Gently in the Blood
This must be the longest year in John
Bacchus’s career as we’re still in 1964 and it starts in a graveyard in South
Shields where the duo and their colleagues are as a result of a tip-off they received about trade
in stolen British passports. They lie in wait to witness the transaction, but only the person selling them shows up and in the inept-looking chase their suspect gets away. The investigation
takes them to the passport office where Bacchus develops a suspicion about one of the
employees, Maggie, a single mother with a bi-racial child. Someone else must
have too because the very next day, she is found dead on a beach, strangled
after having been raped, and a survey of the surrounding area results in the location
of a baby-basket where the baby has been exposed to the elements all night and is seriously hypothermic.
As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear
that the word ‘blood’ in the episode title refers to race. The dead girl’s
parents had disowned her the day they found out they had a coloured grandchild.
Her boss seems to have had an unhealthy fixation on Maggie. She also seems to
have had a boyfriend, Jimmy Cochran (who is a white, small-time criminal),
but the police also receive information about a middle-aged Arab man she may
have been involved with. Jimmy was the one supplying passports, the audience learns it was to a young man called Hamid,
head of a gang of young Arab men and there is definite racial tension between
the two of them. Even though they have known each other all their lives, they are little more than business acquaintances - if they didn’t
have to ‘deal’ with each other, they wouldn’t. They keep to their cultural cliques - Hamid has his gang, Jimmy has his - but how far do you go to protect those you consider your ethnic 'family' in relation (or opposition) to those you consider 'outsiders'? The exception is an Arab looking man who earns a living sharpening knives for the women of
Shields, who steps in and enables Jimmy to escape when there is a Sharks vs Jets kind of fracas on a beach.
It’s not just Jimmy, when Gently visits the club the group of Arab men
like to frequent for a game of pool (they might actually own it), they try to
get him to leave. The police have to navigate the waters of the investigation
carefully, and for some that means reining in their own prejudices. At the end
Gently asks, “why do we find this so hard”? Why indeed. That is one of the salient questions at the root of race relations even today, but now, like then, there are no easy answers.
But as is this second season has been wont
to do, the real end comes with the murderer getting ‘the drop’. There is a definite sense of "Crime and Punishment" in this series - Gently and Bacchus get their man and then while the rest of the episode begins to wrap up, it doesn't actually wrap until the murderer himself gets final justice, which is interesting because it begs the question "Why?". This show only takes place in the mid-'60s, it was shot in 2007 - the current 'tradition', as it were, when it comes to crime drama mimics reality: sometimes the criminals get away. So far in this particular show, this has not been the case. Why is there this need to present this show being tied up in a neat bow: justice for the victim by ensuring 'justice is done' to the person responsible, personal and/or professional growth is seen in Bacchus, and Gently as the mentor, asking the right questions, and generally functioning as both the rudder and keel of the investigation. There is still one episode left in Series 2, so we'll see if it veers away from the new 'norm' established thus far.
One very familiar name from the ‘guest
list’: Andrew-Lee Potts (Primeval, Band
of Brothers, Dalziel & Pascoe, Alice) is Jimmy Cochran, the dead woman’s
long-time boyfriend, who remains in her life.
Context:
1964 – racists apparently had a different
name then: ‘racialists’.
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