Lejink

I've been a fan of Gerry Rafferty for a long time, even though I haven't really ventured beyond the three fine albums he recorded in the early 70s with Joe Egan under the name Stealers Wheel and then his two very successful initial solo albums from the late 70s, "City to City" and "Night Owl".

This one-hour long BBC Scotland documentary made in the wake of his early death at 63 years of age in 2011, attempts to cover the length and breadth of his life and work. I think it's largely successful in doing so, encapsulating a difficult, reclusive man never at ease with the fame that pop stardom brings and who too often took solace in the demon drink that eventually killed him.

Born and brought up in the Scottish town of Paisley, where I personally worked for over 25 years, Rafferty's sometimes morose melancholy seems born of those working-class roots. He made his early way through the local folk clubs hooking up eventually with Billy Connolly as a trio-become-duo known as the Humblebums, before, as Connolly freely admits, Gerry's singing and songwriting talent quickly outstripped his partner and took him into the pop mainstream where he partnered with fellow Buddie Joe Egan in Stealers Wheel. Most famous for their classic song "Stuck in the Middle with You", even then Rafferty struggled with success and left the band briefly even while the song was becoming a massive hit.

In the end he became a solo artist with massive initial success and later revealed that his best-known song Baker Street, set him up financially for life. His later years were difficult, as he struggled with alcoholism and depression, his marriage breaking up in the process as we hear many of his collaborators unflinchingly revealing just how difficult he could be to work with at the time. These include such Scottish luminaries as the artist John Byrne, singers Barbara Dickson Rab Noakes, Joe Egan and of course Connolly who speaks particularly movingly of his old friend as well as musicians Tom Robinson, crime-writer Val McDermid and family members such as his daughter and brother.

Interspersed with much of his music and a rare interview with the man himself in 2001, the picture emerges of a man who appeared to only be at peace when creating his music, but who struggled with the accoutrements of celebrity and it would appear, to some extent at least, with personal relationships. No one in the documentary actually surmises just why he fell into alcoholism, although it's fair to say that for many a fellow Scot of the time and indeed since, it just seems to happen almost naturally.

The best of Rafferty's songs like "Stuck in the Middle", "Baker Street" and "Right down the Line", will continue to be listened to down the years but I would encourage casual listeners lured in by these gems to go beyond - and maybe I should include myself amongst them.

Hopefully this respectful and insightful documentary will do just that.

My stepson is a big Marx Brothers fan and it was he who directed me to this riotous pre-Code comedy of theirs. As the title card says, it features the full complement of four brothers, Zeppo included, although to be fair it does look as if he's been shoe-horned into the narrative - I say narrative but of course what we have here is really just a set of skits, some verbal, some physical and some distinctly surreal.

I'm not sure I was able to keep up with everything presented here, but it was fun trying. Inevitably, for the times, especially in the years preceding the introduction of the Hays Code, there's a degree of sexism in the way women are depicted, with Harpo and Chico's young female classmates manhandled by them or the treatment of Thelma Todd as the Sports Widow, anticipating Susan Sarandon's character in "Bull Durham" by almost seventy years. By the same token, there's a mad scene of Harpo shovelling a massive pile of books into a fire which surely inspired Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" years later.

Okay, I was joking there, but the wisecracks come thick and fast even if a lot of them are so old they're almost prehistoric, as Groucho cheerfullly admits to the audience at one point, breaking the fourth wall in the process. It all ends up with some madcap mayhem on an American College Football game and a three way reunion with Todd at the altar as it almost collapses from exhaustion at the last gasp.

My favourite bits were Harpo's beautiful harp-playing, the "seal" gag and Groucho's "I'm Against It" song, but the undiscerning viewer may find others of their own from different parts of the film. And remember, swordfish is the word!

The first episode of this long-running Quinn Martin television production showcases many of the reasons why it was so successful for so long. Well-written, tautly directed and with a strong cast delivering solid performances, it was fraught with tension from first to last.

It employs the familiar QM template of breaking down the narrative to four roughly equal twelve-minute acts with a short concluding epilogue, normally to set up the next episode. Interestingly and surprisingly for this introduction and unlike the much later feature film which starred Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, there's no scene-setting opening scene. We don't see the killing of Kimble's wife, far less get a glimpse of the one-armed man he says (and I believe him!) he bumped into at the sequence. It simply starts with the train crash which separates him from his Inspector Javert-like nemesis, Barry Morse's Lt. Gerard.

Escaping to Tuscon, with a change of name and hair colour, Kimble tries to blend into the background until he can get a lead on the real killer but on getting a job as a lowly bartender, he soon gets drawn into a domestic situation involving Vera Miles' single parent pub-pianist, on the run from her jealous and violent ex-husband, played with some devilment by Brian Keith.

It ends as all future episodes must end, with Kimble losing the girl and leaving town, but not before righting wrongs and putting certain situations right and in this particular even signposting intra-marital coercive male behaviour when it was probably less highlighted than it is now.

Jansen is immediately convincing in his character and is well supported by Miles, late of major Hollywood parts , while the direction amply and skilfully draws out the story thanks to an excellent script and some atmospheric noir-esque camera set-ups.

I very much doubt I'll get to watch in my lifetime all the succeeding 119 intervening programmes until the final showdown, as I think it would take Kimble-like devotion on my part to do so, but it was nevertheless cool to check in on the very first episode of such an iconic series.