Montalbano second BBC series Turning Point

I must use some credit with Amazon to buy the Wallander books, or at least some of them. First however I will read the Montalbano Books after the discovery that the BBC Four has commenced a second series after the first 9 episodes were shown between February and April this year and achieved ratings averaging 700000. It would be surprising if as with Wallander the BBC did not commission English. Language versions of this excellent series in time. Some twenty or more novels and scripts have been created since 1984, some of which are yet to be translated into the English Language. The BBC series is following the Italian showings which commenced in 1994 with two episodes followed by a similar number in 2000 and 2001. Then in 2002 four episodes were made into TV episodes with two others in 2005, 2006, and the four more in 2008. There was then a gap of three years until 2008 when three more episodes were aired bringing the total to 21. Six of these were scripts without books.

Inspector Montalbano

is much more outgoing but as clever Detective as Wallander. The episode experienced on Saturday evening has a different title from the book, the seventh written and called Round the Mark and which I have ordered and will be delivered on Wednesday along with the other first 11 written between 1994 2008. The BBC title is Turning Point. This is because the episode reflect a potential major change in the life of the Detective.

In this episode Montalbano has decided to resign because of a scandal affecting a mainland force in which it is said evidence was fabricated and suspects beaten up. He is appalled by the behaviour colleagues on the mainland tarnishes all their reputations, especially after similar problem involving the police forced centred on Napoli.

As with the first BBC series the series depends on the interaction between Montalbano and his three colleagues, his deputy Mimi Augello, the former playboy now married to Beba (Beatrice di Leo) who is expecting their first child and the next in command Guisppe Fazio who they refer to as Fazio and the desk officer and general factotum Agatino Caterella who is khack handed and a figure of fun but is also a very serious and dedicated officer with hidden talents which are allowed to emerge from time to time. It is Mimi who guesses what Montalbano has decided to resign and berates him accusing him of betraying his colleagues who are also honest and dedicated.

Montalbano goes off for a swim in a bay near to his house to reflect on what has happened and bumps into floating body which he brings ashore and then lies close to it exhausted. An elderly couple on holiday with a borrowed gun attempt to arrest Montalbano thinking he is a murderer and when having called the station Mini and Fazio arrive the man hits Montalbano on the head with the pistol knocking him down before he can be restrained. The couple then appear on local TV making disparaging remarks about a lack of law and order in Sicily because of its reputation as the home of the Mafia. Montalbano incensed ensures that action is taken on discovering that weapon is not licensed.

Usually he presses the Coroner for the results of the autopsy but this time it is the Coroner who approaches the Inspector charging him with a lack of concern assuming the body is but one of the hundreds of immigrants washed up dead. The body was dead before being into the water for a week or more and because of the current the face cannot be identified but there are indications the limbs had been tied and then cast into the sea at point to make it look as if it was under failed migrant.

The detective is then called to the harbour after a boat with illegal immigrants has been apprehended and Salvo sees a young boy of Middle Eastern appearance perhaps eight or night running off. He approaches the boy and although they speak different languages he is able to establish confidence and reunites the boy with a woman with several other children. The woman is delighted to see the child and then appears to claim her leg is broken as she falls. Later the Inspector finds there is no record of her at the hospital and the ambulance driver confirms that on arrival she said she was OK and had walked with difficulty into the hospital casualty department. This Salvo is told was likely to have been a ploy as there are no security cameras within the hospital which meant the woman would then leave with the children whereas she would have been taken from the harbour and formally interviewed by the police/immigration authorities.

He discussed this situation by phone with his mainland woman friend Livia Burlando played by Kathrina Bohm and also as a voice by Claudia Catani, presumably when the actress left the series or was unable to be filmed. It is assumed that the gaps in this 12 year lasting series is because one or more of the actors was otherwise committed.

In this instance the concerns, shared by the woman friend, are soon realised when an immigrant boy is found dead the subject of a hit and run. He finds this is the same boy who he persuaded to return to the woman he believed was the boy’s mother, A local farmer who witnessed part of what happened at a distance and partially unsighted because of a wall suggests that the boy was deliberately run down.

