George Gently, Series 2 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

George Gently, Series 2 Blu-ray Movie Review

It's a Cold, Cruel World

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 30, 2013

With the release of Series 2 of George Gently on Blu-ray, Acorn Media has now completed the hi-def collection of the episodes that have aired to date. Series 6 is scheduled to air in the U.K. this fall. Simultaneously with the release of Series 2, Acorn is also releasing a box set of Series 1-4, as well as Series 5.

A general introduction to the world of George Gently can be found in the review of Series 1. In Series 2, Chief Inspector Gently and Detective Sergeant John Bacchus are still getting to know each other, and Bacchus is still technically married, although Bacchus and his wife are clearly separated by a vast space, even though they share a roof. Lisa Bacchus has become curious about the working relationship between her husband and his boss, which remains a work-in-progress. In Series 2, that relationship is tested in numerous ways. What is especially notable about the cases is how they wind and twist into dark places that surprise even the worldly Gently, who thought he'd seen it all.

Series 2.1: "Gently with the Innocents" (May 3, 2009) 5/5

At the episode's opening, Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) is suffering through a visit to a local school where, as part of a community outreach program, he addresses a classroom of bored teenagers about being a cop. He returns to his office muttering dire predictions about Britain's future to an amused Gently (Martin Shaw). Schools, teachers and the oversight of young people are crucial themes in "Gently with the Innocents", as a sense of impending change blows through all of Britain.

Shortly thereafter, Gently and Bacchus are called to Harrison House, whose owner, Alfred Peachment (Brian de Salvo), has been found beaten to death in the immaculately tended gardens behind the huge house. The murder was reported by Cora Davidson (Jill Halfpenny), a real estate developer who has just closed on the property and was there to inspect it before demolition to make way for new construction. Suspicion immediately falls on the gardener, Harry Carson (Matthew McNulty), a strong but mentally challenged young man who is prone to violence if provoked. Carson is supposed to be at work, but he is nowhere to be found. When he later reappears, his shirt is covered with the victim's blood.

Gently and Bacchus are not the first on the scene. They arrive to find a young constable, Sergeant Blacksmith (Mark Stobbart), who is native to the area and seems to know everything and everbody. Himself the son of a local officer (now deceased), Blacksmith explains that Harrison House was formerly a school, but closed in 1947 rather than comply with new state regulations. Peachment wasn't even supposed to be there, but he had resisted selling the property, until the local planning board forced his hand. Then he stubbornly refused to move out.

Bacchus is particularly annoyed by Blacksmith, because his presentation is so polished. The two of them are rivals for an inspector's position that has just opened up. Bacchus is even more disturbed that his own boss seems impressed by his rival's deportment.

Real estate and the wealth that accompanies it have often motivated criminal conduct. Already sensing something amiss, Gently and Bacchus have their suspicions confirmed when they return to Harrison House later in the day to find the head of the planning board, Dr. Philip Morgan (Paul Copley), rifling through the dead man's papers—under the watchful eye of the very proper Sergeant Blacksmith. Further inquiry reveals that the dead man's widow, Enid Peachment (Georgine Anderson), from whom he'd been separated for many years, is Dr. Morgan's sister, and the survey on which the planning board based their decision was performed by Dr. Morgan's brother. The entire affair begins to look like a plot to get the property away from the old man for a tidy profit, then murder him when he wouldn't stop protesting.

But as so often happens in George Gently, even the sinister explanations aren't sinister enough. Like the mute gardener, Harry Carson, none of the people in "Gently with the Innocents" are truly speaking; they're just making noise. Harrison House has secrets that have been carefully locked away and that even Gently and Bacchus can't interpret when they're uncovered without forcing the truth out of several witnesses whose reluctance to speak is embedded in every fiber of their being. In 1964, certain crimes were so unthinkable that Gently gets suspended even for raising the possibility that they might have occurred. True to his nature, he keeps investigating anyway.


