Gangsters

Had high hopes after Series 1 and Play for Today, but Series 2 was a joke. A let down.

Perhaps it's just a bit too bonkers for me, but following on from the first series, which was VERY good, to find season 2 was ridiculous was a really shame.

When this was first shown I was moved to write a letter of congratulation to the BBC Pebble Mill Studios at Birmingham, something I have never done before or since, and received a nice reply from the Producer, David Rose. Hard-hitting drama in a Black Country setting that is still traceable in some places and totally obliterated in others. Series Two did go off on a rather esoteric tangent, but if you like The Sweeney and Life On Mars etc. you will ADORE at least the original Play For Today and Series One. I had long ago given up on this production being released on Videotape and knew that, against the ever rising tide of Political Correctness, it could never be re-screened. When I discovered it was available as a DVD boxed set I nearly fainted and ordered it the same day. If this title is deleted due to lack of sales, a real 70's TV gem will have been lost. Probably forever. Buy it.

I was 15 when this series first ran and it was very much a leader in its genre. Today we're used to the Brit gangster movies like Lock Stock, and Snatch, but back in 1975 I'd never seen anything like Gangsters before.

For one thing the characters are all "real people". In shows like The Saint, and the Avengers, the leading roles were very much 2-dimensional. You could never have an ordinary person as "perfect" as Simon Templar or John Steed. But Maurice Colburn's character was flawed. He didn't always win, and his girlfriend is a reformed junkie who ends up with some nasty things happening to her. Also the violence in the show, although restrained by today's standards, was a heck of a lot grittier than the kind of clinical efforts of earlier shows.

This was also one of the first shows I remember in which drugs played a key part.

It's been 30 years since I saw the series - for some reason it hasn't been repeated on UK TV as far as I remember.

The pilot and series one are one of my favourite televisual memories from my youth in the 1970s.

When I got the dvd I was pleased to find series 2 which I had not seen. Not so hot... A bit like the last two Harry Palmer films made in the 90s. Different atmosphere, and I could have done without WC Fields.

Well worth the effort and very evocative of the 70s and not at all politically correct. My only shock was seeing it in colour.. When I first saw it we only had lack and white TV..

I recently moved to Birmingham, where this series was filmed so watching it over the course of several evenings was great fun - specially when I spotted a location at the end of my street. Years ahead of its time, the series span off a Play for Today. The Play for Today, which opens the DVD set, is a gritty drama concerning the Birmingham underworld and the attempts by ex con John Kline to cash in his business interests and leave the 'second city' for new ventures in London. The series spins out the attempts by criminal interests to dispose of Kline, once and for all. Various deals and betrayals take place, with alliances shifting all the time. One aspect may be controversial to the politically correct. There's several scenes set in a nightclub, with comedians telling racist jokes. This is not gratuitous, in the way that, say, a Tarantino film using the N word is. It challenges the viewer to consider their response - do you laugh? If so, at what? The joke itself, or the racist ideologies underlining it? The situation is complicated by one of the comedians, and several members of the audience, being black or Asian. The series highlights how the Black and Asian gangster bosses have taken on the subject positions, the positions of power, of their white counterparts. The programme plays with racial stereotyping in a reflexive way, a way which brings about an awareness in the audience. This is done through excessive acting, costume and also the title sequence of the second series, which references martial arts and Bond films. The series becomes increasingly abstract and self referential and put me in mind of The Prisoner at its conclusion. The writer, Philip Martin, props up in several cameos including the bizarre 'white devil.' I d be interested to read other peoples comments on this series which I can highly recommend. Forget Life On Mars, this is the real thing.