Inspector George Gently: "Goodbye, China" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, originally aired September 11, 2011)

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

My husband Charles and I finally got home last night (Thursday, April 23) shortly before 10 p.m. and I took the opportunity to watch an episode of Inspector George Gently, yet another British mystery series. This one takes place in the mid-1960’s in Durham, England. The episode we watched was called “Goodbye, China” and dealt with an informant Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw) developed during his days with the London police before some sort of scandal led to him being demoted to run the force in Durham. He had a more normal name (which I can’t recall right now) but he was nicknamed “China” (George Rohr), and Gently had been trying to get him to leave the world of petty crime and sober up, find himself a place, and look for honest work. To that end he’d given China a large sum of cash, and while most people in China’s place would have blown a large cash infusion on alcohol and/or drugs, China took it seriously enough that he settled in a village near Durham called Brattleboro, landed a place to live, and was working at making himself presentable to future employers. Only the local police officer in Brattleboro, Sgt. Molloy (Dean Lennox Kelly); his wife Terri (Christine Bottomley); a local coroner’s official, Lafferty (Shaun Prendergast); and a local official named Alan Shepherd (Neil Pearson); were all involved in a massive conspiracy to fake China’s death to make it look like an accident caused by over-consumption of alcohol. In the very opening scenes of the episode, we find out why even though we don’t realize the importance of them at first. A local home for mentally challenged kids is invaded by two local young psychopaths, brothers Devin (Jay Miller) and John (Niek Versteig) Blackburn, sons of local pig farmer Geoff Blackburn (Mark Denton). They abduct Alan Shepherd’s autistic son Danny (James Acton) and literally tie him to a merry-go-round outside, not a full-scale one but the sort of thing you find on children’s playgrounds that’s just a metal wheel on the ground pushed from outside handles. Then they disappear, and though they’ve been ostensibly arrested several times for delinquency or hooliganism their names never appeared on local police records. It turns out the reason for that is that instead of reporting their apprehensions to the proper authorities, Alan Shepherd and Sgt. Molloy worked out a way of “breaking” the Blackburn brothers by beating them up themselves.

At one point Devin gets arrested for public drunkenness and hooliganism by Gently and his assistant, detective sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingolby), who it’s been established in previous episodes that despite his Beatle-ish haircut (Lee Ingolby actually looks like he’d have been good casting for a biopic of John Lennon if one had been filmed at this time, 2011), he’s actually a straitlaced conservative who rejects the burgeoning counterculture. (Did I tell you this show takes place in the mid-1960’s? Oh, I did.) But Devin Blackburn resists all their attempts to interrogate him and ultimately gets released overnight. The two cases turn out to be interlinked when we learn that China (ya remember China?) had used Gently’s money to rent himself an apartment in Brattleboro which had a view of the playground at the home where the Blackburns were tormenting Danny Shepherd. China attempted to intervene but the Blackburns killed him for his pains, and the authorities locally decided to make it look like he was a homeless person who just accidentally died in an alcoholic stupor. Inspector Gently figures it out when he notices that China’s corpse was found wearing darned socks; he claims that homeless people never bother to darn their socks. (The homeless people I’ve known, including the ones who do their laundry at the University and Texas Street laundromat 2 ½ blocks away from my home, might well be people fastidious enough about day-to-day comfort they may take the trouble to darn their socks.) The show comes to a weird and not altogether satisfying ending (though I did a fair amount of nodding off while it was on and there were certain details I might have missed), including what happened to the Blackburn brothers – Devin is never seen again after he’s released from his overnight arrest and John is never seen at all after the opening sequence in which he’s shown tormenting Danny. Did Alan Shepherd kill them? If so, he did such a good job of hiding their bodies that they were never found, and when Gently and Bacchus arrest him at the end they guess he’s only going to be liable for a three- to four-year sentence for interfering with a police investigation, not the penalty for a murder charge. (One of the quirks of Inspector George Gently is that the show takes place during the period when the British government was considering, and finally deciding, to abolish capital punishment once and for all. The show’s scripts, mostly by creator Peter Flannery based on novels by Alan Hunter, incorporated that change as it happened historically.) Alan’s motive turns out to be to protect his son Danny from being institutionalized and subjected to substandard care (or none at all). The story is an object lesson in how tragedies can snowball and how one unfortunate event (like Danny being born with or developing autism) can create a whole series of others that ultimately end up sucking basically decent people into criminal or quasi-criminal acts.