The Real Don Tonay, a Follow Up Post

A couple of weeks ago I received an email relating to a post I made in January about Manchester's Don Tonay. The email was from his daughter Donna and, after some back and forth, I got some answers to the questions, opinions and myths that were evident in that original post about one of Manchester's most intriguing businessmen and a key figure in the early days of Factory Records. With Donna's permission, here is the answers she provided me that shed some light on her late father.Included in this post are photographs she kindly shared with me of Don. I hope you enjoy...

I started by asking Donna just what her father's ethnic background was, given that it was the source of much confusion and conflicting opinions among the Factory set;

"My Dad always said he was from Dublin. But we are not really sure" she replied. "We know he changed his name but we don't know what it was before. My Mum has a lot of theories about that. It was either during the war to avoid going back or to get away from his family. Who knows. He would never tell you"

"He definitely was Irish. He knew Dublin like the back of his hand. I have had a DNA test and I have come back as 70% Irish so I think that was true. His friend, Phyllis, Phil Lynott's (Thin Lizzy) mum said they were neighbours when they were children in Dublin"

I asked her about Don's life prior to owning the Russell Club, home of the Factory nights;

"He opened the first blues in Moss Side called the Monton house. Engelbert Humperdinck used to try and get in every night, but he was too young so my Dad said he was throw him out most nights" 

"He owned property all over Moss Side and rented it out. If they didn't pay their rent he would smash the toilet so they had to move out. He said it was cheaper to buy a new toilet"

"When he met my mum they travelled around the country opening illegal gambling dens, as gambling was illegal in the '60s. In their place in Bristol, Cary Grant used to come in"

"It was my stepdad, who was one of the Quality Street Gang, that allegedly put the Krays back on the train (when they arrived in Manchester with an eye on taking over the city). The Thin Lizzy song, 'The Boys are Back in Town', is about them"

One thing that everyone seemed to agree upon, I said, was that Don Tonay was a handsome, tall and well-dressed gentleman. A cool man who was a world away from the blunt northern club owner stereotype played by Peter Kay in 24 Hour Party People. Donna agreed and confirmed this;

"My Dad was always well-dressed and well-spoken. He wore silk socks and handmade shoes. He was also 6ft 4". Saying that, he could always scruff it and get cracking with whatever needed doing in the clubs or many shops that he owned"

Returning to 24 Hour Party People, I asked if the family were consulted at all on the production;

"We were not consulted. A friend of mine was friend with one of the cameramen who got me onto the set where I had an argument with Tony Wilson, as my dad had only just died of a massive heart attack on the 19th September 2000 and this was November of that year when they were filming. He (Wilson) had the good grace to apologise. You see, there would be no Factory without my dad, he bankrolled it all."

Donna concluded with her belief that her mother should write a book. It's one I emphatically agree with. Hollywood film stars, music legends and gangsters, it would make for great reading!

The Real Don Tonay

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog how keen I am on the Madchester scene. When Michael Winterbottom's film 24 Hour Party People came out in 2002, I went to see it at the cinemas twice and it fast became one of my favourite films. I loved the way that the film recreated the whole scene and the immersive, bewildering world of Factory Records, populated by so many eccentric creatives and larger than life characters. However, there was one particular character who intrigued me and that was Don Tonay, the owner of the Russell Club in Moss Side.

The Real Don Tonay - photo taken from the Excavating the Reno site, 

a site dedicated to the Moss Side cellar club that Don owned in the 1970s.

In the film, Tonay is played by Peter Kay as your stereotypical northern club owner, not too dissimilar to the type of comic creations Kay is known for. But I quickly learned that this was not a truthful account of Don Tonay, a man with Irish, Italian and Jamaican heritage (a Jamaican father and Italian mother I believe, though I may be wrong) who was a much suaver and more imposing figure than the film depicts.

In Tony Wilson's suitably eccentric novelisation of the film (only Wilson would approach his own life story in such an irreverent fashion; as he says in the film "I agree with John Ford. When you have to choose between the truth and the legend - print the legend" and that's literally what he does in this book) he depicts the real Tonay thus; 

"The front door was open. They walked straight in. At the bar, cashing up, a tall, striking, late-middle-aged man in a fine cashmere overcoat. Imposing wasn't the word. Self-assured as only someone who took on the Krays and lived can be. Story was, he came from the tenements of Dublin's North Side, tough as those streets. After a slight altercation with London's premier family, he has come north"

This then, is corroboration for a bit of mythologising I had once heard in a Manchester boozer when raising the subject of Don Tonay. Rumour has it, a sage in his cups informed me, that Don Tonay had heard that the Kray twins were coming to take a look at Manchester in the late '60s. The train from London Euston arrived at Piccadilly and the brothers decamped to be met by Don and what can only be described as a posse of hard bastards. The Krays took the next train back. 

Is it true? I dunno, but I'd like it to be. Already, I'm falling into the Tony Wilson school of 'printing the legend'.

