{"id":288,"date":"2014-07-30T15:11:45","date_gmt":"2014-07-30T15:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/?p=288"},"modified":"2014-07-30T15:13:15","modified_gmt":"2014-07-30T15:13:15","slug":"episode-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/episode-7\/","title":{"rendered":"Episode 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tardis-round\"<\/a> <\/span>
\n<\/strong><\/h1>\n


\n <\/p>\n

I was pleased to see on an episode of QI that Stephen Fry thinks that the long-running detective programme \u2018Columbo\u2019 is possibly the best TV series ever. It is always good when Stephen Fry agrees with you. It makes you feel smart.
\nAnd Stephen Fry is right. \u2018Columbo\u2019 is brilliant, the format unique, the scripts excellent. The masterful lead actor turned in surely the finest series performance of its time, one which in both attention to detail and sustained quality has scarcely been matched since. Peter Falk was a one-eyed actor playing a two-eyed character and that, as Stephen Fry said, gives you a clue as to how good he was. <\/p>\n

Falk played the character first in a 1968 TV movie, then in another one-off movie, before \u2018Columbo\u2019 became a series in 1971. This ran for seven seasons. He returned to the role in 1989, and made at least a special or two most years until 2003. He played the character across 24 years of a 37 year period in a total of 69 films. The character became instantly famous, and pretty much anybody could do their own little Columbo impersonation. But the sheer charm of the performance and, now, its familiarity, makes it easy to miss its absolute excellence. The apparent ease disguises the skill. <\/p>\n

Remember Columbo\u2019s catch-phrase? \u201cJust one more thing\u2026\u201d The usual point of a catch-phrase is that not only the words remain the same but the manner of delivery. Think of all those catch-phrases from \u2018Dad\u2019s Army\u2019. \u201cPut that light out!\u201d \u201cThey don\u2019t like it up \u2018em!\u201d \u201cStupid boy!\u201d Much of the joke is in the sameness: Captain Mainwaring\u2019s irritation at Pike \u2013 \u201cStupid boy!\u201d – is always the same thing. In \u2018Columbo\u2019, the line is always different. The rhythm, the inflection, the pace. Even the gesture of the hand. How many infinite variations can there be on one line of four words? This is virtuosic acting.<\/p>\n

Columbo can\u2019t develop in character terms any more than Poirot can. He boils down to some mannerisms ( the catchphrase, the bafflement, the unpretentious plain-man-in-a-rich-world ) and some props (the raincoat, the cigar, the falling apart car.) But, with Falk\u2019s deftness, he never seems only these mannerisms and props. He seems alive and he\u2019s hard to pin down. There\u2019s some ambiguity as to how much we know about him. We understand that the bumbling man who infuriates the killer is not the razor-sharp real man, but we can\u2019t be certain how much the bumbler is a front. Famously, he refers frequently to his wife, who never makes an appearance. We believe in her, but we can\u2019t be quite sure that she exists. <\/p>\n

Columbo\u2019s world is a fantasy. The setting is LA, but not the real LA, not even the real moneyed LA, any more than Christie\u2019s country houses and chocolate box villages are the real England, or Steed and Peel\u2019s London the real London. Because it\u2019s not real it doesn\u2019t date. This may be why these shows, the earliest nearly fifty years old, seem so fresh. And the character himself, with his tatty raincoat and his bashed-up old car, is no more lodged in the seventies than in the forties, or the 2000s. In fact, Richard Levinson and William Link, the creators, said that one of their key inspirations was the playful, hectoring Porfiry Petrovich of the \u2018Department of the Commissioner for Investigations\u2019 from Dostoevsky\u2019s \u2018Crime and Punishment\u2019, and it is just as easy to imagine Columbo engaging in intellectual duels with Petersburgh princes as Californian millionaires. He is placeless and timeless. (And as a New Yorker in LA, he\u2019s already something of an outsider.)<\/p>\n

Falk is too good and true an actor to allow \u2018Columbo\u2019 to become a one-man show. The character needs an opponent to bring him alive, and much of the programme\u2019s quiet intensity comes from the tension between the detective and the killer. The format is a clever variation on the Agatha Christie whodunit, which it overturns. The audience knows in the first scene who the killer is. The puzzle is not whodunit but how. Rather than the enjoyable \u2018game\u2019 of Agatha Christie, the result is real (albeit stylized) character drama, as the detective closes in on the killer. The nearer Columbo gets, the more arrogant, the more supercilious, the more contemptuous, his antagonist becomes. Because all the killers are extremely wealthy, there\u2019s a satirical subtext, not laboured, on the American class system: the guy on a salary opposing a multi-millionaire. The murderer\u2019s notes range from utter detestation to the pathetic and desperate, sometimes sad and oddly touching. (One of the killers is revealed to have old age dementia.) These two-hander scenes are full of subtlety and delicacy and suggestiveness, in both the writing and the playing. Throughout the seventies and again during the nineties revival, the \u2018Columbo\u2019 murderer was the best one-off acting job going in American TV. The actors plainly reveled in it. <\/p>\n