Series 2.2 "Gently in the Night (May 10, 2009) 4.5/5

What if Hugh Hefner had chosen a fox instead of a bunny as the emblem of his Playboy empire? A Playboy-like club called Rakes operated by an American who's a cross between Hefner and Hustler's Larry Flynt is at the center of "Gently in the Night", which begins with the discovery of a young woman's body delicately laid on a church altar.

The victim, Audrey Chadwick (Sian Breckin), told her parents (Bill Fellows and Mary Jo Randle) and her landlady that she worked as a nurse. Bacchus, however, recognizes her from Rakes, where the unhappily married sergeant is embarrassed to admit that he's been enjoying a trial membership. The proprietor of Rakes, Patrick Donovan (Brendan Coyle), says that Audrey was a "perfect" Fox, not unlike his wife, Helen (Clare Calbraith), before he married her. Audrey, too, saw Rakes as the path to marrying a rich man, but just before she was killed, she'd announced to her best friend, another Fox named Fawn Granger (Nichola Burley), that she was moving to London.

The presence of Rakes in the community has not gone unnoticed. The club is routinely picketed by protesters led by Margaret Bishop (Tracey Wilkinson), who photographs patrons entering and exiting and hands out prayer cards to the female employees. In a sad comment on the state of the Bishop marriage, Gently discovers Margaret's husband Joe, an attorney, sitting comfortably in the office of Rakes's owner, Patrick Donovan, who is a client. As part of his compensation, Joe Bishop enjoys a membership at Rakes, a fact of which his wife may or may not be aware. Gently and Bacchus are naturally intrigued by this connection, given the ecclesiastical circumstances in which Audrey's body was found. But as they both recognize, Margaret Bishop isn't strong enough to have carried Audrey into the church undetected after killing her somewhere else.

Audrey's former boyfriend, Frank Allingham (Diarmaid Murtagh), certainly would have had the strength and has the temper to match. For that matter, so does her father, Ronnie Chadwick, whose wife turns up for a second interview with bruises on her face. Indeed, as the investigation progresses, Gently and Bacchus encounter a full array of unrepentantly male chauvinist behavior, expressed without embarrassment in this pre-feminist age (including by Bacchus, who hasn't exactly been a saint at Rakes). Allegations of rape emerge, as does the issue of abortion, which was still illegal under British law in 1964.

Although the killer is ultimately identified and captured, the result hardly leaves a sense of justice served. Audrey Chadwick may have been killed by a single person, but she was the victim of many. Maybe that's why series creator Peter Flannery chose to end "Gently in the Night" on a lighter note with an exhibition boxing match between Gently and Bacchus. Everyone needed a a little comic relief.


Series 2.3: "Gently in the Blood" (May 17, 2009) 4.5/5

The Notting Hill riots of August-September 1958 were a watershed event in the history of British race relations. They occurred in an area of London heavily populated by immigrants from the Caribbean and were fueled by attacks from so-called "Teddy boys", many of whom belonged to groups such as the White Defence League. Forces from the Met were called out nightly to keep order. Gently was a constable then, and during the course of "Gently in the Blood", he relates his experiences to Bacchus. He saw things he hopes never to see again on an English street, but their latest case reveals layers to the issue of race that even Gently couldn't have anticipated.

It begins with stakeout based on an anonymous tip about stolen passports. The seller manages to escape but the passports are recovered, and they lead to the local passport office headed by Philip Saint (Joe Simpson). Suspicion immediately falls on Maggie Alderton (Robyn Addison), the clerk in charge of shipping expired passports to the main office in London for destruction. Among other things, she's an unwed single mother with a six-week old baby to support. The infant's picture is on her desk, and Bacchus immediately focuses on the baby's dark skin.

As it happens, the escaped passport seller is Maggie's former boyfriend, Jimmy Cochran (Andrew Lee Potts), a local gang leader who walked out on the poor girl when the baby was born, even though she swore she'd been faithful. Jimmy and his crew are engaged in a bitter turf war with an Arab gang led by Hamed (Tariq Jordan) for control of local petty crime. It was Hamed who phoned in the tip about the illegal sale, hoping to put his rival behind bars and out of business.

