by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the
PBS telecast of “Against the Odds,” an episode of the Australian ITV production
The Doctor Blake Mysteries that was actually quite good — a jockey dies of an apparent accident
the day after he won a big race that, we find out later, he was supposed to
throw — even though the show had a recurring flaw of British Commonwealth mysteries:
the characterizations are so deep and well-rounded that by the time writer
Stuart Page gets around to telling us who the murderer was (Blake deduces early
on that the rider — and his horse — were killed by someone stringing a rope
across the track so they would fall, though originally the killer intended the
jockey to die but the horse to live) we really don’t care that much. The
establishing story of Dr. Lucien Blake was he had served in the British
military as a medic in Singapore, and had been so traumatized by that
experience that after his discharge he returned to the small town of Ballarat,
Australia where he’d grown up. This episode explained why he hadn’t married his
partner Jean Beazley even though they were living together in small-town Australia
in the 1950’s and as far as anyone knew they were husband and wife.
It turns
out he already had a wife, Mei Lin Blake (Ling Cooper Tang), a part-Chinese,
part-British woman he’d met in China before the war and who’d been living with
him in Singapore when the war broke out, the British fortress in Singapore
fell, she was captured and held against her will for several years in
Japanese-occupied China during World War II until she managed to escape and
find her way back to Ballarat. She comes to live with her husband and her
husband’s current girlfriend until she realizes she’ll be a fish out of water —
and he sensibly lets her go, allowing her to move into a local hotel. By the
time this plot line resolves itself we hardly care anymore who killed the jockey
— or later set up the jockey’s principal rival to get killed when he was
trampled by a horse while fleeing — and there’s a nice performance by Damien
Richardson as local bookie Terrence Noonan, who when he isn’t fixing local
races is getting worried because the Australian government is about to
institute legal off-track betting and that will, of course, kill his business.
Noonan also has his hooks into the local police sergeant, Bill Hobart (David
Whiteley), who owes him 350 pounds and tells Noonan he intends to pay off his
debt even if he also has to arrest Noonan for murder — only it turns out the
real killer is the horse’s trainer, Agnes Clasby (Helen Morse), who had bet
against her own horse as part of Noonan’s scheme (as had the jockey riding him,
though eventually, like John Garfield at the end of Body and Soul, he recovered enough of his self-respect
that he won a contest even though he would have been better off financially if he’d lost) — and there’s also
the fascinating character of her stable hand Rose Anderson (Anna McGahan), who
makes no particular secret that she likes horses considerably better than
people and actually fires a gun in the general direction of Dr. Blake and the
principals at the end, which briefly makes her a red herring before Agnes is
revealed to be the killer.
