Lewis, Vera and Silk

The fictional Detectives Lewis and Vera have in common that I did not immediate take to either series but now they have become part of my essential viewing. It was always going to be difficult for Kevin Whatley, the North East born and proud, actor, to take the lead role in the series which has brought John Thaw lasting fame and which reminds I must read and write about his life following the purchase of two biographies some time ago, including that by his life and that of his wife Sheila Hancock.

The follow on series where university Oxford University colleges and the riverscape have equal top billing reverses the roles  where Thaw was the bookish opera loving red jaguar car owning Oxford University educated detective inspector by giving the Northern actor a sergeant side kick who is Oxford educated and once would be clergyman. The interaction between the two men has developed well, especially as both are bachelors with the original wife of Lewis having been murdered in what was thought to have been a road traffic accident on a shopping trip to London.

I enjoy the interactions between the two men and the sights of the city, where I studied and lived in two spells totalling five years separated by the year at Birmingham University, more than the stories, where like the other John “Nettles” his Midsomer murders, are more about middle class village life than the endless trail of multiple killings.

The most recent episode of Lewis provided a clever plot where the script pointed to one of two men and not the culprit, a woman, and where the sights of Oxford delight the senses and reminds of a time when golden opportunities were all before me. The final lines are about two successful people who buried themselves in their work but end up alone, one dead also has meaning for Lewis and Hathaway as the latter draws attention.

The story begins with an event which only has a loose connection with everything that is to follow. The two men are at the perimeter keeping the media at a distance while a raid takes place on a cannabis growing operation of several acres worth several millions. The head of the plant manages to resist arrest but warned that he is attempting to break out Lewis and Hathaway use police vehicles to ram the getaway 4 by 4 and it is Hathaway who delivers the punch which leads to the arrest before the cameras after Lewis is hit and injured on his face. The two become local celebrities as a consequence and the subject of banter within the local force.

The significance of good publicity is soon placed against  the bad when a Professor of English who once wrote a  book about women not needing men, is found dead by one of her students after someone had posted the video  she in turn had posted on a dating site seeking a male partner. Surely she did not commit suicide because of this?

The facts suggests otherwise except to Lewis who is nor convinced and persuades his colleagues, senior and junior, as the events unfold, who did it as there are several suspects all of whom they discover were undergraduates together two decades before.

There are two principle suspects. She once dated a fellow student whose happiest moments was in a meadow adjacent to one of the colleges which he is now proposing to develop for housing in a deal with the college, who are hesitant about agreeing after a successful campaign against the project by Professor. It emerges that the reason the couple broke up was the outcome of a successful malicious campaign by another student who she had beat to become President of the union.  This individual now runs and Internet site which attacks individuals, releasing confidential information about their lives including home addresses and telephone numbers. He and his team are responsible for gaining access to the video and releasing it on the net.

One of the helpers is a bright young woman/student/former student who Hathaway takes a shine and asks her to help trying to find the link between the deceased, and the two men. The secret is that the man managing the site had put it out that the Professor was sleeping around, taking revenge on his defeat in the   ballot for President of the Union. This young girl is found brutally murdered and this confirms Lewis’s belief that the Professor was also murdered. The girl is the friend  of another young assistant with the site, who has a grudge against the Professor because she was unwilling to give him the kind of reference which would have got him a post graduate post at an Ivy League USA University after his graduation. The two young people with others have paid work recording the works of Shakespeare for the BBC.

A third suspect is a journalist who dated the Professor recently despite being married with children having responded to the Dating site advert and who had also known the other suspects and the Professor as an undergraduate. The police discover that he appears responsible for the over 20 messages left on the answering machine and subsequently wiped off with the recording cassette taken had destroyed.  He had done this after finding the body although it was his wife who had made the calls after finding out what her husband had been up to.

The culprit was none of these but the woman who runs the Dating agency and Internet site and who was a close friend of the property developer and who wanted him but knew it was not possible while the Professor lived. She had also killed the girl after she had worked out what had been happening and why. The episode remains coherent and satisfying.

