PUBLIC EYE (1965-75)

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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 relocated to Brighton, under the watchful eye of his parole officer. The six black-and-white episodes, set amongst the town’s peeling stucco and windswept seafront, and rich in B-movie realism, explore Marker the man. They reveal a quietly resilient and very English cult hero: a leaner Morse in Columbo’s raincoat. Brilliantly scripted by Roger Marshall and Anthony Marriott for ABC/Thames, Public Eye was an antidote to the square-jawed American sleuths and paved the way for grittier Brit-cop shows of the Seventies.

The Times, 15-7-71





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