Hiding Under Covers

Back in the early Seventies I was a willing participant in a ubiquitous teenage ritual. Every Sunday afternoon, like countless other pop fans, I’d retreat into my bedroom with the family’s portable transistor (a sturdy Roberts) to record the Top 20. I’d set up my equipment and twiddle the radio dial down from Radio 4 to find Pick of the Pops, on Wonderful Radio 1. My nail-bitten fingers hovered over the record button and I waited while the swinging cymbal theme played out, ready to pounce. The skill was to hit pause at the right moment, and thus excise any talking between the records. Most things got taped. I drew the line at what I considered to be “not proper music” (country & western, juvenile singers who I’d first seen on TV talent shows and anything involving bagpipes). But otherwise – armed with that week’s charts, hastily scribbled down at school during lunchtime the previous Tuesday – all new entries were duly captured on compact, red and grey Philips C60s.

Largely forgotten these days, despite a 10-year run on British television, Public Eye was a near-perfect exercise in understatement. The series starred Alfred Burke as a maverick inquiry agent, Frank Marker, a man whose jaded, lonesome existence is stylishly profiled in the monochrome opening titles, accompanied by a theme tune more muted than a funeral tie. “Marker wasn’t exciting, he wasn’t rich,” said Burke, of his creation. “He could be defined in negatives.” His cases are just as pedestrian: blackmail, corruption, infidelity, petty crime. “He gets people in the kind of trouble you can’t go to the police about, even if you’re innocent,” ran one 1965 trailer. In the early series, Marker is as a bit player in his own drama. “The interesting people were the other characters,” said Burke.  At the end of season three, now sadly lost, he is wrongly jailed for fencing stolen goods. Marker comes into his own in the 1969 series, available on DVD. He is out of prison and reloca