In his book, Factory: The Story of the Record Label, Mick Middles elaborates more on Tonay's 'gangster' qualities; 

"The Russell Club had numerous guises, mainly though as the PSV Club (Public Service Vehicle...no, I never understood that, either). It had made its name in later days as a suitably downbeat reggae-orientated venue handily placed, as it was, for nearby Moss Side. (Tony) Wilson had chanced upon the venue following a meeting with the owner, local 'businessman' Don Tonay. He was, in the eyes of Wilson, ' an incredible character...a civilised gangster' 

Tonay, undoubtedly, had style. He was a tall, commanding handsome man in his late forties. Each night, after prowling around the club, he would leave at precisely 1 a.m. A van would pull respectfully onto the car park. The rear door would open to reveal two beautiful prostitutes in reclining poses, between whom Tonay would stylishly flop. The door would be pulled shut and the van would cruise away into the night. Tonay's style was a throwback, of sorts, to the gangster tradition - he did have links, it was strongly rumoured, with the Kray fraternity - and most people who knew him, and knew him well enough not to cross him, regarded him as a lovely individual. One is tempted, of course, to break into Pythonesque tales of a Piranha Brothers nature; 'Oh yeah Don... he was a lovely bloke...' etc, and such cliches wouldn't be too far from the truth as Tonay ruled his patch with an iron hand, be it a loving hand or otherwise. This was, perhaps, typified by a conversation overheard at the Russell Club one night when Magazine were performing. The band's van had been cynically and pointlessly broken into in the car park. Two 'drug squad' officers, standing at the bar - drinking Red Stripe - were heard to mutter, 'Whoever broke into that van will be very sorry...very sorry indeed...pity for him that it wasn't our precinct. Don will sort them out, poor guys'

Tonay had a few other quirks. There were signs in the club that read 'NO TAMS ALLOWED'. It was difficult to know quite what this meant. However one clue could be the time Tonay wandered into the club and, spying three Jamaican guys in woolly hats, screamed 'Haaaattttts!', following which the offending articles were removed. On another occasion Tonay entered the club at 2 a.m, and two or three straggling tables remained - students mainly - only too slowly finishing their Guinnesses, smoking dope, chatting about the evening's gig.  'Don't you know how to clear a club out?' asked Tonay, his question directed at Alan Wise, his sidekick Nigel, and Wilson. Wilson answered pointedly, 'No...not really, Don'. Tonay proceeded to pick up a table, hurl it in the air and, before it crashed to the ground, screamed 'OOOOOUTTTTTTT!!!!'. The students, needless to say, filed out respectfully, silently, nervously."

Alan Wise himself had this to say in a conversation with New Order frontman Bernard Sumner, included in Sumner's memoir, Chapter and Verse;

"Don was actually quite an erudite gangster who's been involved in political activities all over Africa. He went off to be a paratrooper and had been involved with certain members of the African National Congress. He'd gone to Africa and dealt in iron pyrites. Fool's gold. Don was a fascinating character and I really took to him...he was a pirate...he was a fence. The police used to come round to his house and he'd say, 'how's things, guys?' and they'd say, 'we're broke, Don': they used to openly come round to take money, so he was still involved."

Whilst Lindsey Reade, Tony Wilson's first wife, recalls in her book, Mr Manchester and the Factory Girl, that Tonay was;

"A man of Irish gypsy descent with black wavy hair...(Don Tonay) looked like a big Mafiosi character. Tosh (Ryan) recalled accompanying Don's right-hand man to collect Don from the airport after a trip to Italy. The first thing Don said was, 'Anything happen?' '5 Mitten Street got torched,' came the reply. (This was a shebeen that Don owned.) To which Don responded, deadpan, 'Anything else?' 

So as you can see, the reality was far and away quite different from Peter Kay's interpretation in 24 Hour Party People - even though the film retained Tonay's flamboyant mode of transport home from the Russell Club each night.  

Emphatically NOT the real Don Tonay,

played by Peter Kay in 24 Hour Party People

On my special limited edition DVD of 24 Hour Party People (number 1756 of the DVD release which, of course, has a Fac number too: DVD424) there is a great extra entitled From the Factory Floor; an in-vision DVD commentary of Winterbottom's film, featuring the likes of Peter Hook (Joy Division/New Order), Bruce Mitchell (The Durutti Column), Martin Moscrop (ACR) and Rowetta (Happy Mondays), and chaired by the delightful Miranda Sawyer. In it, Hooky talks about Tonay and how radically different the film chose to portray him, and unconsciously challenging the Middles anecdote that made it into the movie;

"Don Tonay wasn't like that though was he? He was much more aloof, much more of a gentleman, you wouldn't catch him in the back of a van with fuckin' hookers. It's probably a good thing that he's dead, the poor bugger, otherwise we'd all have our legs chopped off for that!"

Later on, as Peter Kay makes his first appearance in the film, Sawyer asks the group to recall the real Tonay. Hooky is somewhat confused as to what Tonay's ethnicity was; "Was he black or Italian?" he asks, and Moscrop replies "Italian" "He was very dark skinned though wasn't he?" Hooky continues. "He was from Manchester, but he was of Italian descent" Moscrop concludes - which differs from Wilson's claims that he was originally from Dublin. It's left to Bruce Mitchell to fill in more detail;

"He was a very serious level. He wore like £500 suits...and a £500 suit in those days was a serious suit. He run all the blue beats, he ran all the deliveries of the beer to the blue beats, and this guy was seriously cool..." 

Mitchell then goes on to say something that is presumably libellous as the sound drops out! When it returns, he concludes with "...But he was a very charming guy as well"

The performance by Peter Kay, and the way the character is written in the film, still rankles with Hooky;

"But that's such a strange portrayal. That portrayal of him, if you knew him, is the strangest"

Ultimately, it's Moscrop who sums it up in relation to the audience;

"Everyone knows who Peter Kay is, but they don't know who Don Tonay is" 

In short, the film required the depiction of a northern club owner, Peter Kay was, at the time, playing a northern club owner in his sitcom Phoenix Nights, therefore the film cast Peter Kay, a popular comic, to more or less play himself. A case of printing the legend rather than the truth again.

