There’s a couple of older recordings hidden at the start of this tape. First, a fraction of a second of someone rather roughly frisking a woman.
Then, a BBC 2 intro to The Late Show Annual, only for a second or two.
Then over to BBC1, and this recording finally sticks. It’s the thriller Natural Lies. Not really as well remembered as Edge of Darkness, and I had remembered it as a Denis Lawson thriller, but it stars Bob Peck. But Denis Lawson is second billing, so I wasn’t completely misremembering.
It opens with a young woman running in the darkness, past some cows. So I’m now remembering it’s got an ecological theme of some kind. She finally gets to a phone box, classic 90s.
Bob Peck plays Andrew Fell, who is in advertising, and he’s showing his family the latest ad for Burger Choice. Then he gets a visit from the police.
The woman from the opening has been found dead in her bath, apparent suicide. She was an old friend of Peck’s as they’d shared a house with several others, including Peck’s wife Maggie, played by Sharon Duce.
At the funeral, Denis Lawson, as James Towne, nips in quickly to say a word. He was also one of the old friends. He’s now running a newspaper, a Murdoch-type tabloid if I’m inferring from the clues.
The group of friends spend the night after the funeral at her house. There’s lots of clues to her eco-activism
Another of the friends, Grace (Deborah Findlay) works in government, and tells Andrew that she’s seen a file about their late friend. She was investigating what could be the first case of human infection by BSE.
Andrew goes to the Eco group GreenSearch where Grace worked, to talk to her boyfriend, only to find that he’s skipped off, and that he appears to have been some kind of private detective working there undercover to dig up dirt on them. This alarms Andrew who has just sent his wife to stay at the house, and told the man she would be there. If he was the one who killed their friend, she’s in danger.
Sure enough, he turns up at the house, sounding perfectly friendly.
But he soon turns, and there’s chasing and running and falling over. He’s about to kill Maggie with a shotgun when the police turn up, at which point he turns the gun on himself. So whoever he’s with must be really scary people.
Andrew goes through the bad guy’s wallet for clues. Remember phonecards?
Remember Blockbuster Video? This is proving a real nostalgia inducer.
Good grief! This one wallet is a time capsule of the 90s. Now there’s a Scala Cinema membership card.
Maggie wants Andrew to stop trying to investigate, but he can’t. He grabs the phone during the night to call a number he found – by the looks of it, it could be a phone sex line.
At an event where an expert is talking about the dangers of BSE in the food supply, Andrew sees a woman that the fake boyfriend had been with, and tries to talk to her, but she’s being a bit cagey. Later at night, he sees that she’s sitting in a car outside his house.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 31st May 1992 – 21:05
Before the next episode there’s the end of Mastermind. It’s the final, and champion Steve Williams looks delighted by his victory.
There’s a trailer for Denmark v Sweden and for Running Scared, a movie I always get confused with Money Train.
Then, episode 2 of Natural Lies. This episode manages to take a fairly ordinary political thriller, and descends into farce. The mysterious Jo Scott from the last episode phones Andrew and tells him she has to talk to him at her flat. He goes round there, and she’s still completely cagey. She also happens to live with a man whose brother ate some cake contaminated with Anti-freeze – more food production mystery.
Jo is still being really cagey, and it’s blindingly obvious that she’s angling to sleep with Andrew. They might as well flash a big FEMME-FATALE caption when she’s on screen. She has an old record player, probably because the writer watched Sea of Love once.
She literally strips off all her clothes and begs Andrew to have sex. I’m assuming at this point that she’s actually a spy or something similar, since this behaviour makes no sense to me except as a male fantasy on the part of the writer.
Amazingly, Andrew gets out with all his clothes on. But Jo turns up at his work to embarrass him.
She also calls him in tears, telling him she’s afraid for her life. When she said “I had some coke” to explain her behaviour I wondered if she always reacted that way to sugary drinks. Yes, reader, I am that naive.
A day or so after this, Andrew arrives home, hears music playing in the living room, and discovers Jo’s dead body on his nice rug, bludgeoned to death, with her record player next to her. At this point, I am actually screaming at the TV “DON’T TOUCH THE BODY” but in a world where even Inspector Morse can’t resist, he turns the body over.
My screaming gets louder when he doesn’t immediately call the police – although I know it’s intended to be that he believes he will be held guilty for the attack. But it gets worse, as there’s a knock on the window and it’s their annoying friend Harriet (Sylvia Sims) who might be the mother in law and I missed her introduction.
So what does Andrew do? He wraps the body up in the hearth rug and drags it into the garage before answering the door. And then, he leaves Harriet in the living room while he goes back into the garage to manhandle the body into the car boot. And while he’s trying to do this, Harriet wanders in from the living room to tell him that the base interest rate has gone down. Perhaps this is the programme’s way of distracting us from what a stupid thing it is he’s doing. Even I’m shouting at her to take her stupid Daily Mail mortgage rate musings back to the living room.
He heads out to dump the body, so of course a police car drives next to him, and the policeman looks over.
After dumping the body, he takes the rug to a launderette to wash it, while staring morosely at the record he took from the record player. “Did you see anything unusual that evening?” “Well there was that bloke who washed a single rug, and stared at a vintage 45rpm single.”
He even dumps the rug at Left Luggage.
The one thing he does right during all this is to tell his wife, but this only makes it more annoying that he still doesn’t listen to her and go to the police.
