Hockley district of the city, according to the Sunday Mercury (see Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?, below). Recording also took in two well-known Birmingham landmarks: the Bull Ring Shopping Centre (where Marker meets Liz in Act One) and Snow Hill railway station (where Marker arrives in Act One and returns at the end of the episode). See Nobody Wants to Know, below, for further information about these locations.
For the second building site sequence, Martin Worth’s script suggests the use of high elevation to provide visual excitement. The sequence begins “Somewhere on the building – high up, if possible”, with Steve Burrell talking to Charlie Ridge, who is working there.
Marker’s initial arrival at Snow Hill station is described as follows in the script: “Marker arrives, carrying a small case, and takes a taxi from the forecourt.” When he returns to Snowhill [sic] at the end of the script, the text reads: “Railway platform. Train arrives. As it comes to a stop, cut to sign reading “Snowhill station” – and pan off to see Marker getting out of train.” As Marker walks out of the station, the action then mixes to the end title sequence – which, for Series 2 and 3, showed Alfred Burke (on 35mm film) trudging through Birmingham city centre at night, heading down an underpass off Smallbrook Queensway towards Dudley Street and Station Street.
Who Wants to Be Told Bad News?
Some early coverage of the forthcoming Birmingham-based series of Public Eye was provided by that city’s Sunday Mercury on 15 May 1966, in a piece entitled An Eye on the City (see left), by TV and radio editor Blair Thomson. The article showed the ABC camera unit capturing Alfred Burke as Frank Marker on location, “arguing with a wife with problems”, played by Delena Kidd, in “the first programme in the series, All the Black Dresses She Wants, which will be screened on July 2.” The text referred to Kidd’s character as Mrs Leach, which may indicate that Liz Lodge had a different name in an early draft of the script, or – more likely – that the journalist had misspelled the surname of the actress’s screen husband, Richard Leech. Story editor and producer Richard Bates was quoted as saying, “It seems appropriate that, with so much building and developing going on in Birmingham just now, the first programme should involve a building site.”
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In the run up to the launch of Series 2 in late June, Bates was also interviewed about the new location by Dennis Barker of The Guardian, on Wednesday 22 June. “The aim is to let some fresh air in,” explained the producer, before adding thoughtfully, “or at least some dirty fresh air,” in an item entitled Letting Some Fresh Air into the Public Eye (see above left). “This is 1966,” continued Bates, “and people want to have the feeling that the series is happening here and now. That is why we came to Birmingham. It would be different with The Avengers, for instance – you would not want fresh air let into that. It needs to be in a sort of beautiful vacuum.” Barker referred to location scenes that had already been shot for the new series, “which begins on Monday in London, later in the provinces,” including “the laconic Mr Marker being thrown into the canal at Gas Street Basin by hoodlums” (in You Can Keep the Medal) and talking “a tearful lass” out of an impulsive departure from New Street station (in Don’t Forget You’re Mine). The article also revealed that recording had been completed for six of the thirteen episodes and that the camera unit would “soon film a poignant and highly dramatic” cemetery scene (presumably for What’s the Matter? Can’t You Take a Sick Joke?). “This atmosphere makes Birmingham an exciting place to film in,” concluded Bates. “Also, the police are more co-operative. In London, the traffic is so dense that they won’t let you film anything unless it’s at five in the morning.”
Anglia, which was getting its first glimpse of Public Eye, marked the new series with a short feature (see above left) in the local edition of TV Times (25 June–1 July 1966). “Not many knock on Frank Marker’s door,” the text began. “A lawyer with a worried client. An informer with something to peddle. That’s enough knocking when you’re the Public Eye, the loneliest lone wolf of them all. Three’s a crowd, four is the signal to get out.” However, the world of Alfred Burke “certainly isn’t like that. There are times he wishes it was, but the father of two sets of twins doesn’t have a choice.” Solitude tended to be in short supply in his South London home, the actor remarked: “because of a couple of nine-year-olds like Jacob and Harriet and a pair of five-year-olds like Kelly and Louisa, the quiet life is out.” The article noted that Burke was playing Marker “again”, despite the fact that the character was new to the Anglia region. The programme billing (see above right) was accompanied by two photographs, one of Marker in another Series 2 episode (it shows the inquiry agent in his Birmingham office, which did not feature in All the Black Dresses She Wants) and the other depicting Delena Kidd as Liz Lodge squatting down next to Richard Leech as her wheelchair-bound husband, Joe.