Did you know Don Tonay? Do you have any stories about him? I'd love to hear from you if you do. Just drop me a line in the comment section below. 

Wordless Wednesday: The Real Peaky Blinders

Hard Men (1996)

There ought to be a word for that feeling you have when you can't tell whether you have seen a movie or not. That's the feeling I have watching Hard Men. I certainly recall it coming out in '96 but I didn't think I'd actually seen it. After watching it tonight, so many scenes rang a bell, that I think I may be mistaken. It feels like the eighteen year old me might have seen it with a kebab and a bottle of White Lightning and, given the brain killing properties of 'Quite Frightening', is it any wonder I can't be sure?

Then again, maybe I could be forgiven for thinking I'd seen it before because Hard Men isn't exactly original. In this tale of three lethal, sharp suited cockney hoods out on the town, chatting shit about the etiquette of oral sex and the merits of Abba over Blur whilst plotting a betrayal against one of their number, it is clear that the French born, London based writer/director J.K. Amalou is heavily influenced by Tarantino. But, despite some pretty high praise from the likes of Loaded, Maxim and Marie Claire, his low budget film struggled to find an audience, which is sadly ironic when you consider he had the jump on Guy Ritchie who would do the exact same thing to incredible acclaim just two years later, opening the floodgates of the genre for several imitators to follow.

The film concerns a trio of hitmen and debt collectors; the sensible Tone (Vincent Regan), the professional Bear (Ross Boatman) and the hothead Speed (Lee Ross), who each work for gangland boss Pops Den (played by real-life South London gangster 'Mad' Frankie Fraser). When Tone's ex girlfriend reconnects to tell him he's father to a baby daughter, he decides it is time he should retire and takes his friends out for one last carousal to announce his plans. But Pops Den isn't the kind of person to condone such a resignation and suddenly Tone's last night with the lads is potentially his last night on earth, with Speed and Bear now charged with not only offing him but also with delivering his amputated hand to Pops Den by 9am the following morning.

Amalou has a very arresting and stylised eye for the seamy side of London and outlandish violence that makes Hard Men quite a visually strong addition to the British gangster film, with a cool colour palette combined with an interesting sound design, but he's ultimately weak on getting the audience to truly engage with his characters thanks to their overall unlikeability and some occasionally poor dialogue. It's a shame though to see that his subsequent career has of late consisted of a couple of straight-to-DVD Danny Dyer flicks. For someone who beat Ritchie to it, he deserves more than that.

As for the cast it's easy to see why Vincent Regan went on to become an actor who straddles both a variety of British TV productions and the odd Hollywood blockbuster like 300, as his potential stands out in the role of the sensitive and mature Tone. Ross Boatman, marking time between leaving London's Burning and becoming a rather handy professional poker player with his older brother Barny, is perhaps even better, quietly convincing as Bear in a way that makes me grateful that he's returned to acting in recent years with his great performance as the brother in the BBC2 sitcom Mum. Lee Ross is an actor I normally admire a lot, but here I think he gets a little carried away with the opportunity to overplay Speed's character's jittery coke-fuelled intensity and cockney swagger. Someone like Marc Warren would have perhaps been a more natural and convincing fit. The stunt casting of real-life villain 'Mad' Frankie Fraser as Pops Den is again - when you consider how Guy Ritchie went on to cast Lenny McLean in Lock Stock -  another example of Amalou predicting what was to come, but it is also a deeply contentious one; the showbiz glorification that began to occur in the '90s of once genuinely violent enforcers and murderers is one that has always sat uneasily with me, and I fail to see why the production saw it fit to try and enhance his natural menace with several obviously fake facial scars. There's also an appearance from Ken Campbell that is unforgiveably all too brief - what kind of idiot employs a one-off like Campbell for such a small and insignificant role? That alone should have sealed Hard Men's fate.

Perhaps the best thing about Hard Men is the strapline; You Call. They Deliver. It Ain't Pizzas, but even that doesn't bear much scrutiny, much like the film itself. I am now fairly sure I've seen it before, but I'll mark it as a first watch nonetheless. Perhaps this inability to pin down whether I have or haven't seen it says all there is to know about Hard Men. It's not truly atrocious, but it's nowhere near great either. It's just really rather forgettable. 

RIP Leslie Grantham

EastEnders legend Leslie Grantham has died at the age of 71 following a short illness.

 

I must admit this one's knocked me a bit. As a child of the '80s, Leslie Grantham was huge - both for his success at creating arguably the finest character in EastEnders history, Den Watts, and for his own personal notoriety of being a convicted for murder before he became an actor - and he was something of a favourite of mine; a laconic hardman who seemingly always overcame the odds. When I was fifteen years old in 1995, I entered an arts competition in The S*n 'newspaper' that was celebrating EastEnders' 10th anniversary by asking for drawings and paintings of some of its iconic characters; my drawing of Grantham was published and I won £50. I subsequently wrote my first 'fan letter' to Grantham, including my artwork and received a signed photo I still have to this day.