The day after they visit the passport office, Gently and Bacchus are called to the seashore where Maggie Alderton has been found dead. Now they have to disentangle the financial motives (the stolen passport enterprise) from the personal ones (the paternity of Maggie's baby). The task becomes more difficult as they realize that everyone involved grew up together—with one exception. An older Arab man named Thomas Ali (Stewart Scudamore) hovers in the background for much of the episode, his origins and interests a mystery. Hamed claims that Thomas Ali is the father of Maggie's baby, and he does indeed seem to have taken an unusal interest in her. But nothing about him suggests a motive for murder.

In William Faulkner's famous phrase, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." As a chronicler of the South, Faulkner understood the twists and turns of bloodlines and race relations. He would have appreciated "Gently in the Blood".


Series 2.4: "Gently Through the Mill" (May 24, 2009) 4/5

The final episode of Series 2 is set in the days leading up to the General Election of 1964, which was held on October 15. Durham's seat in Parliament is heavily contested between the incumbent Tory candidate, Nicholas Mundy (Trevor Cooper), and the Labour challenger, Geoffrey Pershore (Tim McInnerny). Indeed, Gently and Bacchus have to clear the two warring candidates and their supporters out of the road before they can gain access to the Rinton Mill, where the body of its manager, Patrick Fuller (Joe Duttine), has been found hanging by his friend Henry Blythely (Nicholas Jones) and the foreman, Sam Draper (Tom Goodman-Hill).

Murder or suicide? The facts are inconclusive. Fuller left no note, but he'd been suffering financially for a long time. He used to own the Rinton Mill but was forced to sell it after years of losses. The buyer was none other than candidate Geoffrey Pershore, who retained Fuller as manager. Fuller then turned around and appointed Draper as foreman instead of a much more deserving candidate, Jed Jimpson (Justin McDonald)—a decision that no one at the mill could understand, since Draper is a lazy, surly fellow, and Jimpson is young and energetic. After being passed over, Jimpson now spends all his spare time working on the campaign for Pershore, whom he worships as a surrogate father, ever since his own alcoholic father died of liver failure.

The safe in Fuller's office has been rifled, and all the petty cash is gone. When Gently has Pershore review the contents, he gets the sense that something else is missing, but Pershore is evasive. Then he tells Gently that, shortly before Fuller died, the auditors found irregularities in the mill's accounts. Was Fuller embezzling and about to be caught? If so, where is the money?

A different set of issues arises when Bacchus goes to Fuller's house to notify Mrs. Fuller (Julia Ford) of her husband's death. She says he was having an affair with his 17-year-old secretary, Julie (Kate Heppell), on whose attractive figure Bacchus' eye has already lingered. (He didn't hire her for her secretarial skills, says Mrs. Fuller. "To call her thick as two planks would be unfair to the planks.") Indeed, evidence at the scene, as well as autopsy results, suggest that Fuller died shortly after an encounter with a woman.

"Gently Through the Mill" is an atypical episode of George Gently, which generally succeeds in parsing the complexities of its cases at just the right speed to reach the story's conclusion with utter clarity about who did what and why. This particular episode feels rushed; indeed, I had to watch it twice to make sure I understood how all the pieces fit together. Part of the reason is that the case turns on several interim developments that seem to come from nowhere, including a side trip into the secretive world of Freemasonry. But the principal cause is the time devoted to the episode's secondary plot, which is the deteriorating relationship between Gently and Bacchus.

Bacchus has never forgotten that Gently quashed his transfer to the London Met at the end of the pilot episode. At the beginning of "Gently Through the Mill", he asks the boss's permission to attend a seminar entitled "A Modern Approach to Policing Crime in London", which Gently refuses. "I can summarize it for you in two sentences", says the former London detective. "One: Find out where the villains drink. Two: Ask them for a bribe." Determined to get to London by any means necessary, Bacchus goes to his father-in-law, the Chief Constable (Mal Whyte), and has Gently overruled, but by the end he realizes that his father-in-law is actually hoping he'll disappear to London so that he'll leave the Chief Constable's daughter for good.