“A slightly incredible drama” was how John Wells of the Daily Mail described All the Black Dresses She Wants in his review on Tuesday 28 June, the morning after the London transmission of the Series 2 opener. Describing the plot, Wells came to the conclusion that “The moral of the story is that wives prefer someone they can look after rather than a man of iron like Joe Lodge, the foreman, who ‘would put his hand in a furnace and not let on’. Be that as it may, the rodent-faced Alfred Burke seems to prove the contrary as far as audience appeal goes, snarling his way through the script with such growling hostility that the slightest indication of good-natured tolerance on his face seems to beam out like a radiant grin on anybody else.” Of the move to the Midlands, it was noted that Marker was now “mixing with people whose twangingly authentic Brum accents are more authentic in some cases than in others.” The reviewer considered the story to be “simple to the point of being thin, and most of the tension centred on the slightly touchy subject of whether the hysterically paralysed foreman was going to walk again.” After detailing the underhanded methods used by “the beady-eyed Burke” to get Joe out of his wheelchair, Wells ended his critique on a disappointed note: “The framework of the series and the character may be OK, but it takes a more masculine plot than that to hold anyone’s attention for three-quarters of an hour if they have anything better to do.”
“A slightly incredible drama” was how John Wells of the Daily Mail described All the Black Dresses She Wants in his review on Tuesday 28 June, the morning after the London transmission of the Series 2 opener. Describing the plot, Wells came to the conclusion that “The moral of the story is that wives prefer someone they can look after rather than a man of iron like Joe Lodge, the foreman, who ‘would put his hand in a furnace and not let on’. Be that as it may, the rodent-faced Alfred Burke seems to prove the contrary as far as audience appeal goes, snarling his way through the script with such growling hostility that the slightest indication of good-natured tolerance on his face seems to beam out like a radiant grin on anybody else.” Of the move to the Midlands, it was noted that Marker was now “mixing with people whose twangingly authentic Brum accents are more authentic in some cases than in others.” The reviewer considered the story to be “simple to the point of being thin, and most of the tension centred on the slightly touchy subject of whether the hysterically paralysed foreman was going to walk again.” After detailing the underhanded methods used by “the beady-eyed Burke” to get Joe out of his wheelchair, Wells ended his critique on a disappointed note: “The framework of the series and the character may be OK, but it takes a more masculine plot than that to hold anyone’s attention for three-quarters of an hour if they have anything better to do.”
The Northern edition of TV Times (2–8 July 1966) provided a much more detailed interview with the lead actor than the version that had appeared in the Anglia edition. The feature, Man in the Public Eye, by Paul Austin (see above), began in much the same way as the Anglia variant, contrasting Frank Marker’s solitary existence with the hectic home life of Alfred Burke. “Once a week I’m reprieved,” the actor added, in the longer version. This was because every Tuesday was the kids’ evening out: “and, believe me, I make the most of it.” It was a Tuesday night as Burke discussed his very different roles as an ordinary suburban husband and the character of Marker. “I suppose Frank Marker and I are similar in ways,” he said, while sipping a glass of claret. “I do exploit parts of my personality in him and, in fact, his is a welding of both our personalities. I don’t believe in force and I have tried to make this point with Marker. He never gets violent if it can possibly be avoided. But I probably find it easier being a nonconformist than Marker: being an actor, I think, is one of the best ways of being a nonconformist. People don’t expect an actor to conform and he can get away with almost anything that pleases him. He can be a drunk, wild or respectable and hide it all.” Burke’s interests were mild rather than wild, however, ranging from watching football or enjoying a quiet pint with a friend in his local pub, to an out-of-London concert or a visit to a historic house with his wife, Barbara. The interviewer left Burke in his comfortable old leather chair, “A man alone, just as he is in the Public Eye.”