Many tributes today will mention Grantham's best remembered role of the Queen Vic landlord 'Dirty' Den, but for me his best role was that of the South London criminal kingpin and family man Danny Kane in Murray Smith's brilliantly quirky The Paradise Club. The show ran for two series in 1989 and 1990, with Grantham starring alongside Don Henderson as his brother, the priest-in-crisis, Father Frank Kane. When UK Gold repeated the series in 1997 I was utterly hooked. I wanted to drink in The Paradise Club, rubbing shoulders with these good guy villains. For Grantham, Dirty Den was history and he spent the '90s starring in the aforementioned The Paradise Club, as undercover cop Mick Raynor in 99-1 and as an alien invader living in the body of a police officer in the sci-fi thriller The Uninvited, written by Peter Bowker from an original idea of Grantham's own, The Stretch, which reunited him with Anita Dobson, as well as many guest appearances on various shows. But despite how good these series and his performances were, Grantham could never really escape the shadow of Den Watts, a character he had intended to firmly kill off the year The Paradise Club made its debut, when he could beat the odds no longer and ended up face to face with a silencer pistol hidden behind a bunch of flowers on a canal towpath. Newspapers and the general public were always asking would he ever return, seemingly from beyond the grave, to the show and they got their answer in 2003 when Grantham accepted a reported £500,000 a year contract to play Den Watts once more. Over 17 million viewers tuned in to see his return, where it was explained Den cheated death and fled to Spain where he had lived in hiding for fourteen years. The Queen Vic had its king once more it seemed...

A year later however and Grantham was the victim of a sting set up by the News of the World. He had been conducting internet webcam sessions with an undercover reporter known as 'Amanda' and the paper claimed he had masturbated before her and insulted many of his co-stars on the soap. Grantham immediately apologised and donated a sum to charity but the scandal proved too much and his time of the show was over. Dirty Den was emphatically killed off for good in February 2005, watched by over 16 million. 

I always found it strange myself how the public, the BBC and the press at large could accept Grantham as a murderer, but not as someone who pleasured himself. It was a clear case of the media building someone up only to knock them down and Grantham's career never really recovered. In last thirteen years that have followed, Grantham's marriage failed and he had attempted suicide a number of times. He wrote his autobiography and, more recently, a children's fantasy novel, but his acting career mainly consisted of a few stage tours and straight to DVD films - including a forthcoming Krays biopic in which he plays detective Nipper Read. His only major role was in the Bulgarian drama, The English Neighbour, which Grantham claimed reinvigorated his love for performing. He also found a love for Bulgaria too, and resided there until this week when a so far undisclosed medical condition saw him return to the UK.  Grantham passed away this morning with family and friends at his bedside.

RIP

Double X: The Name of the Game (1992)

"An underrated British crime thriller with a superb cast and a car chase that actuals thrills. Made on a shoestring budget but with good production values. Entertaining. Great value for money"

Not my words you understand (the spelling mistake isn't mine either) but the words of a glowing five star review of the film on Amazon that is written by none other than...

Shani Grewal - the film's writer, producer and director. 

Hmm. You could have at least used an alias mate?

In reality, Double X: The Name of the Game feels like the kind of film a classroom full of eight year olds might come up with if you'd shown them The Long Good Friday and asked them to have a go at making something similar. But, because it has a rather unlikely star in the shape of comedian Norman Wisdom, it's a film that has a certain attraction for anyone of a certain age and British (or perhaps Albanian, given he was huge there). Yes, that's right little Norman Pipkin has gone deadly serious in his old age, playing the timid employee and criminal brains of a gangland empire known as 'The Organisation' who wants out after seeing how deadly the muscle around him is. 

And what an odd organisation it is; firstly there's Bernard Hill, chewing the scenery as a crippled Oirish sadist called Iggy Smith. Hill clearly knows full well he's a world away not only from Boys From The Blackstuff but also the last big screen crime thriller he was involved in, Bellman and True, and sets about treating the material with the disrespect it deserves. Then there's Simon Ward on oily form as the organisation's Mr Big, who harbours ambitions to become a politician - thereby entering a more nefarious occupation than the one he currently holds, obviously. Lastly there's Leon Herbert as a henchman - he has 'previous', having had at that point recently starred as one of Leslie Grantham's minders in the crime series The Paradise Club.

It's odd to see Wisdom in such an environment - though he was no stranger to straight drama, having a straight(ish) role in The Night They Raided Minsky's and having already played an old con in an episode of Bergerac in the '80s - and, despite it being a little disconcerting to see him wielding a gun or performing in a couple of action sequences (look out for a scene where he has to slap his duplicitous, backstabbing girlfriend, played by Gemma Craven; it's the weakest slap in cinema history - though Craven flies across the room like she's been hit by Ricky Hatton!) and his daughter, played by future Red Dwarf star Chloë Annett, is clearly young enough to actually be his granddaughter, there's nevertheless something mildly charming about seeing him branch out in such fare so late in the game. Plus of course, there's the residual affection we feel just because it is Norman Wisdom after all. 

The film is all over the shop structurally, opening with William Katt as a former cop with the Chicago PD vacationing in Scotland before we get Wisdom's convoluted backstory. Initially it feels like both actors are jostling for star position. Katt is clearly there to attract the US market but, given that around this time he was perhaps best known for being Perry Mason's assistant on TV, he's hardly the Hollywood A-lister parachuted in to raise this low budget British thriller into the big league. It also doesn't help that he's as wooden as hell, providing the film with a voice over that has all the energy of a bile bean - although, given a twist down the line that might be intentional? (No, I'm being way too kind here I think!). Pretty much immediately after the opening credits, Katt checks in at a hotel and stumbles upon the assassination attempt of fellow guest Norman Wisdom and comes to his rescue with a nifty car chase. With our leads fleeing the scene, we then flashback to some three years earlier and, narrated now by the more wide-awake Wisdom, we learn just how he came to be in this mess in the first place. You see, his old gangland colleagues aren't happy with him just going on the run like that and now they want him dead. Plot twists quickly follow and, inbetween the odd explosion and hail if machine gun bullets, it soon becomes clear that you can't trust anyone in this particular game - whatever it's bloody name is! Unfortunately, the whole thing is so poorly put together and misjudged that it's really hard to care all that much about what's going on, despite the twists and turns or the occasional bit of good stuntwork. 