In the first of the latest series, it is the botanical gardens close to Magdalene Bridge and from where there is pathway to Christchurch Meadow and the Isis and the Cherwell conjoin which is the star and which also has a complicated plot with blind alleys and red herrings.  I do not remember this episode now as clearly as I now should.

A botanist accidentally unearths the body of a recently buried professor who was fixated upon solving a Lewis Carroll riddle which has no significance except to pose the concept that some things cannot be explained. The main deviation from the central plot is in the believed existence of a secret Oxford Society for those of exceptional intellect and character. The programme reveals that the founder and sole member of the club is a Oxford Professor one of whose assistant/students died from a drug overdose, or so it appears and his death and the Professor is pursued by the boy’s mother who has turned her home into a shrine and police style Operations room in her determination to get to the truth. I cannot remember if the young man was a druggie or gambler or both with debts but he died after taking part in a private experiment to find an immediate cure for cancer

The head of the fake genius society would pursue possible members by sending them cards on which was printed statements such as “you have been noticed”, “you are under consideration”, and such like, to create a sense of being important. A student couple become obsessed with becoming members to the extent of claiming they saw something at one point relating to one of the deaths but create the likeness of Lewis and his sidekick Hathaway, such is their obsession with being different and drawing attention to themselves.

All roads lead to the home of the wealthy brother of the dead Professor and his wife where Lewis establishes that pictures are being sold allegedly to keep up with the costs of running the Hall.  When the truth unfolds it emerges that in fact £2 million pounds of paintings have been sold in order to fund the basement laboratory where the brother is trying to find an immediate cure for the cancer his terminally ill wife is suffering. The complication is that husband is having an affair with the Botanist head of the Gardens, in fact with the approval of the wife who does not want her husband to be alone when she dies. He had been using a poisonous plant from the Gardens for his experiments and on which he tested on the student volunteer. I think the brother was eliminated by the botanist because he worked out what had happened. In any event the two killers are taken into custody leaving the wife to die alone.  There is a good walk along the High from Carfax to Magdalene Bridge into the Botanical Gardens and Christchurch  Meadow and the gardens  next to the College and back to Carfax.

Vera can be considered a follow up to George Gentry, police detectives set in the North East of England.  Gentry  was in fact written by an East Anglian author who set  all his many books in the part of the country in which he grew up. Vera Stanhope is also a fictional character from a series written by Anne Cleeves and who appears to have written the books as set in the North East with a separate series set in the Shetlands which is also being made into a TV series by ITV although she grew up in the South West country.

Very is played by the double Oscar winning actress Brenda Belthyn who has never looked fully comfortable pretending to be born and bred in the North East, living in an isolated cottage on the Northumbrian coast once occupied by her father, a man she appears to have dislike primarily because he had an affair and as she discovers in the second series, with a woman who she meets and learns she bore him a daughter.

In the first of the four part two hour slot films  a respected senior social worker, Jenny Lister, is murdered by drowning while swimming in a reservoir a number of suspects emerge from one of social services past cases about an infamous case involving the death of a child drowning in a bath. The child's mother was jailed; a junior social worker was pilloried who lives with her daughter also in an isolated cottage on the coast and where Vera’s visit leads to the woman being outed in the local community. In a dramatic finale the pilloried social worker and her daughter are nearly killed by the murderer. I have failed to remember some of the key aspects of the story because of confusion with another story about a former social worker in a different Police detective series with the socially aristocratic Scotland Yard Inspector Linley.

In this case a woman social worker and wife of a clergyman had disappeared at the same time as a child had disappeared in the London where the woman then worked. The mystery is solved  after the duo investigate the murder of a kindly clergyman where his death was  initially thought to be  one of accidental poisoning after he had died  eating a mistaken fungus and  the hostess had survived after being violently sick. The chief suspect is the sixties with it young housekeeper of the clergyman although attention is also focussed on the daughter of the female hostess.  The complication is the policeman son of the local police detective who had an affair with the housekeeper before turning his attentions to the female hostess.