In the Midlands, TV World (2–8 July 1966) promoted the return of the show with a cover photograph of Marker on a cobbled street. Inside the magazine, the People column contained a brief item on guest actress Delena Kidd, while a more substantial piece about the programme’s new setting appeared in the Series and Serials section. Entitled Look Out Birmingham, Marker’s Moving In, the article observed that, though the second city was new to Marker, it represented something of a homecoming for Alfred Burke. “I spent three very happy years with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the early 1950s,” he recalled, adding of Marker, “He’s enigmatic, a chameleon, so the viewers naturally see more of me in the part than they would if I were playing Shakespeare.” The actor had no objections to being compared with the character he played. “For me, Marker is a naturalistic part,” he said, admitting, “I look a bit seedy myself."
On Friday 1 July, the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph announced that “Public Eye returns to the screen at 8.0 on Anglia”, despite the fact that the programme had never been seen before in that region.
Meanwhile, to mark the Grampian transmission of All the Black Dresses She Wants, the TV column of Aberdeen’s Evening Express published a photograph of Marker, “the small-time private detective played by Alfred Burke and the unheroic hero of Public Eye” (see below centre).
On Saturday 2 July, the Grimsby Daily Telegraph also ran a picture of Burke as “ABC TV’s off-beat inquiry agent Frank Marker” (see below right).
In the Midlands, TV World (2–8 July 1966) promoted the return of the show with a cover photograph of Marker on a cobbled street. Inside the magazine, the People column contained a brief item on guest actress Delena Kidd, while a more substantial piece about the programme’s new setting appeared in the Series and Serials section. Entitled Look Out Birmingham, Marker’s Moving In, the article observed that, though the second city was new to Marker, it represented something of a homecoming for Alfred Burke. “I spent three very happy years with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the early 1950s,” he recalled, adding of Marker, “He’s enigmatic, a chameleon, so the viewers naturally see more of me in the part than they would if I were playing Shakespeare.” The actor had no objections to being compared with the character he played. “For me, Marker is a naturalistic part,” he said, admitting, “I look a bit seedy myself."
On Friday 1 July, the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph announced that “Public Eye returns to the screen at 8.0 on Anglia”, despite the fact that the programme had never been seen before in that region.
Meanwhile, to mark the Grampian transmission of All the Black Dresses She Wants, the TV column of Aberdeen’s Evening Express published a photograph of Marker, “the small-time private detective played by Alfred Burke and the unheroic hero of Public Eye” (see below centre).
On Saturday 2 July, the Grimsby Daily Telegraph also ran a picture of Burke as “ABC TV’s off-beat inquiry agent Frank Marker” (see below right).
Public Eye Returns for Second Season, proclaimed Nottingham’s Evening Post and News in its Weekend Television Preview that same day (see above left). It noted that, since the last series had ended, “Mr Burke has played Shakespeare in Regent’s Park, appeared in several episodes of [the ATV boardroom drama] The Power Game and installed a handsome new kitchen in his London home at Barnes.” In fact, Burke had been a guest artist in just one instalment of The Power Game, playing Joe Panton in The Switch. The article announced the main guest cast of All the Black Dresses She Wants and the writers of forthcoming episodes, as well as asserting that, prior to the launch of Public Eye in 1965, the role of the anti-hero in thrillers had been a rarity since the films of the 1930s. “Frank Marker was born into a world of glossy he-men; yet he survived and returns this summer stronger than ever, and assured of further success as the trend towards the anti-hero continues in all media. In the new Public Eye, Marker has transferred his office from Clapham Junction to the back room of a Birmingham estate agent.” Marker’s new office would not be introduced until the second episode, Don’t Forget You’re Mine, and it would, in fact, be another upper-floor situation rather than a room at the back (as had originally been envisaged in the rehearsal script for Don’t Forget You’re Mine).