Double X: The Name of the Game isn't the worst British gangster movie out there (that's probably still the ultra-cheapo Shadow Run, starring Michael Caine and James Fox) but it runs close. It may have been made in 1992, but it already seems dated for then, feeling more like a mid '80s production with its jazzy score and neon blue hued credits. It's one to watch for a certain nostalgia I guess, as there are brief roles for Derren Nesbitt and Vladek Sheybal in his final film role, but overall it's the kind of film that reminds you - aside from the odd hit from Handmade and the reliability of Merchant Ivory - just how low the British film industry had sunk by the 1980s and early '90s and how little money it was actually expected to make films on. If you're a glutton for punishment this might serve as a 'good' double bill with Tank Malling.

When he's not writing Amazon reviews about his own films, Shani Grewal directs television dramas such as the daytime soap Doctors and the Saturday evening stalwart that is Casualty. It's probably more on his level.

The Yakuza (1974)

'With an impressive noirish body of work already behind him, Mitchum is utterly believable in his role as our ageing ‘urban knight’ Harry Kilmer, cutting a truly iconic figure of the genre as he wanders, baggy-eyed and turtle-necked, through the bustling neon-lit, rainy streets of Japan'

See my full review at The Geek Show

Coming to DVD: Stormy Monday (1988)

Arrow Films will release Stormy Monday, Mike Figgis' feature-length directorial debut from 1988, in July. Accompanying the DVD will be a booklet including a new critical essay on Figgis and the film, 'Mike Figgis: Renaissance Man' written by yours truly

Be sure to order your copy!

Villain (1971)

By the late 1960s, a lot of critics were shaking their heads in dismay and writing the obits for Richard Burton's career. He was, to their mind, a great actor who had simply squandered his talent on unwise choices. An actor whose best known role was not as they had hoped, the Shakespearean greats, but was instead that of Mr Elizabeth Taylor in the ongoing, glitzy and gaudy pantomime of their marriage. They were Brangelina, they were Kim and Kanye, they were Posh and Becks. They were all those and more; the celebrity power couple before the term had even been coined and, in that less celeb crazed time, Burton being so high profile meant just one thing to the critics - wasted potential.  

But the critics were wrong. Granted, Burton made some truly horrible decisions from the late 1960s and up until his untimely death in 1984, there were roles in populist fare that kept him from treading the boards where they felt his talent thrived and yes, he often sleepwalked through some of these appearances, but he was far from washed up. Because when Burton felt the material was worth it, he gave it his all and when he did, he was capable of turning in a fine performance that positively crackled upon the screen. His role in Villain of gangland kingpin Vic Dakin here, allows for just such a performance - a role so meaty he could truly get his teeth into and enjoy it with absolute relish. 

When we talk of classic British gangster movies, we talk of Get Carter (which Villain came hot on the heels of) and The Long Good Friday; films which benefit from two truly iconic gangster characters in Michael Caine's enforcer Jack Carter and Bob Hoskins' mob boss Harold Shand. These are characters which can stand comfortably alongside the greats from Hollywood, the home of the traditional gangster genre, with Caine as chillingly cobra-eyed as a Bogart or Raft, and Hoskins as snarlingly feral as Edward G Robinson. It's a shame therefore that Villain isn't as well known and as celebrated as these two films, because in Burton's Dakin we perhaps have our own James Cagney. Just look at that final speech he has here, it's right up there. Seriously, by the time the credits roll you won't care that Burton couldn't really do a cockney accent. He is Vic Dakin, and that demands your respect.

Dakin is a gloriously complex and creepy monster, obviously inspired by the Kray twins (who had been convicted of murder the year prior to filming) though with a particular emphasis on the certifiable Ronnie. When we first meet him he suggests a girl makes a cup of tea whilst he busies himself slashing her boyfriend's face off, his vicious nature also spares room for a sneering contempt for the ordinary nine to fivers of society ("Stupid punters - telly all week, screw the wife Saturdays") but at the same time this taciturn tough is utterly devoted to his dear old mum, who he treats like a mixture of royalty and precious bone china, taking her down to Brighton every weekend, feeding her whelks and then - as Nigel Davenport's detective remarks - drives home at 30mph to ensure she doesn't get hiccups. 

As with all our cinematic gangsters Dakin makes a fatal mistake that sees his power snatched away from him. Receiving a tip off from one of the clients of his lucrative protection racket, Dakin and his firm try their hand at armed robbery, with disastrous consequences. But this overreaching error isn't borne of some ambitious desire to expand his empire; Dakin's folly stems from the fact that he is starting to feel his (middle) age, and fears he is seen to be going soft in the eyes of Ian McShane's young chancer, Wolf. And going soft is the last thing he wants when it comes to Wolf, because he's in the middle of a rather tempestuous love affair with the younger man. 

Burton claimed he had no trouble pretending he fancied McShane, indeed he said he found it rather easy because he reminded him of Elizabeth Taylor! I always get envious watching Ian McShane films from the '70s because Burton was spot on, he was such a handsome fella, I wish I looked like him back then! 

Gritty and atmospheric, Villain is wonderfully evocative of '70s London with its crisp location shooting and its fashions of flares, roll neck sweaters and sideburns. Those long-gone London streets are populated by a great number of character actors and familiar faces that offer up an instant nostalgia hit to any British viewer of a certain age, and they deliver bluntly authentic dialogue (shocking in its day I presume) that came from the pen of no less a writing partnership than Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, better known for their comedies such as The Likely Lads, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen Pet.  