In this instance it emerges that the up and coming former City based clergyman had buried himself away in the countryside after his baby daughter had died in infancy and then his wife was thought to have committed suicide on a ferry trip to the continent. Her body was never found. By coincidence he had chosen or been appointed to a parish where he discovered his former wife was living under a new name with a daughter who is about the same age as their lost child. It emerges that the woman had faked her death before kidnapping the baby and bringing her up as her own. The story does not cover what happens to girl now a teenager when she discovers that she had a mother living in poverty in London with other children.

In the most recent case for Vera a shoe is found on a Tyne Bridge over a motorway link which is later connected to another shoe of a man found dead in a skip in Portsmouth.  It is later established that the man was attacked and thrown over the bridge or managed to get in the bridge rail and fell onto the roof of a passing transport en route to Portsmouth and a Continental bound Ferry and had been dumped in the skip by the driver determined not to delay his work assignment.

It is then discovered that the man in his early forties was living with his mother who did not report he was missing for three days. It transpires she had been away or a trip with a local doctor also to the continent from the North Tyneside based overnight Ferry service. It also emerges that the young man had developed an early drug habit and his mother had used her inheritance, re-mortgaging the property and establishing major debts to a drug supplier in order to maintain he son’s habit and where she also kept detailed of records of how much she spent and also in the periods when she had been successful in getting him to stop.

There is an involvement between the man and a young woman and also an elderly dying homosexual man with whom the young man had established a relationship and was intending to leave his mother to live with and who was also to inherit the man’s property. During the fist part of the story it is made to appear that the mother was responsible for the death of her son. The “who done it” is in fact the mother’s boyfriend, causing the unintentional death of the son from the best of intentions and also that of drug dealer is found dead on a beach. The woman owed the dealer money and had gone to Amsterdam as a courier for him.

I have also been watching the second series of Silk with Maxine Peake playing Defence Barrister Martha Costello and Rupert Perry Jones as Clive Reader fellow Barrister and Neil Stuke as the Chambers Senior Clerk Billy Lamb. The first series centres on he ambition of both barristers to become leading Counsels Q.C’s and the machinations of the senior clerk to get them “briefs” commission’s from solicitors to represent their clients. He deals with a solicitor who represents a well known villain and it is this relationship which concentrates the first episode of the new series. There are two defendants. The first the crime boss walks because there is a lack of evidence to continue to the hearing but the fall guy is a man of low intelligence and high dependency who did carrying out part of the instructions to destroy the five senses of the victim, going as far as blinding him but then calling an ambulance which saved the man’s life. Although as a consequence of a powerful speech, the client is found not guilty (diminished responsibility) despite a steer by the Judge to the jury to the contrary, he is then tortured and killed by crime boss.

In the second episode Martha is asked to defend an Army officer charged with being responsible for the death of a member of his team by disobeying orders not to leave their compound in Afghanistan. The man refuses to go into the witness box, to explain his actions or have a senior friend speak for him. A side story is the potential relationship between Martha and the friend who arranges the representation.

The story that emerges is a moving one in that the dead colleague was a trained sniped who had unintentionally shot a child used as a shield by the enemy at distance when they had been attacking the compound. They had attempted to save the child but the death had haunted both of them especially the man who shot the child and who became unstable and unreliable. Facing a similar situation he had agreed to the young man going out to investigate leading to his death rather carrying out the orders and putting all the team in jeopardy. He had not wanted to reveal the truth before the parents. While the officer is found guilty of disobeying orders and is penalised the chairman of the Tribunal expresses the wish that the man remains with the service and continues to display the courage he has previously shown on the field of action and in the court.

Sopranos Season 5 ends

Having watched the last four episodes of the penultimate season of the Sopranos I was pleased that I remembered the main outcomes. As the in past I commence with relationship between Tony and his wife Carmela, his son and daughter, his uncle and his cousins, Christopher and Tony B.