In common with the Evening Post and News, Ireland’s Saturday Night described the returning character of Marker as “the down-at-heel inquiry agent who takes a Robin Hood attitude to the foibles of rich clients” in “an off-beat detective series”.
Meanwhile, The Coventry Evening Telegraph (see above right) recycled material from TV World. “Frank Marker, that most seedy of all inquiry agents, has run out of clients in London,” declared Monitor on the Week-end Television and Radio page, “so, in search of new horizons, he arrives in Birmingham for a new series of Public Eye on ITV at 9.10.” The article then quoted Burke reminiscing about his time with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, as in the Midlands listings magazine. Monitor also mentioned that the actor “appears in The Saint this week,” referring to a repeat screening of the Series 2 episode The Wonderful War on Thursday 7 July at 9.40pm.
Numerous newspapers made reference to the show’s change of location, including Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel, which noted that “The new series of Public Eye, with Alfred Burke as a down-at-heel inquiry agent, is set in the Midlands.” This fact was remarked upon even outside the region, with the Belfast Telegraph reporting that Marker “moves to Birmingham from London for the return of this exciting series.”
In common with the Evening Post and News, Ireland’s Saturday Night described the returning character of Marker as “the down-at-heel inquiry agent who takes a Robin Hood attitude to the foibles of rich clients” in “an off-beat detective series”.
Meanwhile, The Coventry Evening Telegraph (see above right) recycled material from TV World. “Frank Marker, that most seedy of all inquiry agents, has run out of clients in London,” declared Monitor on the Week-end Television and Radio page, “so, in search of new horizons, he arrives in Birmingham for a new series of Public Eye on ITV at 9.10.” The article then quoted Burke reminiscing about his time with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, as in the Midlands listings magazine. Monitor also mentioned that the actor “appears in The Saint this week,” referring to a repeat screening of the Series 2 episode The Wonderful War on Thursday 7 July at 9.40pm.
Numerous newspapers made reference to the show’s change of location, including Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel, which noted that “The new series of Public Eye, with Alfred Burke as a down-at-heel inquiry agent, is set in the Midlands.” This fact was remarked upon even outside the region, with the Belfast Telegraph reporting that Marker “moves to Birmingham from London for the return of this exciting series.”
Both Hull’s Daily Mail and the Liverpool Echo and Evening Express included images of Richard Leech as the wheelchair-bound Joe Lodge. The Daily Mail (see above left) pictured him looking back in terror as a tipper truck prepares to drop its load on him towards the end of Act Two, while the Liverpool Echo (see above right) showed him with Delena Kidd as Joe’s estranged wife, Liz, “the only person with any sympathy towards him”, in the same image as had been used in the Anglia edition of TV Times.
“Welcome back to Alfred Burke as Marker in Public Eye,” wrote Mary Flynn of Maidstone, Kent, in a letter to the Sunday Mirror, which was published on 3 July. “What a change to see a down-to-earth man dealing with other people’s problems in a really practical way. Please find him plenty of work so that he can clear up all his bills in the TV show!”
Ms Flynn was not the only one pleased to see the programme’s return. On the same day, Maurice Wiggin of The Sunday Times embraced the “modified version of Public Eye … which made such a hit last year”. The critic felt that the move to Birmingham was “not at all a bad idea”, believing it was “high time the centre of interest shifted” in television drama. “I only hope that Marker will retain the sad, shabby integrity which made him the most appealing of all private eyes while he inhabited his peculiarly Gothic attic office in London. Alfred Burke’s creation and development of this character has been one of the most improbable achievements in the field of private vision.” Turning to the narrative style of the series, Wiggin noted that “there is a distinct touch of Graham Greene. To be sure, the writing is not up to the Greene standard [but] it has all the markings of fascination. The signature tune haunts me.”