Directed by first-timer Michael Tuchner, this is an acutely-observed piece with a great sense of place and character. It's a shame that Tuchner's potential never seemed to be achieved after this - he crossed the pond and back a few times to produce a series of TV movies and low budget offerings, some of them over here being good (the Play for Today Bar Mitzvah Boy, and reuniting with Clement and La Frenais to make the big screen spin off of The Likely Lads in '76) but most of them over there seem decidedly humdrum (Hart to Hart revivals and several movies of the week) along with some you simply struggle to categorise (Mr Quilp - a musical adaptation of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, and the Smith and Jones vehicle Wilt) He did make the big screen adaptation of Alistair MacLean's Fear is the Key the year after this though, and that's on my to-watch list.

In conclusion, whilst Villain isn't the British crime drama that deserves immediate reappraisal (that is of course Peter Yates' brilliant Great Train Robbery inspired 1967 film Robbery) it is nonetheless worth your time for a truly interesting lead performance by Burton and some really authentic progressive moves in the crime genre (the homosexual gangster, his seedy connections to parliament, the decline of old fashioned crime and uncompromising dialogue) But the downside is that its narrative is just too small-fry compared to Get Carter and The Long Good Friday and that is why ultimately it remains in the shadows.

Girls With Guns

Dita Von Teese

Cars & Girls / Girls With Guns

Dita Von Teese

DVD Review: Dixon of Dock Green Collection One

Dixon of Dock Green was a mainstay of BBC drama for a staggeringly successful twenty-one years, starting in 1955 and coming to a close in 1976. A spin-off of the classic British crime film The Blue Lamp, the Ted Willis-devised show brought Jack Warner's helpful old school beat bobby PC George Dixon back from the dead (he was gunned down by a young Dirk Bogarde twenty minutes into the film) and saw Warner portray the character until his 80th year, well past police retirement age! 

Sadly much of Dixon of Dock Green has been wiped from the BBC archives and so, Acorn DVD's three releases (available both individually and as a boxset) have concentrated on the available colour episodes from 1970-1976 which saw the 70-odd year old Warner portray Dixon as the Sergeant of the Dock Green parish alongside his son-in-law Andy Crawford (Peter Byrne) now a detective in CID and other characters such as Nicholas Donnelly's strapping uniformed Sergeant Johnny Wills who would understandably undertake much of the legwork and action-orientated scenes at this stage in the show's history.

Not that there's all that much action in Dixon of Dock Green. Those expecting a '70s cop show like The Sweeney will be somewhat disappointed by the lack of grit, street vernacular and squealing tyres that marked out that series, but it's actually a popular misconception that, by this era, Dixon was an outdated and redundant relic that was out of touch with reality and long surpassed by the antics of the aforementioned Flying Squad and the BBC's own Z Cars. For a start, it still pulled in extremely healthy viewing figures suggesting there was great affection and a demand for the series, and secondly, going off the six episodes in this volume, it was still a remarkably solid drama that didn't shy away from the bleak and gritty aspects of crime and the subsequent investigations made by the police force. In my view and on the evidence laid out here, Dixon was still in good health in the early '70s and far better than Z Cars from the same period which Acorn has also released to DVD and which frankly, with a few exceptions outstanding, pretty much bored me to tears with its humdrum low-risk and uneventful mundanity.

Some episodes in this set wouldn't actually look that out of place plot-wise on The Sweeney; episodes like Eye Witness, Harry's Back and Firearms Were Issued are all set in roughly the same ballpark as the crimes and characters depicted in ITV's swaggering, rough and ready rival, and feature such cases as a young woman who witnesses a gangland slaying being taken into police protection; Crawford's dogged efforts to prove that a roguish charmer is in fact a ruthless and deadly villain; and an internal inquiry into the fatal shooting by the police of an unarmed criminal fleeing his hideout respectively.

Unfortunately no matter how much these episodes want to come to terms with the contemporary styles of that era, the elephant in the room remains Jack Warner himself, looking faintly ridiculous as a still-serving police officer. There's an air of 'what am I still doing here?' that lingers around his reliable, comforting presence in a manner which I imagine dogs the 67-year-old Derek Thompson's performance as nurse Charlie Fairhead now in that other BBC Saturday night perennial, Casualty. It's not just Warner's age (given that back then most men in their '60s looked by today's standards to be a good 15-20 years older, it's worth pointing out that Warner actually doesn't look half bad for his age) it's also the fact that he's clearly increasingly unsteady on his pins thanks to crippling arthritis of the hip and, on one occasion (the episode Sounds on this disc) seems to be reading all of his lines from various places around the set. These frailties saw the character become increasingly sidelined, content to open and close each episode with his trademark and now classic monologue to camera and later restrict himself to studio scenes only. But if you can suspend your disbelief it's really worth it because no one but the extremely hard-hearted would want to see Dixon completely removed from the programme. After all, he was the programme.

This set opens with what was the debut episode in the show's 17th series from November 1970. Entitled Waste-Land it marks a change in the show's format thanks to new producer Joe Waters who claims that his intentions were to make it less a show about the police and more about the people who got involved with the police. His decision to move the action onto the streets of East London using hand-held cameras means this episode has aged remarkably well and its easy to see why it garnered very good reviews way back in 1970 - dramas shot completely on film and on location were very rare for the BBC at that time. Watching it now, Waste-Land has a curio appeal, capturing as it does a disappearing and admittedly bleak and decrepit looking London on the cusp of change before the crumbling, decaying docklands were earmarked for redevelopment.

