Something to watch tonight: Friday 23 May

Edge of Darkness (Campbell, 1985)

American act­or Joe Don Baker passed away this month and the online memori­als and obit­u­ar­ies have been largely focused on his break­through role as Buford Pusser in the vigil­ante film series Walking Tall or play­ing two dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters in three Bond films, but I’ll always think of him as the rogue and rogue-ish CIA agent Darius Jedburgh in the 1985 BBC thrill­er series Edge of Darkness.

This show was hugely influ­en­tial on me at the time. The top­ics of nuc­le­ar con­spir­acy and eco-terrorism were get­ting quite a bit of trac­tion in Thatcher’s Britain and those omin­ous shots of the trains rolling past sub­urb­an houses car­ry­ing huge can­is­ters of nuc­le­ar waste weren’t fig­ments of writer Troy Kennedy Martin’s ima­gin­a­tion. And there wasn’t much trust around either – not for the gov­ern­ment, the police, industry or the mil­it­ary – and the show tapped right into that.

Shakespearian act­or Bob Peck – did any­one else have the amaz­ing Ralph Steadman poster for the RSC pro­duc­tion of Macbeth on their wall? – plays Yorkshire police detect­ive Ronald Craven, invest­ig­at­ing pos­sible cor­rup­tion in the Miners’ Union. When his daugh­ter Emma (Joanne Whalley) is shot dead in front of him, everyone’s first thought is that he must have been the tar­get. Revenge for a pri­or con­vic­tion, some­thing like that.

But as his unof­fi­cial invest­ig­a­tions reveal that, far from being a simple left-wing uni­ver­sity stu­dent, Emma had been protest­ing against Britain’s nuc­le­ar secrecy and dis­covered the cover-up of an acci­dent at a low level nuc­le­ar waste facil­ity called Northmoor.

This had put her on the radar of both MI5 and Jedburgh’s CIA and, as Craven digs deep­er, the con­spir­acy reaches ever higher.

One of the things I liked about Baker’s per­form­ance in Edge of Darkness was that it was so not-BBC. Like the char­ac­ter him­self, he looked like he’d arrived from anoth­er plan­et, not anoth­er coun­try. But no one is doing old fash­ioned BBC act­ing, thanks to Martin’s script which isn’t afraid to go in some weird dir­ec­tions. Peck has some extraordin­ary moments as a grief-stricken fath­er, ima­gin­ing that he’s talk­ing to Emma as a child (Imogen Staley).

Edge of Darkness was dir­ec­ted by New Zealander Martin Campbell who would go on to dir­ect the less suc­cess­ful film remake of Edge of Darkness, star­ring Mel Gibson. When that came out in 2010, I wrote:

Relocated to Massachusetts, and with fad­ing super­star Mel Gibson in the role made fam­ous by tacit­urn Bob Peck, this Edge of Darkness should be named some­thing else so that it can’t be com­pared to the ori­gin­al. Then we can hate it for what it is rather than what it isn’t.

This was also the show that intro­duced me to the music of Willie Nelson. Craven lies on Emma’s bed in epis­ode one, hold­ing her teddy bear to his chest, listen­ing to Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” from Red Headed Stranger:

And he cried like a baby
And he screamed like a pan­ther
In the middle of the night
And he saddled his pony
And he went for a ride

It was a time of the preach­er
In the year of O‑one
Now the les­son is over
And the killin’s begun

Where to watch Edge of Darkness

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Not avail­able online but Aro Street Video has the DVD. I own the BBC Blu-ray that came out a few years ago but was nev­er retailed here to New Zealand. I am will­ing to lend it to any paid sub­scriber who asks, though.

Australia: Digital pur­chase1

Canada: Not cur­rently avail­able online

Ireland: Digital purchase

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Not cur­rently avail­able online

UK: Digital purchase