I watched ‘Grace’ last night. New series. Mainly because it was shot where I live. I recognise all the scene settings which makes it jar a bit when they walk down a street and turn a corner into a road on the other side of the city from the first one. Clever that. Nearly as clever as turning a time corner in ‘Life on Mars’ where John Sim made his name. He’s very short like most actors, but I’ll forgive him some of the hand-wringing as he was a sounding board for the great Gene Hunt, a moral philosopher of my school. “You make that sound like a BAD thing!!”
I ran into Sim and the whole crew filming up at the top of the Devil’s Dyke (worth looking up), the local Brighton mountain. That will probably be in a later episode. You can sit outside the pub up there with a pint, watching the stupefyingly slow process of filming.
I read one of Peter James’ books on which this is based whilst lying in bed one day when the murderer was described as walking past the very window I was looking out of whilst reading. Bit spooky.
Anyway I know Peter slightly. He’s made an absolute fortune with the Grace books. He went to school with my other half, and was a great mate of her brother. I’m going to lunch with his ex-missus next week, but I’m not sure I can stick with this series. It’s achingly politically correct. The books are a bit but they do have some satisfyingly bad baddies in them as relief. The TV is worse, of course. And worst of the worse is Sim’s Missus-to-be. Small also, off-white, foreign, and perpetually ‘concerned’. She wears a frown like a frock. Changing it every day for another colour frown. You can imagine her helping in a Calais camp and apologising to all and very sundry that we are treating them all so terribly badly and please do come over and live amongst us! “No, I’m sorry, but not in the bit of Hove I’ve just moved to. Unless it’s on a Deliveroo bike of course. I’ve tipped you online”. No you haven’t you lying cow. God knows how she got pregnant. You wouldn’t think she would unwind enough. Satisfyingly, somebody left a burning pram outside her front door last night. I’m beginning to understand why Grace’s first (and still) wife Sandy legged it mysteriously. Spoiler alert – she wanted to.
I won’t spoil it (much) further, but those of you that know the joke about the ten-year silent child that turns out to be German – well it’s like that. There’s the obligatory efficient black sidekick (TBH – he is in the books too), the overweight slob white detective (not on TV so much), but a reliably butch lesbian who takes no shit from the rapists. And they’re the ones she works with never, mind the crooks. There’s some nasty sneery white males, of course, all living in Hove next door to David Gilmour. Actually I think he’s moved now. Didn’t like the neighbours either, I guess. There was also a modernistic house they used across the road from me, next door to Nick Cave – before he moved after his son decided to try flying off the top of the cliff I’m looking at as I write this. Nasty. Don’t try LSD at home, children.
They do a nice line in ‘Knockerboys’ in the prog too. As my other half is a local and was in the same antiques business (very loosely speaking) as them, I can absolutely vouch for the fact that they were actually much nastier than in Grace. Nobody would believe the real article these days. A dying breed. They were the type that would be smuggling people in rubber boats across the channel if the EU hadn’t given the licence to do that to our continental ‘friends’. Except the boat people would arrive naked and stripped of all possessions. Proper crims.
A mate of mine, also proper Brighton, was a copper here for all of his working life. He retired an Inspector but cut his teeth as a youngster wearing a white helmet, as they did here, ‘dealing with’ the Mods & Rockers back in the early 60s. A lot of trouble was averted by the coppers singling out the ringleaders and taking them under the Pier where the errors of their ways were explained to them and some suffered ‘accidents’. Walking successfully on those pebbles can be quite tricky. Anyway – even he didn’t mess with the knocker boys. They started up at the same time as the razor gangs of Brighton Rock fame. Pinky was for real. Didn’t live in Hove, either. Not everybody here is bent, of course. Even if playwright and journalist Keith Waterhouse (another alumni) famously wrote: “Brighton is a town that always looks as if it is helping police with their inquiries.” But not necessarily DSI Roy Grace who would probably be a cut above all that tedious petty crime stuff. He has morals, especially the TV version of him. Too many if you ask me.
Brighton started as a fishing village, Brighthelmstone and might have happily remained one if it hadn’t been taken up by probably the most infamous of it’s ne’rr do wells, George, Prince Regent. He’s the subject of another piece another time, methinks. I’m not sure he was guilty of any dastardly murders, but by god, he did the rest. Wine, women and song doesn’t even cover the hors d’oeuvres. That and trying to bankrupt the country, and nearly succeeding. A good lad to know if he liked you. Roy Grace would frown quite a lot if told that Prinny was off limits for his inquiries, and the rest of the series characters would be pretty disgusted. Except, perhaps, Detective Norman Potting. I have hopes that Norman could be saved from the hideous fate that hopefully awaits the woke.
Summing up. Worth a watch if it’s raining and Spoons is out of the question. If the mother-in-law’s around …. she will like it.
© James Leary 2024