It's also a big step away from the preconceptions that the world of Dixon of Dock Green was a cosy one; the disturbing and grimy 16mm POV shot that opens proceedings suggesting someone disorientated, wandering around the derelict docks, with the unseen character's unnerving laboured breathing playing out upon the soundtrack, joined in by the voice of a woman describing the actions of someone who is clearly deeply, mentally troubled is far from what one expects.

It turns out the unseen character is one PC Norman, and the voice belongs to his long suffering wife. Norman is an officer plagued by an assault against him earlier in his career and we quickly learn that he is AWOL from duty with his Panda car turning up abandoned by the dock's waste-land. The team set out to locate their colleague, going from door to door speaking to the kind of community that, like the London of this time, has also now long gone. The kind of community we see replicated in Call The Midwife these days. They presume Norman was out looking for a suspect but, as Dixon talks to his wife, it becomes clear other, stranger possibilities may be near the mark. It's a bleak narrative that remains ever out of reach concluding with an open ending in which Dixon has to admit we can never truly know or understand a person, even if they live or work alongside us day to day.

Like the black and white episodes of the 50s and 60s, the rest of series 17 was wiped by the BBC meaning that the next episode on the disc is Jigsaw from a year later. Unfortunately, Jigsaw suffers from a slight case of repetition being, through no fault of it's own, similar to Waste-Land in terms of its exclusive location shoot around the unkempt abandoned areas of East London, its documentarian film style approach and the unnerving nature of the crime at its heart. The setting this time around is a derelict gasworks, and the case involves a missing wife rather than a husband. The programme boasts a strong guest cast including Windsor Davies, Glyn Edwards and Victor Maddern.

Eye Witness dates from 1973 and is an episode from Dixon's 20th series. This one, as mentioned earlier, feels very much like it's in The Sweeney's domain, apart from one major plot device that ultimately scuppers it and beggars belief. We open with Gwyneth Powell (later to become Grange Hill's Mrs McCluskey and Greg Davies' mum in Man Down) as Anne, the sole witness to a gangland shooting. She's a hardbitten, cynical young woman who is immediately taken into police protection, which she treats with utter disdain and contempt. And it's kind of easy to see why. You've just watched your boyfriend get gunned down by the likes of Stephen Grief (Citizen Smith's Harry Fenning) and Euro hood Steve Plytas (the drunk chef from the Fawlty Towers episode Gourmet Night) and had an attempt made on your own life - so I ask you, would you be happy to guarded by the 78-year-old Dixon and an ineffectual WPC on an island off the coast of Bristol?!

It's a major stretch of credibility and the episode never recovers from it, least of all when we're treated to a less than exhilarating 30mph chase across an unfinished stretch of West Country motorway to a private airfield where Dixon, clad in his civvies of sports jacket and vivid red poloneck (mmmm, nice) and accompanied by the irritating and wooden young hotelier, announces to the base staff that he's a policeman and averts the murderers plane from taking off. By that point it doesn't matter that we've seen Plytas handle business from the phone offered to him poolside by a delectable dollybird in the South of France (a very Sweeney like touch) or that Grief gives as ever a great account of himself as a tough heavy, the damage is pretty irreparable. That said, we're witness to yet another unhappy ending in which the villains get away with it (another Sweeney like touch - and remember, The Sweeney hadn't appeared on our screens by this stage) the headstrong Anne deciding to take the hush money offered to her by Plytas who, Dixon reveals, was the victim of a fatal traffic accident in France not long after - the only crumb of comfort in terms of justice this storyline offers us. Again, it's a world away from the notion of the show being a cosy, unrealistic representation of the police and criminals. The good guys in Dixon don't always win, just like they don't in reality.

Another face worth pointing out in this episode is that of a very young John Salthouse, appearing here as one of the criminals who kidnap Anne from her hotel hideaway. He would later go on to play the brilliant DI Roy Galloway in the first 3 series of The Bill.

Harry's Back is probably my favourite episode in the set. Again it's plot is very familiar to fans of The Sweeney and crime drama in general, indeed it's something of a mainstay. It concerns a seemingly untouchable villain, the kind of charmer who has everyone in the local community hoodwinked as to his true nature - family, fiance, friends, neighbours and even the police....except for Dixon's son-in-law Andy Crawford, who is determined to finally bring Harry Simpson (Lee Montague, brilliant with the aspects of largesse in his character but always tipping the viewer off to his real nature, which Andy suspects - it's worth mentioning too that Montague played the villain in Regan, the TV movie that started The Sweeney) to justice.

Harry is a typical stereotype of the East End villain; the kind one imagines is good to his mother and helps old dears across the road, is always in the chair at the pub and always has a good word or a fistful of fivers if you're on your uppers. Dock Green police know he's not as legit as he seems, but they can't prove it. Dixon takes the view that a criminal like Harry will one day trip up and that, in the meantime, it is best just to tolerate him. His son-in-law and former protege, disagrees. Andy wants to keep very close tabs on Harry, and its an action that leads to Harry - at his most cunning - report Andy for harassment to his superior officer, who just happens to belong to Harry's local golf club.

Written by NJ Crisp, a veteran scriptwriter on the show, Harry's Back is a strong episode which is only let down by its refusal to offer up another 'unlucky this time' finale - the kind of finale The Sweeney would have given us. Instead, through a series of slightly improbable events, Harry is ultimately brought to book by Andy. Though pleasingingly, in Dixon's closing monologue, it is revealed that Harry's friends, family and neighbours refuse to hear a bad word said about him and believe him to be framed by Andy.

