McCallum

Thanks to the Shazam app, I was finally able to identify the gorgeous intro & closing music to McCallum. It's a song called Country Memories by Guy Fletcher & Rod Williams. I've spent hours trying to ID this instrumental & finally I found it.

John Hannah was excellent & so are the rest of the cast. I love British shows. They are good clean shows with not a lot of vulgar language, etc. I definitely recommend watching this show. I only wish there were more seasons. Three seasons is not enough...

The series is centered on Forensic Pathologist Dr Iain McCallum (John Hannah) who is a Scot working in London. He works on a team that is suitably quirky and dysfunctional but is also a very tight knit group. He drives a motorcycle, tangles with authority and has a somewhat tumultuous relationship life with his live-in girlfriend Joanna (Suzanna Hamilton). The stories are centered on criminal cases investigated by the Forensics and Pathology team working with the police.

The strengths of the series include a solid cast and some very interesting characters, of particular note is John Hannah probably best known for playing Jonathan in The Mummy and its sequels. The series also make very good use of the London locations, focusing mostly on the more rundown and disreputable areas. The morgue/forensics laboratory is appropriately dark and dingy, far removed from the hi-tech antiseptic look of most American procedurals.

The weaknesses as I see them seem to have to do with focus or direction of the series; it seems at times to want to concentrate on the cases and at other times on the character development and unfortunately for the most part it doesn't adequately service either. For me the cases also rely far too heavily on coincidence to connect McCallum closely with them. Less of a problem are the more typical complaints seen in procedurals, McCallum is involved in a great many criminal investigations and the police with whom he works seem to be constantly one step behind our hero.

One minor quibble in that some of the incidental music does not appear to be original, some of it sounds distinctly like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The series ran for nine episodes over two seasons

I started watching McCallum via streaming so - many years after its original broadcast. These medical mysteries made in the early days of DNA analysis kept me engaged but I had problems with the show. (My husband refused to watch after one episode but I kept going.) In the first episode, the boy-coroner behaves like a teen while everyone else acts grown up but in the next, McCallum takes command of these same adults who behave like kids. Also (1) the pleasant theme song leads me to think the show is about a happy-go-lucky country veterinarian rather than a serious, touchy, horny medical examiner who vies with everyone in The Big City (2) McCallum zooms around the mean night streets on a motorcycle that doesn't seem suited to his demanding, high stakes, gloom-and-doom medical job (3) McCallum imagery is relentlessly dark and dingy - the graveyard shift explores unexplained deaths in dreary settings: dirty alleyways, shadowy exam rooms, cramped walk-ups, filthy windows, greasy drizzle falling on inky alleyways - then, after work, it's off to dark, noisy pubs to get falling-down drunk - yuk (4) the character Joanna spends too much time curled up on a sofa pouting, more like a plot device than a flesh-and-blood woman - so helpless she waits for the hard-driving McCallum to arrive on his motorcycle laden with groceries to feed her, as if she were his pet cat (5) I actually cringe to see the ill-tempered detective who, rather than speaking in normal tones must always snarl, bark and scowl, demanding impossibly fast results from everyone amid gruesome crime scenes, tenement hallways, morgues and police HQs. I can see why the show had so few episodes. A shame, really, because it does have its strong points: intricate plots, Fuzzy the scientist, the beautiful doctor Angela, McCallum's flashes of brilliance, exciting conclusions (though they do seem rushed with breathless explanations and sudden closing credits). I came to like John Hannah very much - a good actor - and plan to see his other appearances.

As with some of the best films and series, I stumbled across this quite by accident. It was late, a storm was in full force outside and I was sitting comfortably on the sofa when I flicked past a channel that was just about to show one of the episodes. I intended merely to watch a couple of minutes while waiting for the commercials to be finished on another channel before switching back to some or other sitcom. About an hour and a half later I remembered my resolve and was so happy that I hadn't done that. Needless to say I made sure I saw all the other episodes.

John Hannah has been brilliant in almost everything I have seen him in and he does not let down here either. All other cast members do a stellar job too. My personal favourite (aside from John Hannah, of course) is Gerard Murphy.

The only negative side to this series are the limited amount of episodes. Only 8 with JH himself and an additional 1 with someone else. I would love to see McCallum back on the screens, though it would have to be with JH!