Inspector George Gently: "The Burning Man" (Company Pictures, Element Pictures, All3 Media, GBH, PBS, aired July 13, 2008)

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

Later in the evening (Thursday, May 7) I switched channels from NBC to PBS to catch a rerun of Inspector George Gently, a BBC-TV policier that ran from 2008 to 2017. Its central character, Detective Chief Inspector George Gently (Martin Shaw), was a crabby middle-aged man who as the series began had just suffered two big-time blows, one personal and one professional. The personal blow was the death of his wife at the hands of one of the criminals he’d been after, and the professional one was losing his prestigious job at New Scotland Yard in London and being reassigned to the small town of Durham in Northumberland in the north of England. Gently’s new professional partner is Detective Sergeant John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby), who in 1964 (when the series was set at first) is wearing his hair Beatle-length (as I’ve noted in previous entries in the series, he’d have been good casting, at least visually, for a biopic of John Lennon) but other than that is a quite stuck-up conservative personally, if not politically, The Gently character was created by author Alan Hunter and brought to the small screen by Peter Flannery, who’s listed as the show’s creator and also wrote this particular episode, “The Burning Man.” Only the second episode of the series, “The Burning Man” begins with Gently and Bacchus finding the corpse of a man that has not only been killed (with a single gunshot to the forehead) but soaked in a flammable liquid so he would be burned beyond immediate recognition. The only clue as to his identity is a gold ring which he swallowed just before he was killed, and emerged intact even though the rest of his body was utterly consumed and only his skeleton remained. The ring has an inscription to “Wanda,” and the cops trace it to Wanda Lane (Pooky Quesnel), a barmaid at a local tavern called The Rook.

The Rook markets itself to the local Irish community, including hosting bands playing traditional Irish folk music (with, shall we say, more enthusiasm than talent) and playing host to various operatives with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The show’s 1964 setting puts it well ahead of the so-called “Time of Troubles” which rocked the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, which stayed part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland, and Wales after the remaining 26 Irish counties at last gained independence, but the seeds of doubt are already brewing. Gently and Bacchus find themselves investigating two cases at once: the murder of the burned-out mystery corpse and the disappearance of O’Shaughnessy (Deka Walmsley), a middle-aged man whose (barely) adult daughter Carmel (Charlotte Riley) is looking for him and entreating the police to take more care of the case than they might otherwise. Their task is complicated by the appearance of Empton (Robert Glenister) from London’s Special Branch, which as its Wikipedia page explains “was a unit of London's Metropolitan Police formed in March 1883 to combat the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The name became Special Branch [it was originally Special Irish Branch] as the unit's remit widened to include more than just Irish Republican-related counter-espionage.” When he’s not trying to recruit John Bacchus to leave the police force in Durham and join the Special Branch, Empton is pushing his weight around and getting in the way of the investigation big-time. Eventually we learn – or think we learn – that the burned-out corpse was Ruairi O’Connell (Finbar Lynch), a gunman for the IRA. O’Connell was having a casual sexual affair with Wanda, who is, shall we say, quite free with her affections (at one point she tries to seduce Gently and even undresses to her underwear, but Gently, whose only interest in her is to take her down to the police station and get her information, calmly tells her to put her clothes back on so he can do that).

The true villain of the piece turns out to be Doyle (John Kavanagh), who runs a local trucking company for which O’Connell drove.Through an inside connection at the local British military base, O’Connell had acquired a large collection of guns which he intended to smuggle into Northern Ireland to continue the struggle for full Irish independence. Only O’Connell had been recruited by Empton as an informer, and his murder was an IRA execution as revenge for his having given Empton the names of his colleagues. O’Shaughnessy is in turn killed by a hit squad led by Doyle as Gently, Bacchus, and O’Shaughnessy’s daughter Carmel look on helplessly. Ultimately Empton turns out to be one of the piece’s villains, willing to let the shipment of stolen guns make its way to the IRA in exchange for having Doyle, who’s really his agent, win a place on the IRA’s governing council so Empton can gain intelligence on the group from the source. In the end Doyle is picked off by a well-aimed shot from Gently as he’s attempting to save himself by holding Wanda Lane hostage, Empton is disgraced, and fortunately both the women we’ve come to like, Wanda and Carmel, are alive at the end (though we get the impression Wanda has been chastened by the experience and won’t be anywhere nearly as man-hungry as she was before). I like Inspector George Gently because it almost totally lacks the campy levity of a lot of the other British policiers, especially the ones like Midsomer Murders set in central England instead of London, Manchester, or Liverpool. Instead it virtually qualified as neo-noir, and I particularly liked this episode because it had a political background but luckily didn’t hit us over the head with it.