So far, all the episodes in this set have been shot on film and on location. That's about to change with the next episode, 1974's Sounds

By 1974, it's rather clear Jack Warner was too ill to endure long location shoots. Transferring the character to the duties of desk sergeant meant that Warner was only required for studio scenes, which this time were shot on videotape. It's also clear - as I said earlier - that Warner is reading his lines from hidden cues around the set here.

Sounds is an interesting episode. There's a touch of Coppola's The Conversation on display in the team's efforts to make sense of the various background noises in a woman's call to the station which is abruptly cut off, suggesting foul play. The rather attractive Jacqueline Stanbury stars as WPC Hawkins, the young officer who takes the call and raised the alarm. She has heard the woman on the line ask for the police, before a choking sound is heard on the line and the woman's infant daughter picks up the phone to announce that mummy seems to have 'fallen asleep'. The race is on to save this potentially injured woman and her child who could still very well be in danger. Aiding the investigation is Dave (David Wood, who would go on to become Stanbury's husband a year later) a sound technician who examines the recording of the telephone call. He's gloriously '70s with his long hair and groovy clobber, a stark and somewhat jarring contrast to the staid old timer Dixon which reminds viewers there's a different world going on out there beyond the confines of Television Centre's Dock Green set, one which the show naively fails to understand or depict.

The plot develops rather nicely with the team locating where the call was made from, but finding no one at home. This leads to a representative from a security firm - the number of which was written alongside Dock Green's telephone number at the woman's address - played with an oily sickening charm by Michael Graham Cox. The police, and the audience, smell a rat instantly; this guy is too eager to help locate the woman and child and it isn't long before it becomes clear that he is the missing woman's husband and has ferreted her sway after a bout of domestic violence. When she is finally located, she refuses to press charges despite everyone's best efforts. Her husband, who believes he is utterly untouchable, is proven to be so and swaggers out of the station full of nauseating confidence as we know he will continue to abuse his wife.

Again, a desperately bleak tale in stark contrast to the twee reputation the series has. In conclusion, Dixon offers up only the tiniest sliver of hope in his monologue when he states that one day he hopes the battered woman will have the courage to report her husband to the police, if only for her daughter's sake. It's worth noting how far the show had progressed by this stage in terms of its stance on domestic violence - a previous episode from the 1950s suggested Dixon saw little harm in what went on between man and wife behind closed doors ;"if I arrested every bloke who clocked his wife, I'd be working overtime" An offensive attitude yes, but sadly one all too indicative of the times. Twenty years is a long time in television, and Dixon clearly rode the seas of change to move with the times thankfully.

The last episode in this DVD set is another which features a plot that could conceivably come straight from The Sweeney and is one that is especially interesting to watch as a comparison piece to Line of Duty currently on its blisteringly good third series on BBC2. Entitled Firearms Were Issued it dates from 1974 and features a nighttime raid on a house a gang of bank robbers are holed up in by armed police officers led by Andy Crawford. Andy has received a tip-off regarding the gang's whereabouts and was told they would be armed. He believes this tip because the gang are wanted for an armed robbery and so it falls to Dixon to issue guns to Dock Green officers Crawford, Wills, Cox and Dewar, reminding them firmly and precisely of the procedures they must adhere to whilst in possession of a lethal weapon.

Needles to say the raid is a disaster. It's the dead of night, which means a disorientating experience and, when Andy Crawford tumbles to the ground whilst giving chase, his colleagues believe he has been shot and 'return' fire on what is soon to be revealed as an unarmed, fleeing man. 

What follows is an atmospherically captured long dark night of the soul for the regular characters as they are each confined to the station to come under the scrutiny of no-nonsense A10 officer Donovan played by veteran actor Percy Herbert who interrogates them intensely one by one. Both Dewar and Wills believe themselves responsible for the death of the unarmed man as they both fired off shots alongside the shot Andy inadvertently fired as he took his tumble - the shot they believed came from their man. Wills is a reliable, dependable type who, having been with the show since 1961, is understandably familiar to the viewers. He's also referred to in the episode as an excellent marksman, cool under crisis. Dewar, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity, younger and clearly greener. However the episode pulls the rug from under us by revealing at the close that it was in fact Wills who delivered the fatal bullet. 

It's a rather cracking, atmospheric 'night shift' episode but unfortunately it's one that is likely to support anyone's idea that Dixon was not very realistic and prone to wrapping things up in a happy-ever-after style. We know from the other episodes in this set that that was not the case, but Firearms Were Issued does rather let the side down. In the closing monologue it is revealed by Dixon that an inquest into Wills' actions returned a verdict of justifiable homicide, with Dixon admitting he would likely have made the same mistake in Wills and Dewar's situation.

All very well George, but the fact remains that an unarmed was fatally shot whilst running away. It's an astounding conclusion, but given the miscarriages of justice involved in cases against police officers down the years (and as I type this post the family of Juan Charles de Menezes have just been told they have lost their human rights challenge over the decision not to charge any police officer for the unlawful shooting of their son in London's Stockwell Tube in 2005) it's perhaps one that is more likely than we'd care to admit.

Just like the character of DS Steve Arnott says in Line of Duty; "easiest way to get away with killing someone? Be a police officer"

Same as it ever was.

Well, that's your lot for this first volume of Dixon releases. The extras on this DVD are rather non-existent, just a filmography of the actors involved in the production.

If you've enjoyed my ramblings on this show, I may review the other two DVDs in the boxset once I get round to viewing them.

Evening all.