It seems that all decent American TV is made in a state of unarmed combat between the programme makers and the suits: network execs, studio execs, accountants, advertisers. \u2018Columbo\u2019 was not only a rare artistic success, it was a commercial hit too, so you would suppose the best thing would have been to leave it alone. Nope. The suits could not stop interfering. Early on, they decided Columbo should have a young sidekick. The programme makers said no way. Peter Falk said no way. Upstairs insisted. The production team, reaching a compromise, said they would give him a dog.
\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t want a dog,\u201d said Peter Falk.
\n\t\u201cWait \u2018til you meet the dog.\u201d
\n\tThey found the ugliest dog in the word.
\n\t\u201cYes,\u201d said Peter Falk when he saw him. \u201cThat\u2019s Columbo\u2019s dog.\u201d In the series, he was called merely Dog. He made occasional scene-stealing appearances. <\/p>\n

\tMore damagingly, upstairs, noticing, as they do, the flood of advertising revenue, decided they could make even more money if they increased the running time from a ninety minute slot, about seventy minutes of material, to a two-hour slot, about ninety-five minutes of material. This is why some of the episodes from the second year onward feel a bit too long. They are. The extra running time was forced on the artistic staff. Not one of them wanted it. <\/p>\n

\tBut as faults go, this is a small one. The series maintained its integrity throughout its very long run and its star remained dedicated to it and serious about it and superb in it. \t <\/p>\n

\tIf you\u2019re unfamiliar with the series it needs no special pleading: I might recommend \u2018Any Old Port in a Storm\u2019 with Donald Pleasance as a wine merchant both comic and tragic, but, really, pick out pretty much any episode, particularly from the seventies run. <\/p>\n

There are plenty of entry points for people who want another reason to take a look. \u2018Star Trek\u2019 enthusiasts might start with the episode featuring Leonard Nimoy as a particularly loathsome killer, and William Shatner is excellent in a late episode as a tabloid talk-show radio host, of which there are many in America. Actually, I met Shatner \u2013 or at least was in a Green Room with him \u2013 (Shatner, Mike Tyson and me\u2026!) at an event shortly after watching this and wanted to tell him how good I thought he was in it, but felt it would be embarrassing. Walter Koenig crops up in one as a cop.
\nMartin Landau crops up too, playing identical twin brothers. There\u2019s even a science fiction episode, featuring Robbie the Robot, (not as the killer!), which works surprisingly well. <\/p>\n

But maybe the best start for cult TV fans is the six episodes involving Patrick McGoohan. These offer a good sampling of both the seventies series and the nineties revival. Falk and McGoohan work together wonderfully well. McGoohan regarded \u2018Columbo\u2019 as his finest work after his move to the USA. He plays four very different murderers: from the original series, in \u2018By Dawn\u2019s early Light\u2019 he\u2019s a Colonel, an austere head of a military academy, full of convictions about \u2018turning boys into men\u2019, icy and yet strangely sympathetic; In \u2018Identity Crisis\u2019 which he also directs, and which has loads of sly references to \u2018The Prisoner\u2019, he\u2019s a CIA operative, icy and by no means sympathetic, though he enjoys the cat-and-mouse game with Columbo, even when he loses; From the revival, in \u2018Agenda for Murder\u2019, he\u2019s a lawyer floating around at the edge of politics; and in \u2018Ashes to Ashes\u2019, a marvel of scenery-chewing camp, he\u2019s a horrid celebrity mortician who kills a horrid gossip columnist. McGoohan also directed two in which he does not appear: \u2018Last Salute to the Commodore\u2019, a rare instance of a change to the format, (the apparent murderer in the first scene may in fact not be,) and \u2018Murder With Too Many Notes\u2019, the penultimate episode, with Billy Connolly, of all people, great as the killer, and with a solution so obscure that you will have to watch the denouement at least twice to get it. McGoohan shared a writing credit for this. <\/p>\n

\u2018Columbo\u2019 has been repeated ad nauseum all over the world, but it was not \u2013 in the UK at least \u2013 made available on VHS, so it\u2019s only since 2012, when the final stories came out on DVD, that the entire series has been obtainable. It\u2019s possible, more than ever, to appreciate what a remarkable achievement it is. It\u2019s always clever, it\u2019s funny, it\u2019s dramatic, it\u2019s sublimely played. It\u2019s thrilling to see the countless permutations of the very tight format, always the same, endlessly different, like a blues improvisation. It\u2019s unusually durable. The stories withstand multiple viewings. Doesn\u2019t even matter if you remember whodunit! To my mind, until \u2018The Sopranos\u2019, American TV never did anything of such continuous excellence. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  I was pleased to see on an episode of QI that Stephen Fry thinks that the long-running detective programme \u2018Columbo\u2019 is possibly the best TV series ever. It is always good when Stephen Fry agrees with you. It makes you feel smart. And Stephen Fry is right. \u2018Columbo\u2019 is brilliant, the format unique, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-blue-box-blog","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewwaterhouse.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}