Inspector George Gently: "Gently in the Blood" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, aired January 4, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 19) at 10 p.m. I watched a KPBS telecast of the “Gently in the Blood” episode of Inspector George Gently, a British policier that ran eight seasons from 2008 to 2017 and began, like the first episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime, with the murder of the principal police-officer character’s wife – in this case, by a notorious gangster named Joe Webster. The show took place in the mid-1960’s and worked Britain’s abolition of the death penalty in 1965 into the plotting, though “Gently in the Blood” took place in 1964 and actually ends with the hanging of the murderer before abolition occurred. “Gently in the Blood” begins with a late-night confrontation between Gently, his assistant Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby, who wore his hair in a Beatles haircut and looked enough like John Lennon he’d have been good casting, at least visually, for a biopic in 2008, when this episode was filmed), and a group of young thugs led by Jimmy Cochran (Andrew Lee Potts). The confrontation takes place in a British Navy cemetery in front of a monument honoring the sailors who gave their lives during World War II. Director Ciarán Donnelly gives us lots of yummy shots of Cochran’s crotch, clad in white pants that show an amazingly huge basket, and I wondered if this episode’s casting director, Thyrza Ging, was anticipating Lifetime’s formula of making the hottest-looking male the principal villain. The series was set in Newcastle upon Tyne in Northumberland (the books on which it was based took place in Norfolk), and the beach figures importantly in the plot. The cops fail to make any arrests in the passport scheme but they are able to recover the passports, which turn out to be the genuine British government-issued article, and trace them to an office in Newcastle run by Philip Saint (Joe Sampson). Maggie Alderton (Robyn Anderson) works as a clerk in the passport office and is also the girlfriend of Jimmy Cochran. Her parents (Steven Hillman and Elizabeth Rider) can’t stand him, believing that her infatuation with Jimmy robbed her of her potential success out of high school. Maggie is also a single mother, and the question of who her baby’s father was becomes a major issue in the script by Peter Flannery.

Maggie is found murdered on the beach outside the Shoreline Inn, a rather skuzzy bar and pool hall (the presence of pool tables made me think of the late Wlliam K. Everson’s joke that pool had been established as a major avocation of movie criminals since the first gangster film, D. W. Griffith’s 1912 The Musketeers of Pig Alley) along the coast where Jimmy and his gang members, most of whom are of Arab descent, hang out. (The walls of the Shoreline Inn feature posters for various British rock bands of the period – all of them fictional, at least as far as I could tell – but there’s no stage or any other hint that the club ever presents live music.) Among the candidates for the father of Maggie’s baby are Jimmy Cochran and a 40-something Brit of Arab descent named Thomas Ali (Stewart Scudamore), who was seen visiting Maggie’s flat just hours before she was killed. When the baby was born dark-skinned Jimmy immediately assumed Maggie had been having extra-relational activities and suspected Thomas Ali of being the father. For the first hour of this 90-minute show the action cuts between the police investigating Maggie’s death and Cochran and his fellow gangsters, all of whom are Arab-British, trying to salvage the business in stolen and altered passports after the cops have confiscated their existing stock. There are also at least two scenes in which Thomas Ali goes to the club and harangues the younger Arab-Brits there about violating the tenets of Islam, especially the ones against gambling and drinking alcohol. At one point Inspector Gently even poses as Philip Saint and tries to extract information from the thug kids. Jimmy is relentlessly hostile towards the Arabs he’s supposedly in league with, and towards one Arab in particular, Hamed (Tariq Jordan), whom he also suspects of being Maggie’s paramour and the father of her mixed-race baby. He’s big on drawing a switchblade and holding it to the neck of the person who’s bothering him the most at the moment, though in one scene he and Hamed confront each other and both have switchblades drawn and are holding them at each other’s necks.

Then in the last half-hour Peter Flannery starts throwing reversals at us with a speed that might have made even Tony Gilroy blush [multiple spoiler alerts!]. First of all, Thomas Ali turns out to be the father of Jimmy Cochran; his aunt (Catherine Terris) and her husband adopted him, told him his father had died in the war (which was why he hung out a lot at the Navy cemetery), couldn’t discipline him, and threw him out, but not before creating a false identity for him that conceals that his real name was Thomas Jamiel Ali. They got “Jimmy” as a first name as an obvious “Anglification” of “Jamiel.” Jimmy was also the father of Maggie’s child – she’d never had sex, at least not willingly, with anyone else – and her murderer was Hamed, who’d had a long-time crush on her. On the fatal night Hamed tricked her into getting in his car, drove her to the beach, raped her and killed her, leaving the baby (whom she was carrying in a basket and she took Hamed’s ride mainly to get them out of a driving rainstorm) out in the elements to die. During the later stages of Maggie’s life Jimmy had talked about settling down, finding a legitimate job, marrying Maggie and helping raise their son despite his obviously Arab appearance. As for Thomas Ali’s appearance in Maggie’s flat, he was there merely to acquire a fake passport so he could flee Britain and return to his ancestral homeland, Yemen (called “The Yemen” for some reason in Flannery’s script). It also turns out that Philip Saint was Transgender and, rather than having an infatuation with Maggie as most of the other characters assumed, actually wanted to be Maggie. At the end Jimmy Cochran makes a moral reversal that for sheer unbelievability rivals the end of Puccini’s Turandot: despite Maggie no longer being alive to help him, he determines to get a job, lose his duck’s-ass hairdo and get short-back-and-sides, and raise his son as a single father.

What’s most remarkable about Inspector George Gently is that there’s none of the light, almost comic breeziness of most British TV shows about cops. It – at least judging from this episode – is relentlessly serious, grim, almost noir both thematically and visually. It also hints at a critique of British racism; early on in the show Gently upbraids his assistant and partner Bacchus for having made a racial slur towards a suspect, and by the end we’ve been given a taste of the ongoing prejudice all too many white Britishers feel towards the Arab-descended people in their midst, and how that makes the Arab-British feel as essentially second-class citizens in their own country. Given Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics and the anti-immigrant, especially anti-immigrants-of-color, policies of his government, this part of “Gently in the Blood” is all too timely today.