The Teleview column of the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, on Monday 4 July, disagreed. As far as its reviewer was concerned, the only consolation provided by the return of “the shabby, private detective ‘hero’ of Public Eye” was that it replaced “the tedious Redcap. But it is a poor replacement. The venomous Marker is so completely lacking in sympathy or even humour that any question of self-identification is out. Anti-heroes are all very well, but there must, for entertainment’s sake, be a saving grace.” Citing as an example the “thoroughly objectionable” John Wilder, the ruthless businessman portrayed by Patrick Wymark in The Power Game, the columnist noted that “the characterisation in his case has depth and there is an obscure appeal which has ‘endeared’ him to many. This will never happen in Marker’s case.” Nor did any of Public Eye’s other characters appeal. “Inevitably, the people Marker comes across are equally slimy and unpleasant, particularly so in Saturday’s episode,” the critic declared. “The episode left a nasty taste in the mouth.”
Fortunately, ‘B.S.’ of Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel was more appreciative – of both Public Eye and another returning series, Rediffusion’s ecclesiastical comedy Our Man from St. Mark’s, which together were regarded as “a couple of tried and proved ingredients” in “ITV’s summer brew”. Writing in the newspaper’s Viewfinding column on Wednesday 6 July, B.S. was satisfied that “Frank Marker, the down-at-heel inquiry agent of ITV’s Public Eye, has not changed in character with his move to Birmingham. He remains the off-beat, laconic detective who takes a Robin Hood attitude to the foibles of rich clients. ABC managed the change of location neatly by making Marker’s eternal debts the cause of his acceptance of work in the Midlands.” However, the critic predicted that Marker’s sense of justice made him unlikely to strike it rich in his new location: “Engaged in the first story by a wealthy contractor to prove that a worker, paralysed in a fall, was faking, he exposed his client instead and as a sideline played cupid in reuniting the injured man and his estranged wife. This off-beat line is the strength of Public Eye, and the list of scriptwriters engaged to pursue it should ensure another popular season.” Unaware as yet of the programme’s improved viewing figures, the reviewer concluded that it “may not hit the top ratings, but it promises entertainment on a par with most Saturday night drama series.”
Another positive write-up appeared in the Coventry Standard the following day: “Seedy inquiry agent Frank Marker (Alfred Burke) got off to a good start on ABC last Saturday. This show, Public Eye, now has its location in Birmingham. Its realism stems from its lack of heroics.”
When Series 2 finally came to the TWW region on Thursday 18 August, Public Eye was mentioned among Peter Forth’s recommendations for that night’s viewing in the Western Daily Press. “His many fans will welcome Alfred Burke back with another series of the adventures of an English private detective,” proclaimed the journalist in his Forth’s Choice column. “He deals with the case of a solicitor, debts, and other modern and pressing problems.”
“Welcome back to Alfred Burke as Marker in Public Eye,” wrote Mary Flynn of Maidstone, Kent, in a letter to the Sunday Mirror, which was published on 3 July. “What a change to see a down-to-earth man dealing with other people’s problems in a really practical way. Please find him plenty of work so that he can clear up all his bills in the TV show!”
Ms Flynn was not the only one pleased to see the programme’s return. On the same day, Maurice Wiggin of The Sunday Times embraced the “modified version of Public Eye … which made such a hit last year”. The critic felt that the move to Birmingham was “not at all a bad idea”, believing it was “high time the centre of interest shifted” in television drama. “I only hope that Marker will retain the sad, shabby integrity which made him the most appealing of all private eyes while he inhabited his peculiarly Gothic attic office in London. Alfred Burke’s creation and development of this character has been one of the most improbable achievements in the field of private vision.” Turning to the narrative style of the series, Wiggin noted that “there is a distinct touch of Graham Greene. To be sure, the writing is not up to the Greene standard [but] it has all the markings of fascination. The signature tune haunts me.”
The Teleview column of the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, on Monday 4 July, disagreed. As far as its reviewer was concerned, the only consolation provided by the return of “the shabby, private detective ‘hero’ of Public Eye” was that it replaced “the tedious Redcap. But it is a poor replacement. The venomous Marker is so completely lacking in sympathy or even humour that any question of self-identification is out. Anti-heroes are all very well, but there must, for entertainment’s sake, be a saving grace.” Citing as an example the “thoroughly objectionable” John Wilder, the ruthless businessman portrayed by Patrick Wymark in The Power Game, the columnist noted that “the characterisation in his case has depth and there is an obscure appeal which has ‘endeared’ him to many. This will never happen in Marker’s case.” Nor did any of Public Eye’s other characters appeal. “Inevitably, the people Marker comes across are equally slimy and unpleasant, particularly so in Saturday’s episode,” the critic declared. “The episode left a nasty taste in the mouth.”
