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.