Montalbano arranges for a colleague to make a mock up of the face from the body in the water, reminding of similar action in the film Gorky Park. Catarella brings the computer generated face suggesting it is that of a wanted criminal. Mimi disagrees about the similarly of likeness. His position appears confirmed when the local Police commander says that the man was buried by his widow a year before.

What the Inspector is able to uncover is a horrific example of child abduction and bringing to Italy for use as spare body parts, to be sold to be paedophiles or for slave labour. The Inspector is helped by journalist introduced to him by the Coroner who is investigating the trade and by Ingrid a female friend who arrives at the station when invited to have dinner only to find the policeman has forgotten but then sees the photo of the dead man who she identified as the man previously believed dead and who taken her for sex to rooms he was using at an otherwise deserted former Tuna Factory close to the beach where the body was found.

It is here that the Inspector and the force lay in wait when getting info of the arrival of next fishing boat filled with young male migrants. The Inspector intervenes when he sees one of the boys beaten for protesting at being given an injection/taking of a blood sample. The children are held at the centre for medical examination and grading for onward selling on the mainland. Montalbano is shot while rescuing the boy killing the gang leader in the process. The episode ends with Montalbano convalescing in a mountain top country treat used by his father and where apart from Mimi who brings him there the only other person involved is a neighbour and former friend of his father who has arranged for the place to be ready for him with bedding and food. He is still considering his future.

　

　

　

Wallander (Branagh) Before the Frost

It is with the third episode Before the Frost that the extent to which the authors have created links between three selected books have is fully appreciated.

A woman disappears and is found to have been murdered. She had come across a man setting swans on fire, one of who aflame managed to fly off attracting the attention of someone who reported the incident. I remembered this incident from the original Swedish production but after this the story take a very different slant.

Kurt is visited at his isolated home in the countryside on the coast by a disturbed young woman who he knows as a friend of his daughter. She appears to want to tell him something but runs off. This leads Kurt to making contact with his daughter again. They find the friend is not at her flat and contact with her mother played by the excellent Lindsay Duncan reveals that these two have also become estranged and that girl has been away at university, but a visit there finds that she has dropped out and appears to have joined a religious cult. There are other odd deaths with the same component of someone dying as form of atonement. It emerges the missing girl’s father presumed dead returns and it here that is causing the death of individuals seeking atonement for past sins. Wallander becomes involved in a situation where the man has organised for his wife and daughter to commit suicide to atone for the fact that the with the help his wife his daughter had an abortion after being raped.

It is the girl who breaks out of the situation saving herself and her mother. The experience results in Wallander and his daughter confronting what happened between them and the daughter makes up for her father not being at the wedding letting him accompany her to the pregnancy ultra sound where he sees the picture of her child. The female assistant is also on the road to recovery and she tells Wallander he does not need to assuage his guilt by constant visiting. She has her husband and her daughter. The series therefore ends on a positive and optimistic note after the depressing gloom engendered by the first.

Wallander (Branagh) The Dogs of War

In the Dogs of War Branagh moved towards finding salvation for his trouble soul. This time two murdered men with their faces disfigured by acid are washed ashore in a dingy. In the introduction we had seen a fishing boat approach the dingy and then cast it adrift on the sight of the bodies. The investigation leads to the arrival of a Detective from Riga in Latvia who appears to be keeping info from Wallander. He stays at the home of Kurt for a hard drinking session at which they share something of how the job they do affects their relationships and their ability to communicate. Wallander presents the detective with a book about Sweden and the man leaves before Kurt awakes the next day.

Following the stealing of the dingy that had contained the bodies the man had revealed he had been investigating a drug ring but also suggesting he was under threat and the involvement of his superiors, indicating high level corruption.

