by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night, just before they showed an unusual
presentation of the San Diego Symphony performing a so-called “Tchaikovsky
Spectacular” concert live at the Embarcadero Marina, I put on KPBS for a Doctor
Blake Mysteries episode that, like the last
Endeavour show I’d seen, was
about a murder involving a rock ’n’ roll star. The Doctor Blake
Mysteries show is set in the small outback
town of Ballarat, Australia and takes place in the 1950’s, after Blake
relocated to his original home town following service as a medic with the
British army in World War II, and this show, called “The Food of Love” (though
the plot involves love far more than it does food, literal or metaphorical,
unless the title is supposed to be a reference to Shakespeare’s line, “If music
be the food of love, play on”!), deals with a concert appearance by Australian
rock star Bobby Lee (the quite attractive and boyishly handsome Steve
Danielsen), whose real name is Gunther Hansen, who founded a four-piece band
with his friend, pianist Walker (Daniel Hills) — only they were supposed to be
equal partners, with Walker writing the songs and Lee singing them, but Lee got
a bad case of egomania and insisted that he be treated as the star. Lee collapses and dies just
as he’s leaving the theatre and about to be mobbed by fans (one wonders where
the concert security people were; even in 1957, there was plenty of history of
singers with large teenage followings, like the young Bing Crosby in the early
1930’s and the young Frank Sinatra in the early 1940’s, getting mobbed by their
fans with such intensity that their lives were in danger: Sinatra said he
switched from wearing tie-on bow ties to clip-ons because fans would grab for
his bow tie, and until he started using clip-ons this would put him at imminent
risk of being strangled), and it turns out when Doctor Lucian Blake (Craig
McLachlan) autopsies him that he was stabbed but in such a way that he bled internally, not externally, his blood filling up his body and
ultimately drowning and stopping his heart. The police investigation focuses on
three potential suspects: Walker, who was heard arguing with Bobby after the
concert over credits and the musical direction of the band; Mattie O’Brien (Cate
Wolfe), whom the constable in charge of the investigation locks in the town
jail through most of the episode because she hit a younger officer who was
trying to search the alleyway where Bobby collapsed for the knife used to stab
him; and a free-lance moralist who runs a local church and distributes a
pamphlet he wrote condemning rock ’n’ roll as “the devil’s music.” (Of course I
immediately wanted one of the characters to come back and mention that rock has
its roots in Black American gospel music and therefore it is not the devil’s
music, but the Lord’s!)
Along the way Dr. Blake, who has to deal with an
official constabulary of especially stupid and stubborn people even by the
meager standards of credentialed cops in this sort of mystery story (where the
police have to be dumb so the
audience will believe they need the help of the private “sleuth” character to
solve the crime), though since in addition to a working doctor in Ballarat he’s
also what would now be called a forensic pathologist, responsible for
conducting autopsies on people who’ve died under mysterious circumstances, and
therefore is a part of official law enforcement himself, discovers 1) that
Bobby Lee’s real name is Gunther Hansen (whether he changed it simply because
“Bobby Lee” would have more rock-star cred or a German-sounding name would make
him unpopular with people still bitter about World War II isn’t explained by
writer Pete McTighe); 2) that the social-work client Mattie was supposed to be
looking after at the concert, Shirley Freedman (Nicole Gulasekharam), not only
had a secret crush on Bobby Lee but believed he had actually had sex with her,
fathering her baby (whom she had aborted under-the-table — when Dr. Blake
learns this he angrily demands Shirley rat out the doctor who did her
procedure, which she commendably refuses to do), and was sending her secret
messages via the lyrics of his songs (which in fact he didn’t even write
himself — Walker the piano player did); and 3) Bobby Lee’s killer was Gerry
Bowen (Peter Flaherty), Shirley’s father and the owner of the local pub (where
Dr. Blake had stored Bobby Lee’s body because the cellar was cold and there was
no room at the official morgue), because he was convinced Bobby had ruined his
daughter even though in fact they had never even met, much less had sex (which
rather begs the question of who was
the father of Shirley’s aborted baby — or even whether there was a baby or she just had what’s called an “hysterical
pregnancy,” in which a woman develops all the biological signs of being
pregnant except a fetus in her
womb).
Along the way we get to hear two songs representing Bobby Lee’s output,
“Stop Hanging On” (supposedly Lee’s latest single and credited on the imdb.com
Web page for this show to “D. Cornelius, R. Merecith and T. Page”) and “Six
O’Clock Rock,” written by Johnny O’Keefe, the real-life Australian rock star of
the late 1950’s and pretty obviously the model for Bobby Lee’s character. (His
biggest hit, “Real Wild Child,” was covered by Buddy Holly — who heard it when
O’Keefe opened for him on an Australian tour — and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Lewis’s
version was used in the otherwise disappointing Australian coming-of-age film Romulus
My Father.) The songs are effective and
it’s genuinely charming when, as part of his investigation, Dr. Blake starts
picking out the chords to “Stop Hanging On” on his home piano and ultimately
decides he actually likes rock ’n’ roll. He also mentions having seen Gene
Krupa, whom he describes to the young people as hopelessly old-fashioned even
though the adulation that surrounded Krupa in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s
was quite similar to what Elvis Presley and the other 1950’s rockers went
through — and, as I noted when Charles and I watched the film Rock,
Rock, Rock! together and I noted that the
final song was a big-band instrumental featuring ex-Duke Ellington tenor
saxophonist Al Sears, distinguished from swing only by the harder, more
emphatic backbeat the drummer was playing, big-band music and early rock ’n’
roll weren’t really all that different.
McTighe (who I believe is a well-regarded mystery novelist as well as a
screenwriter) deserves credit for avoiding some of the more transparent devices
he could have used — at one point I was expecting he’d have it turn out that
Bobby Lee was actually the scapegrace son of the minister who was picketing his
show — though when the minister is confronting Dr. Blake and explaining his own
checkered past as an armed robber and heavy drinker, and Blake is accusing him
of murdering Bobby to dispatch him to hell ahead of schedule, I’d have liked
the minister to say, “Oh, no, I didn’t want him dead! I wanted him to find
Jesus and turn his life around like I did!” At the same time, the fact that
there are so many issues and
possibilities McTighe and the show’s director, Declan Eames, couldn’t get into
a 54-minute running time is an example of this show’s strength.