Fortunately, ‘B.S.’ of Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel was more appreciative – of both Public Eye and another returning series, Rediffusion’s ecclesiastical comedy Our Man from St. Mark’s, which together were regarded as “a couple of tried and proved ingredients” in “ITV’s summer brew”. Writing in the newspaper’s Viewfinding column on Wednesday 6 July, B.S. was satisfied that “Frank Marker, the down-at-heel inquiry agent of ITV’s Public Eye, has not changed in character with his move to Birmingham. He remains the off-beat, laconic detective who takes a Robin Hood attitude to the foibles of rich clients. ABC managed the change of location neatly by making Marker’s eternal debts the cause of his acceptance of work in the Midlands.” However, the critic predicted that Marker’s sense of justice made him unlikely to strike it rich in his new location: “Engaged in the first story by a wealthy contractor to prove that a worker, paralysed in a fall, was faking, he exposed his client instead and as a sideline played cupid in reuniting the injured man and his estranged wife. This off-beat line is the strength of Public Eye, and the list of scriptwriters engaged to pursue it should ensure another popular season.” Unaware as yet of the programme’s improved viewing figures, the reviewer concluded that it “may not hit the top ratings, but it promises entertainment on a par with most Saturday night drama series.”
Another positive write-up appeared in the Coventry Standard the following day: “Seedy inquiry agent Frank Marker (Alfred Burke) got off to a good start on ABC last Saturday. This show, Public Eye, now has its location in Birmingham. Its realism stems from its lack of heroics.”
When Series 2 finally came to the TWW region on Thursday 18 August, Public Eye was mentioned among Peter Forth’s recommendations for that night’s viewing in the Western Daily Press. “His many fans will welcome Alfred Burke back with another series of the adventures of an English private detective,” proclaimed the journalist in his Forth’s Choice column. “He deals with the case of a solicitor, debts, and other modern and pressing problems.”
Nobody Wants to Know
When Marker tells Beck, “I must have been away and left everything on,” he could be referring to his trip to Bournemouth in Have It on the House at the end of the previous series, or earlier, when he fled London to escape the wrath of gangster ‘Happy’ Holliday in You Should Hear Me Eat Soup.
Birmingham Snow Hill railway station, which opened as Birmingham station on Friday 1 October 1852 and was renamed Birmingham Snow Hill in February 1858, is one of the three main city-centre stations in Birmingham, along with Birmingham New Street (which features in Don’t Forget You’re Mine) and Birmingham Moor Street. Snow Hill was once the main station of the Great Western Railway in Birmingham and, at its height, rivalled New Street, with competitive services to destinations including London Paddington (from where Marker travels in All the Black Dresses She Wants), Wolverhampton Low Level, Birkenhead Woodside, Wales and South West England. The station has been rebuilt several times since it originally opened as a temporary wooden structure. It was rebuilt as a permanent station in 1871 and then rebuilt again on a much grander scale during 1906–1912, to cope with increasing traffic. As late as the mid-1960s, Snow Hill was still a major station, handling millions of passengers every year. However, the electrification of the rival West Coast Main Line from London to New Street saw New Street favoured over Snow Hill, most of whose services were withdrawn in the late 1960s. This led to the station’s eventual closure on Monday 6 March 1972 and its demolition five years later. After 15 years of closure, however, a new Snow Hill station, its current incarnation, was built, reopening on Monday 5 October 1987.