When he learns that the detective has been murdered he travels to Riga and is met by two senior offices from the local station who take him to the funeral and introduce Kurt to the widow. They appear to suspect the widow of being involved with the death of her husband because of a relationship with a journalist investigating the drug gang and the issue of corruption. The journalist is framed for the murder and is then found hanged in his cell. Kurt who had developed a relationship with the widow returns home having been told the case is now closed.

At home he discovers the camera of the detective and this contains a photo copy of the file the detective kept on his investigation. Returning to Riga he and the widow join forces and they are soon under attack from the gang and their police contact. He is forced to hand over the evidence to obtain the release of the captured widow. With her help in then breaks into the police station and locates where the original file was kept hidden.

The issue is which of the two senior police officers is the guilty man? Only at the last minute does Kurt realises he has suspected the wrong man but fortunately the is on hand and the guilty are apprehended. Kurt returns home, the relationship with the widow having developed but neither prepared to invest in something more substantial. The relationship has possessed healing aspects for both of them

Wallander Branagh) An Evenet in Autumn

Kenneth Branagh

has achieved something which I thought impossible. He has matched the brilliant performances of the Swedish production of the Wallander Police Detective Books written by Henning Mankel with a three of four bi annual series. The fourth will be the last comprising the White Lioness and the two part adaptation of the final book Wallancer book, a Troubled Man.

The first of the third series, “An event in autumn” Wallander is setting up home with his new girl friend, after the death of his father. He has become estranged from his daughter following her marriage to which he was not invited. This marks a change from the original TV series in which the daughter comes to work as a police woman at his station.

The story begins with the audience understanding that an inebriated lorry driver on the ferry between Sweden and Poland spots what he believes is a person falling from the side of the ship in the water past the window at which he is sitting in a bar lounge. The vessel is halted and a passenger and crew count taken and no one are found to be missing.

There are then two events which become connected to this incident. First the part remains, including a hand, of a female are found washed ashore suggesting a body caught up in a ship’s propeller. Meanwhile Kurt’s (Wallander’s) dog discovers a body buried under brambles in the garden of his idyllic new home and situation. This depresses him more than his partner. The length of time the body has lain leads to an investigation of previous owners. It also leads to contact with the neighbouring farmer and when his partner is attacked while investigation movement outside, Kurt chases the individual to the premises of the father. How are these events connected?

The mystery is solved when Kurt speaks to a young woman waiting at the quayside and finds that her friend has not appeared following a ferry trip to Poland which had been taken to seek financial assistance for the child the friend was carrying. It subsequently emerges that the father of the child is the bar man from the ferry who is also the son of the neighbouring farmer. He altered the ship’s passenger list via a computer terminal in the bar, It also emerges that the son had previously killed the girl whose body is found during close to the bramble bush. Kurt had discovered that in the advertising brochure for the property there were no bramble bushes but on visiting the farm he noted some bramble bushes and spaces revealing that some of the bushes had been transplanted.

It emerges that the son had befriended a girl staying at Wallander’s new home in the past. He had killed the girl and the knowledge of what happened had led his mother to commit suicide. The father had reburied the body on learning that the new owner was the famous police inspector. Once the truth emerges the father also commits suicide. However before this Montalbano turns his attention of a scrap yard owner who lived at the home for a time and to the mystery surrounding there whereabouts of his daughter who is found to be living in the USA and who contacts Wallander to prove she is alive. This part of the investigation reveals that the man sexual abused his daughter forcing her to also act as a prostitute along with the girl discovered buried and the two Polish girls’ one of whom was murdered. The other girl is also ordered by the killer of the other two.