Tony continued to live at the home of his mother but appears to have established a regular and satisfy relationship with a young woman Valentina with the ability to cook and book keep. She catches her kimono on fire when cooking him some food after having sex. She is burned especially on one arm, losing her hair but not secondary degree and will fully recover in time without the need for skin grafts.

While she is in hospital Tony hires a stateroom with Butler in a top hotel overlooking Central Park. Although he spots Dr Melfi also staying there on a trip tot he city he keeps out of her way and everybody, During this time he has a young woman call to his room, has meals in his room and relaxes but the sense of being in a bubble away from the world in particular, without a woman and family is also highlighted. This I suspect is a frequent feeling of men alone away from their families, friends and regular work environments in hotel rooms all over the world; He makes a decision which is to change his life once more.

In Cold Cuts one of  the main subjects in anger, at first the anger of his sister Janice when she beats up the aggressive abusive mother of a child playing against  her step daughter in a football (British)game at school. She is arrested and charged and Tony insists she goes on an anger management course. It is the reaction of her husband which causes her to accept the course after the step daughter explains how embarrassed she is by what has happened and puts his foot down saying either she takes action or their relationship will end. She finds the group therapy sessions difficult at first but typical of Janice she appears to respond well after deciding it is good for her.  In the past she has thrown herself into everything and every one with disastrous consequences.

Tony beats up and sends into hospital an employee just for saying a word out of turn

Tony discusses the situation with Dr Melfi who points out his own similar tendencies suggesting they link back to their background and their mother. When Tony visits his sister and her new family for a meal he goads her about her son and his lack of contact with her. Previously he has reminded her of the temper which led to the death of her previous lover and which he had to sort out for her. He is successful in driving her into a rage thus demonstrating the shallowness of her conversion. It could also demonstrate the effectiveness of his own therapy in gaining him insight, at one level helping him to function more normally as a human being however it is also being used to help him become a more effective and powerful, murdering, terrorising and thieving maniac. The humour of the series sometimes creates the atmosphere in which the unthinking or casual viewer can like this monster of a human being.

In The Test Dream while is in the hotel Tony he calls the wife of his friend and restaurant owner Tony Bucco. He does not speak and the scene suggests he has done this before, phone and not make the next move. This can be interpreted as another indication of his insight that attempting to have a serious relationship with a woman other than his wife always ends disastrously. It is as this point he arrange the call girl, although it is also odd that he does this given the previous  availability of the Bada Bada girls and that such an organisation will also have a financial involvement in the whole range of sex industry interests without needing to use  a public offered service.

It is after having sex with girl (which is Tony’s instance always appears successful) that the rest of this episode takes the form of protracted series of dream sequences. It begins with meeting the dead Carmine Senior who dies of natural causes and who tells him how lonely he is on the other side missing being with his wife. This is what is at the root of Tony’s personal life predicament now that his mother is dead and having gone over and over with Dr Melfi his relationship with his mother and its impact on his relationship with other women, and the way he has treated his wife yet was able to sustain the relationship over two decades despite his continuous adultery.

His sense of having a family yet separated from it is then covered in a conversation between himself and his previous relationship with Gloria Trillo who plays the part of Dr Melfi and who confides that she dies too young to have children of her own. She asks if he is ready to do what he has to do.

He is in a car driven by his father and among those in the vehicle with him are several of those who we know he killed or had killed or was involved in their killing, Pussy Bonspiero, Ralph Cifaretto and Mikey Palmice.  When Tony asks where they are going he is told he is bring driven to his job, task in hand, and they pull into his home drive which open every episode and where at the beginning of each season he has gone out for the delivered newspaper, or driven over it.