The Bull Ring is a major shopping area in central Birmingham, which has been used as a marketplace since the Middle Ages. The area was first known as Corn Cheaping, in reference to the corn market on the site. The name Bull Ring referred to the green within Corn Cheaping that was used for bull-baiting – the ring being a hoop of iron to which bulls were tied for baiting prior to slaughter. The first of two shopping centres erected in the area was built by John Laing Group and opened by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh on Friday 29 May 1964. A combination of traditional open-air market stalls and a new indoor shopping centre, it was the first indoor city-centre shopping centre in the UK. Attached to it was a nine-storey office block, designed by local architect James A. Roberts, with a scrolling advertisement board, which, during the opening title sequence for Series 2, used its dot matrix of lights to beam the legend “PUBLIC EYE” across the Birmingham skyline. Unfortunately, the Brutalist grey concrete architecture of the Bull Ring Shopping Centre was very much of its time and had fallen out of favour by the 1980s. It was eventually replaced by a new shopping centre, the Bullring & Grand Central, which opened on Thursday 4 September 2003.
Throughout this episode, Steve Burrell swallows pills to treat migraines. If The Drug Merchants had gone into production, one wonders whether he would have taken Ergyl, the remedy that featured in that unmade script.
Birmingham Snow Hill railway station, which opened as Birmingham station on Friday 1 October 1852 and was renamed Birmingham Snow Hill in February 1858, is one of the three main city-centre stations in Birmingham, along with Birmingham New Street (which features in Don’t Forget You’re Mine) and Birmingham Moor Street. Snow Hill was once the main station of the Great Western Railway in Birmingham and, at its height, rivalled New Street, with competitive services to destinations including London Paddington (from where Marker travels in All the Black Dresses She Wants), Wolverhampton Low Level, Birkenhead Woodside, Wales and South West England. The station has been rebuilt several times since it originally opened as a temporary wooden structure. It was rebuilt as a permanent station in 1871 and then rebuilt again on a much grander scale during 1906–1912, to cope with increasing traffic. As late as the mid-1960s, Snow Hill was still a major station, handling millions of passengers every year. However, the electrification of the rival West Coast Main Line from London to New Street saw New Street favoured over Snow Hill, most of whose services were withdrawn in the late 1960s. This led to the station’s eventual closure on Monday 6 March 1972 and its demolition five years later. After 15 years of closure, however, a new Snow Hill station, its current incarnation, was built, reopening on Monday 5 October 1987.
The Bull Ring is a major shopping area in central Birmingham, which has been used as a marketplace since the Middle Ages. The area was first known as Corn Cheaping, in reference to the corn market on the site. The name Bull Ring referred to the green within Corn Cheaping that was used for bull-baiting – the ring being a hoop of iron to which bulls were tied for baiting prior to slaughter. The first of two shopping centres erected in the area was built by John Laing Group and opened by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh on Friday 29 May 1964. A combination of traditional open-air market stalls and a new indoor shopping centre, it was the first indoor city-centre shopping centre in the UK. Attached to it was a nine-storey office block, designed by local architect James A. Roberts, with a scrolling advertisement board, which, during the opening title sequence for Series 2, used its dot matrix of lights to beam the legend “PUBLIC EYE” across the Birmingham skyline. Unfortunately, the Brutalist grey concrete architecture of the Bull Ring Shopping Centre was very much of its time and had fallen out of favour by the 1980s. It was eventually replaced by a new shopping centre, the Bullring & Grand Central, which opened on Thursday 4 September 2003.
Throughout this episode, Steve Burrell swallows pills to treat migraines. If The Drug Merchants had gone into production, one wonders whether he would have taken Ergyl, the remedy that featured in that unmade script.
With thanks to Jonny Davies, Andrew Pixley, Barbara Toft, the BFI Special Collections, the British Newspaper Archive, Network Distributing and Vortis Press.
The Missing Markers is a not-for-profit fan website written and edited by and copyright © Richard McGinlay. All rights reserved.
Public Eye (the ABC years) is copyright © StudioCanal. No attempt to infringe this copyright is intended.
The Missing Markers is a not-for-profit fan website written and edited by and copyright © Richard McGinlay. All rights reserved.
Public Eye (the ABC years) is copyright © StudioCanal. No attempt to infringe this copyright is intended.