This depressing episode gets worse when Kurt pressurises his female assistant to break into the Scrap yard against her better judgement. She is forced to shoot the two guard dogs that attack them and the owner strikes the assistant with a spade placing her in a coma from which she does not immediately recover. His partner leaves him not so much because of the history of the property but Kurt finds it increasingly difficult to communicate and share his feelings, in part requirements of his work but also tied in with the relationship with his father and daughter, the separation from his wife and feeling correctly responsible for what happened to his female

Blackout

During July and August 2012 there has been some great dramatic series fiction on Television with Blackout a three part BBC production together with three more episodes of Wallander with Kenneth Branagh. I have particularly enjoyed The Newsroom the new Arron Sorkin creation which covers contemporary events with all the impression of authenticity that covered West Wing and with echoes of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister which continues to be rerun on channels. The second series of the Bogies returns with more attention to the machinations of the Pope attempting to sustain his position and further the interests of his family than the explicit sexuality which in my judgement failed to add to the excellent performance of Jeremy Irons, while I am still trying to catch up with the latter episodes of the final season of the Sopranos, discovering in the process a rerun of Inspector Montalbano and being able to experience the first of 12 episodes which I missed. The first episode of a new series of George Gently set in Northumbria commenced on Sunday while to day there is a new series of New Tricks. I also accidentally came across a brilliant live short play performance of the meeting of spy Guy Burgess when the worked for the BBC as Parliamentary editor and Winston Churchill when he remained an isolated figure during the period when Chamberlain attempted to appease Hitler and his embryonic Nazi Empire.

In this first piece I try and remember Blackout which starred the former Dr Who Christopher Eccleston and one of my favourite female actresses, the always adorable, she will hate me for her describing her in this way, Dervia Kirwan.

The subject is a corrupt London politician who commits manslaughter on his way to become a popular Mayor of London supported by a large international corporation bidding to control the city though taking over the public sector services.

Eccleston plays Daniel Demoys the chairman of a contract allocating committee of what I presume is an individual local authority rather than the Greater London Council. It is never made clear which came first, his alcoholism or his corruption, paid by the man he goes on to kill for providing contract information and ensuring the man gains lucrative contracts for pubic sector services. Married to Dervia and with three children he consoles himself with the separated wife of a Metropolitan police Detective using a seedy Soho drinking club cum brothel.

Following a night of debauchery he encounters and kills the corrupt service provider and this triggers a great sense of guilt which leads him to intervening in an attempted assassination in which he is shot and become an overnight popular hero. Because of blackouts we the audience and Demoys himself is not sure his responsibility which he attempts to establish by retracting his movements on the fatal night.

Through a close political adviser Jerry Durrans played by Ewan Bremner had become an expert in managing elections and pushes Daniel into using his popularity to sweep into the office of Mayor, unaware that this former idealist has become one of several placed individuals by a sinister fascist corporation set on controlling greater London by winning contracts for all the essential and major public services. He initially successfully blackmails Demoys into cooperating and abandons his plans to create a utopian political situation in which the people own the services in such a way that they cannot be privatised. The position of the Mayor is undermined by the daughter of the man he killed seeking to know what her father was doing and why he was killed and by the Police Detective husband of his mistress who has suspicions about their infidelity and the involvement of Demoys in the death, helped on by a corrupt senior police officer also in the pay of the corporation.

Eventually Eccleston cleans himself up especially when the lives of his wife and children are threatened and realises that he will only be free of his guilt by confessing to his responsibility for the death and corrupt involvements leading to a long period of imprisonment. Through this atonement he rescues his marriage and relationship with his children as well as taking steps to stop the privatisation and set a new regime of good government for the capital. There is also the prospect of a new relationship between the Police detective and his former wife.

Conspiracies, politics, the police, the media and sex and corruptions has always interested me for reasons which should be implicit in my writings over the past five years and the level of acting in this work and broad subject matter outweighed the many questionable moments. However the series became very topical with the failure of the private corporation to provide the level of contracted security at the Olympic Games leading to the deployment of soldiers and arousing pubic concern and insecurity before the games commenced. This led one Tory Minister to admit he had reviewed his previous prejudices about the ability of the private sector to always perform better than the public. The success of the Olympic Games and the role played by London Mayor Boris Johnson has also highlighted the importance the London Mayor in British politics and in this in instance the future of the Tory Party in the UK and that of David Cameron in particular albeit with Scum Murdoch pulling the strings.

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.