The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder is one of the finest TV Detective series evar. Dating from 1969-71, two seasons were made, one either side of Hugh Burden's memorable appearance as Channing in Spearhead from Space. Burden plays the title character, a mild-mannered, seemingly absent-minded civil servant, who is of course far sharper than he appears. Possessing a "criminal mind" (as is pointed out by or to him in most episodes), Reeder can out-think even the smartest and most dangerous criminals to be found in 1920s London.

Being made in the 1970s and set in the 1920s means there are several episodes that... how can I put it... wouldn't get made that way today, if at all. This includes one instance of Indian characters not played by Indians, and two with 'Yellow Peril' Chinese - the latter including a stage magician character with a 'vanishing lady' trick that could easily have been an inspiration for Li H'sen Chang, and David "Monkey" Collings in yellowface - although, unlike with John Bennett, it is only his character who dons yellowface within the story. The same can not be said for other characters, including the aforementioned stage magician.

Aside from Mr. Reeder, the other main character is his boss Sir Jason Toovey, Director of Public Prosecutions, played by Willoughby Goddard. He is a wonderful comic foil to Burden's Reeder and lights up every scene he appears in, and conveys that Sir Jason is not quite the 'buffoon with a clever underling' that a superficial reading of the character might indicate, and for all that his alternating between blustering at Reeder and sucking up to the aristocracy (his two main character traits) make him seem like a character out of a P. G. Wodehouse story.

Other recurring characters of note are Reeder's Scottish housekeeper Mrs. Houchin (Mona Bruce), whose attempts to feed Reeder with disgusting-sounding meaty meals force him to constantly have to improvise reasons for not eating them, and Miss Bellman (Virginia Stride in season one, then the sadly not as good Gillian Lewis in season two), Reeder's hopeless love interest - hopeless in the sense that it is made obvious to the viewers that each is equally in love with the other, but they are too uptight and restrained by the etiquette of their class and time to act upon it.

The plots are inventive, with little sign of the format becoming stale by the end of the run. There was only one really bad episode, in which John "Bilbo Baggins" Le Mesurier was wasted as a guest star with an implausible death trap in his house, randomly, and which Reeder and Miss Bellman only escape from through chance, not from Reeder's intelligence. At the other extreme, the best episode of the series, titled Sheer Melodrama, sees Reeder tell Miss Bellman that he prefers melodramatic plays to so-called 'realism' at the theatre due to the melodrama plots being more realistic - which is then borne out by the sequence of decidedly unlikely and melodramatic events that then befalls them both.

Out of 16 episodes, only two exist in colour (both from the second season, so I don't know if the first season was originally made in colour or not), and I guess we are lucky that they exist at all.