C.A.T.S. Eyes

This was in a similar vein to series such as The Professionals, and Dempsey & Makepeace, and even had the same writer. Featuring action packed explosive episodes, full of espionage and counter intelligence, it was Girl Power long before Mel B existed. In this series the girls were able to grab a slice of the action from the boys. One little twist, is that it resurrected a character (Maggie Forbes) from a long forgotten Police series called The Gentle Touch. The three main babes played by Rosalyn Landor, Jill Gascoine, and a thin lipped Leslie Ash even had a Cowley/Spikings type boss to answer to: Dourly played by Rising Damp's Don Warrington.

Unfortunately, after the promise of the first series, it dragged on a bit too much. And the babes were replaced more times than Charlie's Angels.

A weird series on so many levels, CATS Eyes changes its format frequently and never seems to know what it wants to do.

Jill Gascoine is wasted and is capable of so much better than this. While it's a fantastic idea to bring back Maggie Forbes from the superb police series The Gentle Touch, Jill Gascoine is forced to do the best she can with some very weak and ordinary material.

Series one sees impossibly posh Pru (Rosalyn Landor) and gobby Cockernee Fred (Leslie Ash) joined by Maggie in the Eyes Agency, an undercover detective agency. Some good stuff in series one, with a tense relationship between Maggie and Fred, and Pru taking charge. Standard detective stories, and it's quite watchable. There's a spooky episode where Fred gets her drink spiked and hallucinates while trapped in the office, and there's a really good episode about people smuggling. The Kent locations look bleak, miserable and cold; there is frequently snow on the ground; the car chases look especially dangerous, with all that black ice on the roads.

It goes a bit wrong with series two. Pru, Eyes Agency and their office are never mentioned again. I like to think Pru is still doing detectiving from that little office. In comes Tessa, a character written in invisible ink. Tracy Louise Ward has very little to do in the role, and it is notable that Fred and Tessa utterly fail the Bechdel Test on every level: whenever they are alone together, they talk about boyfriends. While the series has now been retooled as an action adventure show, with everyone carrying guns and there being KGB double agents all over the place, so Fred and Tessa are now just standard dollybirds. Maggie is in charge and her awkward relationship with Fred is forgotten. Each episode ends on a not-funny laugh.

Series two is surprisingly violent. Barely five minutes goes past without the rattle of machine gun fire. Doors are regularly boobytrapped to explode. It all feels very ordinary and same-old-same-old. People are held hostage in large country houses and get terrorised by people in balaclavas. There's a really nasty episode where Maggie is locked in a cellar and the baddies produce a bag of scapels etc and threaten to carry out surgery on her. I am amazed that the recording I watched came from the Family Channel, as some of the material included is not family-friendly. It feels vicious and unpleasant. It's a bit dull and ordinary, stuffed with KGB spies and double-agents.

The high point of series two is one about white South Africans attempting to assassinate a black African leader: an episode so completely ludicrous that its final conclusion with Maggie coming to the rescue is the most laughable thing I have seen for some time.

Series three tones down the violence and has a notably shorter run of just seven episodes, as if the producers felt enough was enough. Other than that, series three is as ordinary as series two: Russian spies; Fred and Tessa talking about blokes; people being held hostage in mansions.

I think the biggest failing of the show is that it pretends to be different by having three female leads, but having all-male producers, writers and directors means we just get a standard action adventure series that thinks it needs to water itself down to become a bit girly, but actually doesn't know what it wants to do.

Jill Gascoine is totally wasted and, on the whole, it's a load of rubbish. The Gentle Touch is much better.

As there has been no official release of this programme after 30 years, and with no prospect of it happening because of some dispute, and my age, I decided to get an unofficial version. I put a phrase something like 'rare TV' or whatever it was into a search engine and was able to get a reasonable version with no problems. Obviously the quality cannot be anywhere near that of an official release but it is OK for me, but then I am not into Blue-Ray, HD, etc. So was it worth the money? Yes, for me, because I like ITV adventure series, even though I would say that the production/script writing/etc was not up to the standard of The Saint, The Avengers, etc. I also benefited from stopping fretting about whether I would ever get to see it. I don't agree with some other comments that I have seen. Rosalyn Landor was OK for me. Also, I enjoyed the second and third series just as much as the first. One qualification there, however. There is a significant change from the first series to the rest. The private eye aspect goes, and it is almost all security stories. The problem that I have with that is that they tend to be more unpleasant than private eye stories. However, a minor point.

A previous reviewer stated that CATS Eyes resurrected Maggie Forbes from The Gentle Touch. Hardly, CATS Eyes was a spin-off from The Gentle Touch, which had ended the year before. Initially intended as a new vehicle for Maggie Forbes (Jill Gascoigne), the first series worked fairly well. In the series, Maggie becomes part of a specialised detective agency, joining forces with Fred and Pru to investigate cases, offer protection and advice to various clients. Their cases were handed to them by a mysterious government official, Nigel Beaumont (Don Warrington trying to get away from his Rising Damp character).

One great episode in season 1 featured Fred in the CATS Eyes office all on her own. She had been given an hallucinogenic drug and someone was trying to break in.

Unfortunately, where the series really failed was the woeful Rosalyn Landor - a truly dreadful actress. Thankfully she was replaced for the second season. While Tracey Louise Ward was a better actress her character was not as good and the second series was much poorer.

Its an interesting curiosity, yes it is kind of a British Charlie's Angels but with better stories and certainly not a bimbo show. Most of the leads were good actresses and the 1st season stories were good. It would be nice to see it again. However, it was not a patch on the series that gave birth to it - The Gentle Touch.