RANDALL and HOPKIRK (deceased)
Season 2

WHATEVER POSSESSED YOU?

Jeff and Jeannie are hired to look into a series of deaths at a haunted hotel during one of its ghost weekends. Marty returns to help them fight a couple of spirits looking to change the past and live again.

The second series of the revamped ghost and PI show opens with quite a strong episode that eschews a lot of the low comedy that has undermined it so far and plays it quite straight with some decent performances all round.

The plot is reasonably complex involving the troubled spirits, a place where the fabric of time and space have become thin (handy to have ex-Time Lord Tom Baker around then), time travel, exorcism and a once famous investigative journalist turned tabloid hack (played with convincing levels of self-loathing by Hywel Bennett). The events of 1951 are rendered in very pretty black and white, Jeff and Jeannie finally get it on (well sort of) and there are some decent effects with the faceless spirit and the burning man.

Only the clunky excuse for getting Marty to give Jeff his memories back (after having made such a big deal about him and Jeannie needing never to remember at the end of the last season) is disappointing.

In all, this is the best episode that the show has served up to date.

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REVENGE OF THE BOG PEOPLE

Marty is feeling down, so Wyvern saddles him with a mischeivous ghost who seems to have a few tricks up his sleeve that might come in handy as Jeff tries to solve the murder of an old flame, something that brings him into conflict with a jealous Jeannie.

There's more than a slice of THE SIXTH SENSE about this episode, but it's all handled as well as M Night Shyamalan could manage up to the point of the central reveal. The plot's not very difficult to work out, but that's not actually the point of the episode. Here it's the relationship between Jeff and Freya (her father was an anthropologist) and the effect it has on both him and Jeannie that matters. This series is using the central relationship between the two living detectives as something to move the story forward as well as having the stand alone mystery plots.

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BEST YEARS OF YOUR DEATH

Jeannie's nephew suspects foul play at his new boarding school, so Jeff and she go undercover as new members of the faculty to find out what is going on and why the red jacketed choir members seem to be in charge.

Phyllis Logan and Peter Bowles are the guest stars in this mildly entertaining tale that mixes up hints of the STEPFORD WIVES (or in this case students) with old ideas about secret societies within the hallowed halls of private schooling.

It would work a lot better without the low farce which this time around involves possession by Marty and a lot of physical comedy from Bob Mortimer as a man not in control of his own body.

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O HAPPY ISLE

Jeff and Jeannie go to a remote Scottish island to look into the death of a mainlander who was working on the brewery's computer system. Why are the islanders so unfriendly, what is the high-tech hidden lab working on and why have Jeannie's breasts got bigger?

This episode reverts to type by undercutting the plot (derived liberally from THE WICKER MAN and DR NO, both of which are namechecked in case anyone missed the references) with some unsubtle humour based around inappropriate same sex relationships, trying to get around the awkwardness of this by having a central rant about how gay people are people too and have rights and all that. It's clunky and very poorly handled. The setting is nicely handled and for once Marty is able to provide most of the information needed, though it takes the living longer to put it all together. It is also left to the living detectives to do pretty much all the work, with the ghostly partner left only to arrange an escape from prison.

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PAINKILLERS

Jeff and Jeannie are hired by a couple of shadowy civil servants to infiltrate a secret government laboratory and find out what is going on inside after a previous agent dies two days after receiving a quick acting poison.

There is no expense being spared for this show as the jungle built inside the laboratory and the laboratory equipment shows. This is the second time in succession that a high-tech laboratory has been the focus of matters.

There is also the calibre of the co-stars. In this episode Vic and Bob manage to rope in none other than the inestimable Derek Jacobi and the estimable, but lots of fun, Dervla Kirwin.

The plot is complex, involving dead Amazonian tribes, life-prolonging plants, delayed pain, truth serums and death by pleasure. It's given heft by Jacobi's presence and he plays his part beautifully straight, leaving all the nonsense to the others, including an utterly ridiculous pantomime fight sequence. At least that gives one good laugh right at the end.

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MARSHALL AND SNELLGROVE

In a ski lodge, a newly rich man tells a tale of how two brothers fought over an inheritance whilst two firms of private detectives failed to prevent a number of deaths.

This episode thinks that it is very tricksy, but the twists and turns that it throws out are pretty obvious all the way through. This leaves only the incidentals to carry it through and unfortunately they are not strong enough. The rivalry with the other detective firm, most especially the odious Snellgrove isn't funny enough and the whole plot is so decidedly odd in terms of the characters that it grates, especially since it's obvious what is going on.

The highlight remains the startling depiction of the afterlife and continuing hints as to the place of the mysterious Wyvern within it.

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THE GLORIOUS BUTRANEKH

Jeff and Jeannie travel to Latvia to the aid of their one time cleaner whose child has been abducted. Jeff chases down an all-woman cult whose members are determined to kill Jeannie and the cleaner in the morning.

This episode is almost completely joke free and ends up being quite interesting by playing the whole thing utterly straight. It gives a real sense of the what show might have managed had it been a straight remake rather than a comedy one. Unfortunately, the plot itself is utter nonsense and detectives as incompetent as these would have fared far worse in foreign climes than the events depicted here. Everyone in Latvia speaks English apparently.

Pauline Quirke guest stars as the cleaner, but the real star is the washed out, faded cinematography that gives a realistic impression of a washed out, faded ex-Russian republic. It is a shame the story can't live up to that.

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TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME

Whilst Jeff is laid up with injuries gained in the line of duty, Jeannie takes on a case on his behalf. She and a kid from his school are caught up in a department store that has become a death trap. Meanwhile Marty visits the seaside town from hell. Literally.

The unearthly story, though, is what really works here. Marty is losing his bond with Jeff and when that happens then things go very badly wrong for ghosts. Rhadamanthus-on-Sea (named for a Greek mythological judge of the dead) is a dreadful and creepy place that is a truly terrifying afterlife. There, unloved ghosts wander a bleak landscape of boarding houses and awful holiday shows until they forget the human they were attached to and become empty shells on an endless pier. It's a very, very scary place that wouldn't be out of place in a horror show and that's what makes this episode so very good. A bit more like this and the ghost show's resurrection might have lasted more than two series.

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