Lisa Bacchus (Melanie Clark Pullen) may be reaching the same conclusion. Both we and Gently meet her in this episode for the first time, and she is gravely concerned about the state of her marriage. Sergeant Bacchus is clearly at a crossroad in his life, and while it is dramatically interesting to explore, the exploration takes away essential screen time from a criminal investigation that's already hard enough to follow.

George Gently, Series 2 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As previously noted in the review of Series 5, Acorn Media has changed their approach to video encoding with the most recent releases of George Gently. Previous releases (that is, Series 1, 3 and 4) have been issued with two episodes per disc (each episode is approximately 90 minutes long) on BD-50s. Series 2 and 5, which are being released simultaneously, have the same amount of content per disc, but the discs are BD-25s. Acorn has achieved excellent images with their releases of Midsomer Murders using this arrangement, and they apparently have decided to try the same approach with George Gently.

The approach worked with Series 5, where the content was 1080p, but it doesn't work nearly as well with Series 2, which like the other series preceding Series 5, arrives in 1080i format. Series 1, 3 and 4 have very good images, despite the interlaced formatting, but on my main display, Series 2 was covered with an almost continuous layer of video noise, as the much lower bitrate struggled to keep up with the constant field shifts. The problem was easy to see when I was doing screen captures, because combing and motion artifacts in the image were much more frequent than in the previous 1080i series. In normal viewing, a good player will do its best to eliminate such problems, but it can only do so much; hence the video noise. (Of course, isolating single frames in captures minimizes the effect.)

There are times when I find the prejudice against 1080i to be unfair. Properly handled, it can produce a stunning image. But if Series 2 of George Gently is any indication, 1080i cannot reliably tolerate the same degree of compression as 1080p. Acorn got away with it on the first two volumes (19 and 20) of Midsomer Murders, presumably due to differences in the source format, but the results for Series 2 of George Gently are nowhere near comparable in quality, either to those volumes of Midsomer Murders or to other volumes of George Gently.

Colors, black levels and contrast are on a par with the other series of George Gently. But the image as a whole is subpar compared to every other series, and I am docking the video score accordingly. As I noted in my review of Series 5, Acorn charges a premium price for what is supposed to be a premium product. Why would it cut corners with disc capacity when its previous approach to 1080i has worked so well? George Gently is too good a series, and these episodes are too high quality, to let this drop in video quality deter anyone, but Acorn should avoid mastering 1080i material with this extreme degree of compression.

George Gently, Series 2 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Having previously encoded George Gently's audio as PCM, Acorn Media has now switched to DTS-HD MA 2.0. From the listener's point of view, the difference in lossless formats is moot, because the track continues to provide the same basic and functional mix, emphasizing dialogue and essential effects. As on previous episodes, there is a general sense of environmental ambiance, but otherwise nothing special from the surrounds and no major work for a subwoofer. Irish composer Ray Harman continued his scoring duties from the pilot episode and Series 1.

George Gently, Series 2 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Martin Shaw Interview: In text, the actor recalls his own memories of 1964, when he was studying at drama school in London.



• Lee Ingleby Interview: In text, the actor discusses his character, the period and the episodes.



• Producer Johann Knobel Notes: This brief note reads more like an official press presentation than a personal statement, but it contains relevant information.



• 1964 Historical Facts: A list of events from 1964 in both world history and popular culture. Several season sets of Mad Men have included a similar feature, and it's a great extra for a series that draws on historical references.

George Gently, Series 2 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

With all five series of George Gently now available on Blu-ray (and despite the video shortcomings of Series 2), it's possible to stand back and appreciate the remarkable arc of the Gently/Bacchus relationship as it has evolved from the initial hostility and grudging respect of the pilot episode to the often cantankerous partnership that is essential to the dramatic finale of "Gently in the Cathedral" in Series 5. These are two men from opposite worlds, of different eras and with incompatible temperaments, but like soldiers in war, they share a unique bond forged by a special type of combat. The Blu-rays of Series 2 may not be up to the technical level of their compatriots, but they're still highly recommended for their content.