Inevitably, the police turn up on his doorstep in the shape of Brian Croucher. Andrew manages not to confess everything, and thinks he’s off the hook.
Andrew’s friend Grace has traced the number that he found in boyfriend Malcolm’s wallet to a company called Lovehouse, but doesn’t know what it is. “It sounds like a record company” says Andrew. Does it?
But Croucher returns and takes him back to Jo Scott’s flat, where her flatmate positively identifies him as the man who was there. Busted!
BBC Genome: BBC One – 7th June 1992 – 21:10
Straight into Episode Three, and amazingly, he still manages to convince them they don’t have any evidence. More evidence comes up about Lovehouse, which was a shell company that owned a lot of small farms, and would have been badly hit by the BSE scare.
Andrew makes stupid mistake number 113 as he goes back to left luggage to pick up the rug. He’s stopped by two plain clothes police officers and arrested.
But it’s not the police, and they take him out into the middle of some woods, and get him to dig his own grave at gunpoint.
But just as they are about to execute him, they’re interrupted by a school party of small children on a nature ramble, giving Andrew a chance to run for it.
After waiting and not being discovered, he makes his way back to civilisation and phones Maggie. She tells him the police are there – but we know it’s the assassins, and they’re there with the children. This is almost tense.
Maggie manages to escape the clutches of the bad guys, and is reunited with Andrew. And now the plan is to go to the big Food exhibition in Brighton where they were supposed to be anyway, so there would be a lot of people around and they would be safer. I think his big plan is to make a big speech at the food conference exposing the whole conspiracy. If only he knew what the conspiracy was.
He’s even got his slide deck ready. (Note for younger readers. In the olden days, Powerpoint consisted of shining a bright light through photographs printed on transparent plastic (known as a colour slide) onto a big screen.) That orange slide box is unmistakable. I’ve got a whole box full of my dad’s old slides, with slides going back to before I was born.
Unbelievably, this really is his plan, and he really has brought slides. Needless to say, with an audience of food manufacturing executives, it’s a hard sell. Plus the police are there to arrest him.
He skips out of the lecture, and Towne takes him up to his room to lie low.
But shortly after Towne leaves, there’s someone at the door, and it’s Croucher and the police, so Andrew has to hide on the adjoining balcony.
But it’s lucky that he had to, as he goes across a couple of balconies, fails to attract his wife’s attention as she’s leaving her room, then he hears a voice – it’s Jo Scott’s voice, coming from the room his children are in. Before she was murdered, she’d found a tape in his daughter’s bedroom and recorded a message for him, explaining everything.
She was Towne’s lover, and it was he who had been running Lovehouse. Andrew finds him, takes him out to the beach, and plays him the tape, so Towne explains the whole plot. He had assigned evil Malcolm to keep tabs on their friend Beth, but he had strayed from the brief and murdered her. Towne had gone to Andrew’s house to find Jo, they’d got into an argument, he didn’t mean to kill her, blah blah blah. There’s a half-hearted fight, and Andrew is left unconscious by the sea, waking up some time later to find Towne gone.
He goes back to the hotel room, and finds Towne on tiptoes on the balcony railing trying to retrieve the copy of the tape Andrew had left there with the children’s fishing net (which, I have to admit, was set up half an hour ago in a piece of dialogue – Chekov’s fishing net). Now you and I both want to see Andrew push Towne off the edge, but he can’t even do that, even while Towne is almost literally dancing on the balcony, taunting him with his balance and non-slip footwear.
There’s another fight, which finally goes Andrew’s way, and he chokes Towne.
But, now this programme seems to have turned into a horror film, because as soon as Andrew turns his back on Towne’s inert body, a hand rises from beneath the duvet, and Towne rises from apparent death.
This time the fight doesn’t go Andrew’s way. “This is how I killed her” Towne tells Andrew, brandishing a glass ashtray.
No, it’s not a horror film, it’s Fatal Attraction, as Maggie appears at the door of the room and charges at Towne screaming, and pushes him right off the balcony. I’ll say this – the writer knows what we wanted to see, and he’s giving it to us in an unexpected way, so top marks for that.
But it’s not over yet, as Towne is hanging by his fingertips to the balcony. Then he sees the incriminating cassette just out of reach, and can’t help but reach out for it.
He can’t hold on, though, and plunges to his death. Not on a boring old pavement, though. Not for this show. No, he crashes through a glass roof, and ends up dead in a cold meat buffet. This is pure poetry.
I think I enjoyed this show despite itself. I had a lot of issues with the way most of the women were written, and the underlying conspiracy never really felt as rock solid as it should in a thriller. And Andrew really was a bit of an idiot throughout. But Bob Peck can lend gravitas and seriousness to anything, so it definitely wasn’t time wasted.
BBC Genome: BBC One – 14th June 1992 – 21:10
After this, there’s a trailer for Ring of Scorpio. Then the recording stops, and underneath there’s the end of Everyman.
There’s a trailer for Inside Story: The Illegals.
Then, the start of the first episode of a new sitcom, Knight and Daye. It stars Mason Adams as a retired radio host, living with his daughter and grandchildren, and the plot concerns him being reunited with his old radio partner (who we don’t see in the small part I have recorded here, but he’s played by Jack Warden) who he hates. It’s created by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, familiar names on many comedy shows and films.
The tape ends after a few minutes of this.
