Something to watch tonight: Friday 23 May

Edge of Darkness (Campbell, 1985)

American actor Joe Don Baker passed away this month and the online memorials and obituaries have been largely focused on his breakthrough role as Buford Pusser in the vigilante film series Walking Tall or playing two different characters in three Bond films, but I’ll always think of him as the rogue and rogue-ish CIA agent Darius Jedburgh in the 1985 BBC thriller series Edge of Darkness.

This show was hugely influential on me at the time. The topics of nuclear conspiracy and eco-terrorism were getting quite a bit of traction in Thatcher’s Britain and those ominous shots of the trains rolling past suburban houses carrying huge canisters of nuclear waste weren’t figments of writer Troy Kennedy Martin’s imagination. And there wasn’t much trust around either – not for the government, the police, industry or the military – and the show tapped right into that.

Shakespearian actor Bob Peck – did anyone else have the amazing Ralph Steadman poster for the RSC production of Macbeth on their wall? – plays Yorkshire police detective Ronald Craven, investigating possible corruption in the Miners’ Union. When his daughter Emma (Joanne Whalley) is shot dead in front of him, everyone’s first thought is that he must have been the target. Revenge for a prior conviction, something like that.

But as his unofficial investigations reveal that, far from being a simple left-wing university student, Emma had been protesting against Britain’s nuclear secrecy and discovered the cover-up of an accident at a low level nuclear waste facility called Northmoor.

This had put her on the radar of both MI5 and Jedburgh’s CIA and, as Craven digs deeper, the conspiracy reaches ever higher.

One of the things I liked about Baker’s performance in Edge of Darkness was that it was so not-BBC. Like the character himself, he looked like he’d arrived from another planet, not another country. But no one is doing old fashioned BBC acting, thanks to Martin’s script which isn’t afraid to go in some weird directions. Peck has some extraordinary moments as a grief-stricken father, imagining that he’s talking to Emma as a child (Imogen Staley).

Edge of Darkness was directed by New Zealander Martin Campbell who would go on to direct the less successful film remake of Edge of Darkness, starring Mel Gibson. When that came out in 2010, I wrote:

Relocated to Massachusetts, and with fading superstar Mel Gibson in the role made famous by taciturn Bob Peck, this Edge of Darkness should be named something else so that it can’t be compared to the original. Then we can hate it for what it is rather than what it isn’t.

This was also the show that introduced me to the music of Willie Nelson. Craven lies on Emma’s bed in episode one, holding her teddy bear to his chest, listening to Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” from Red Headed Stranger:

And he cried like a baby
And he screamed like a panther
In the middle of the night
And he saddled his pony
And he went for a ride

It was a time of the preacher
In the year of O-one
Now the lesson is over
And the killin's begun

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Where to watch Edge of Darkness