I once knew someone in college who was mad keen to be a policeman. Our lecturer kept telling him to go to university, get a degree and then join the police force. It was the only way to get far in the force with proper promotion. This was in the mid 1980s.
So it was odd to see Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel (Warren Clarke) keep bringing up the university education status of Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) in a crime drama shown in the mid 1990s. By this time most high ranking police officers would have a degree.
A Clubbable Woman was a 1970 crime novel by Reginald Hill, where a policeman with a university degree would had been unusual. Not so in the 1990s and the reliable writer Alan Plater had not or unable to update it.
This also explains why the ending of the crime drama was odd. The victim who remains unseen until she is a corpse was by all regards a horrible older woman married to Sam Connon. He was once a promising rugby player now working as a personnel manager.
Coming home with concussion after a rugby game. His wife remains impassive, just watches television while he throws up and goes to bed. When Connon wakes up, he finds his wife dead, her head bashed in.
The first episode of Dalziel and Pascoe is the adaptation of the first book. Set in a yorkshire town, Dalziel is a blunt man who is rough around the edges. Pascoe is more calmer and polite.
Dalziel knows Connon from rugby circles. Among the possible suspects is a Welsh rugby fan with an attractive wife, a neighbour who dislikes Connon and a keen jogger who is always running about in the evening.
When a small boy goes missing, it leads to several important clues regarding the murder.
The ending was weird but that might reflect more on the way Hill wrote his novels, such as writing in non chronological order. There is also no going away from the hint of misogyny about the whole thing which might reflect the era the novel was written in. Then again even the modern police still has its share of misogyny.
