Our
own efforts were very different. Randall
and Hopkirk (Deceased) was played for laughs, Thames TV’s Frank Marker in Public Eye was much more downbeat,
and more recently Cormoran Strike, with his prosthetic leg, currently conducts
his business from a run-down office in seedy Soho. However, my all-time favourite investigator
has to be Eddie Shoestring, the role which first introduced me to Trevor Eve.
Shoestring was
like no other crime series I’d ever seen. For starters, it was firmly set In
and around Bristol, just up the M5 from where I was at the time an
undergraduate in Exeter. The primary twist was his character playing not a
private eye but the Private Ear, working for a local radio station
after suffering a nervous breakdown. Eve’s investigator was no natural action
man either. The closest we got to a violent altercation was probably this
rough-and-tumble in the Severn Estuary mud! My
contemporary diary noted some leaps of faith regarding the resolution of the
mysteries but the characters, locations and storylines grabbed me immediately.
Sadly
there were only two series spanning a mere fifteen months before Eve quit in
order to focus on theatre for a while. The BBC producers filled the gap
sharpish with Bergerac but it was a
while before the actor featured in anything I watched. Since then he has
specialised in roles as haughty characters of dubious morals. With that hooked
nose and towering forehead three storeys high, it’s hardly surprising
In
1990 I saw him star in A Sense of Guilt,
one of those Andrew Newman bonkbusters so popular in the Eighties. It stirred
up the Daily Mail mob as Eve’s Felix Cramer was a middle-aged writer shagging a
friend’s teenage daughter who also sparked the green biro brigade into action
by having the temerity to appear topless. Trevor Eve was at it again in ‘94, involved in
sexual shenanigans with Charlotte Rampling in Murder In Mind then, a year later, he was an MP who has an affair
in The Politician’s Wife. A pattern
was emerging…. I didn’t witness his performance in the remake of Andrea
Newman’s infamous A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, nor in various TV movies but in
2000 he snared the lead as a senior cop who – shock horror! – was not putting it about with young women.
If
I remember correctly, Waking The Dead
began as one of several crime pilot dramas and was to run for nine series. Eve’s
Peter Boyd was originally a DCI who led a team investigating unsolved cold case
murders, each wrapped up in two episodes screened on consecutive nights. With
an excellent supporting cast featuring the likes of Sue Johnston, Holly Aird
and Tara Fitzgerald, Boyd was a great character. A decisive man of action, he
also on occasion demonstrated a tender side in a team which invariably worked
like a well-oiled machine. The snappy dialogue also flowed freely but it was
Boyd who held this classy series together.
Trevor
Eve was embroiled in another cold case in 2015 but this time as a suspect.
Playing a shady politician (surprise, surprise), he was in a superb cast for
series one of ITV’s Unforgotten, to
which I shall undoubtedly return in a later chapter or two. That same year he
was a wealthy businessman fronting a lucrative drugs enterprise in BBC’s so-so
eight-parter The Interceptor.
Alongside the star OT Fagbenie he was the best thing in it, portraying the evil
Roach with a credible level of menace.
He
may be 68, precisely ten years older than me – to the day – but I’m sure Trevor
will remain in demand. The floppy-haired, tan-jacketed investigation days may
be well behind him but there will always be roles for tall, slightly sinister
Establishment figures of a certain age. Nobody plays them like he does.
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