Some sequences I did not understanding including one which involved Annette Benning playing a mother of someone his daughter (?) is dating at a restaurant dinner party. Throughout this episode and the previous Tony’s fascination with old films, particularly those involving  fictional   gangsters  is constantly brought to our attention as is the influence these films have on his behaviour. Small human beings, pathetic human beings, uneducated human being all trying to be what they are not and seeing slights when none are intends aspiring to be regarded as the  tough and powerful people being portrayed. It all reminds of those I encountered among the criminal classes in those six traumatic months in 1960.

In another sequence we learn perhaps what we already knew that Tony had a sexual relationship back in High school with Artie Bucco’s wife and then in a contemporary set sequence he is having passionate sex with her while Artie is close at hand coaching him. The coach aspect is also part of another dream when he goes to kill his former football (American) Molinaro who advises that he does not have to be a criminal with all the conflicts and the stress this involves. When he goes to kills the man the gun slips from him with the bullets falling out and then disintegrating when he attempts to put them back.

Tony phones his wife after waking with a start and tells her about his latest dream with the coach and she guesses correctly from previous experience that the advice given is that same as before. What would be interesting to know is if he had the dream and the advice before his session with Dr Melfi in which she has attempted to provide him with the insight that his life threatening panic attacks relate to the conflicts and stresses of his criminal activities and if he gives them up he can live a more normal life. “One cannot undo the past but one can learn to live with it in a positive and constructive way.”

In Long Term Parking Tony realises what he has been running away from. He needs Carmela and his home and calls her and they have dinner at the Nuovo Vesuvio. He promises to be faithful. Carmela who is the eternal optimist and would be devout Catholic is however realistic about the reality of this. She wants Tony to provide the funds to build a new home on some land she has acquired with a view to selling for profit. He agrees.  His live in at his mother’s house girlfriend is ready to leave hospital and Tony gores to the hospital to take her back to the house, saying that he will continue to meet all her private health bills and to provide for her, but he is not staying with her and returning to his wife. She is understandably devastated and angry at the development, especially as we know Tony had told others of his intention to settle with the woman who ticked all his boxes in and out bed.  When Tony arrives at the house with his luggage AJ his son greets him and asks where it should go indicating he has not been told his parents have got back together.

There has been little about the children during the latter part of the series season. Carmela is frustrated with AJ’s lack of application to get into a good college or about anything. Tony comments that Meadow has done well and takes after her mother, He observes that his son is taking after him. Carmela draws attention that he is her son as well. During the final episode All Due Respect A J organises a party for High School friends which is a success and makes a profit. Tony notes that his son is watching a film about a man who make a good living as an event planner and he and his wife comment that perhaps their son has find something which interests and can build a life on, especially when they find out he has been making inquiries about a college course which would for the basis for such a career.

The situation of his young cousin’s Christopher and his live in partner about to marry, Adriana, now reaches its climax. It will be recalled that she was blackmailed into spying on Christopher and his associates after being trapped through a drugs offence which would have given her a jail sentences of five years. The situation begins with the FBI viewing CCTV tapes of the rear of the road house club Christopher arranged for her to manage which features live bands. She places something in the dumpster and then changes her mind moving it into the boot of her car.

They bring her in for questioning over the finding of the stabbed body of someone who disappeared after visiting the club. Under instructions of Christopher and in order to ensure the club is a safe venue for members of the crew to meet and use her office area, drugs has to be sold out the venue although Adriana has a soft spot for the main seller.  It was odd that in the previous episode when she and Tony were on the verge of having an affair and needed drugs they needed to take a long drive which led to the accident rather than turn to this contact, albeit the situation occurred very late after the club had closed.

I digress, on the night in question, the drug dealer asked if she would make the exception and let him use the phone in her office and cell and packed up and she agreed. When going through the club he is spotted by someone with a genuine beef about the impact of the drug on young people and threatens with a knife. The man is killed and she helps in the cover up. The Feds now give her an ultimatum. She must bring Christopher to them or face a life sentence as an accessory to murder. When she tells Christopher the predicament his reaction is to beat her but after calming down he appears to agree to their going into the witness protection programme to give up Tony and his associates.

Just when she is ready and packed one of his associates arrives to say he has been involved in a suicide attempt and will drive her to him. As the journey progresses she senses what is to happen before turning off the min  road through the  forest which has been the subject of several previous episodes.  She is killed. We see Christopher later dispose of her case and leave in car in along term car park hence the title of the episode. He then goes into hiding. Later Tony talks to him in effort to satisfy that their position has not been compromised. Christopher appears OK about the killing of his woman and tells Carmela that they have broken up and she has left him. He also tells Tony of his disappointment that although he was convinced she loved him she was not prepared to take the initial jail sentence for him rather than spy on them.

Tony has become uncertain about Christopher and his crew became of him. The cause of this has been the simmering problems with the Carmine Crew and the feud between the Miami based Little Carmine with whom Tony has had a good close association and Johnny Sacks the former under boss who lives within Tony territory. Tony intervenes when he learns that a smuggled consignment of Vespas has been taken by Sacks when it should have been divided. Sacks denies the action and reminds that he still not convinced that Tony’s cousin, Tony B was not involved in the murder of Joey Peeps.

Tony decides to get his cousin out of the way by asking him to go and live with the elderly brother of his father to has lived in an upstate farm with his wife and there three bodies have been buried over the years, The farm has a new owner and the decision has been taken to move the bodies if their bones can be found. The uncle was a soldier in Uncle Junior’s crew who was allowed to be retired because of health problems.

On top of this outstanding problem and the murder of Johnny Peeps, his cousin Tony B has learned of the murder of one his former prison cell mates. We learn that the cell mate was gunned down by Phil and Billy Leotardo brothers and members of Johnny Sacks crew and where one of the brothers has just been brought into operations, In the following episode Christopher visits Tony when he is in Central Park overlooking hotel to report that Tony B has gone missing and is believed to be after the Leotardo brothers killing one and wounding the other. In part of the dream sequence of this episode, Tony is warned that he needs to have his cousin killed.

The death of the crew member results in Little Carmine deciding to withdraw from the battle with Johnny Sacks but to the dismay of Carmines associates. This leads to Tony having a formal sit-down with Sacks and the family of the dead crew member. They are not satisfied that Tony does not know the whereabouts of cousin. The suggestion is made that he should offer Christopher as the alternative and that unless he resolves the issue all out war will break out.

Tony arranges via a contact in the phone company to put a trace on the phone in the building where his cousin is camping out enjoying the services of calls girls. Tony visits and explains why he has protected his cousin over the year because of why he dropped out of the crime for which his cousin was sentenced. His cousin asks Tony to protect his two sons.

After an attack on a former driver of Tony which leaves the man badly injured in hospital and dissensions among his crew that he is sacrificing them for his cousin. Among these is Paulie who Tony visits for the first time since the problems when the man was released from prison. Tony sees the painting of the horse he had commissioned up on wall and not destroyed as he had ordered. Paulie tries to explain that he admired the way Tony looked in the painting as a commander and that the painting was valuable and of gallery standard. Tony takes in down and to a dumpster but before departing thinks further about what had been said to him about being a general.

Tony realises that the future of everyone is at stake. He visits and kills his cousin. He advises Sacks about the location of his cousin but on finding the man dead Phil Leotardo is upset at not being able to exact revenge and Sacks advises Tony that the death did not solve anything. He arranges a meet with Sacks at his home and offers to cut Leotardo into percentages of financial actions as compensation. Sacks invites  Tony in for coffee but Tony sees armed men approaching a makes a hasty retreat, getting wet and cold as he travels cross country in the  heavy snow wintry conditions. He arrives home and Carmela expresses concerns at his condition. We have seen Johnny Sachs being arrested by Fed agents.   Tony calls his lawyer to find out what has been happening and is pleasantly surprised to learn that one of Sacks men has been cooperating with the Feds of year and now been able to five up the whole crew. Tony is not mentioned in the indictment and the season ends with everything appearing to be going for him once more.