George Gently, Series 4 Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

George Gently, Series 4 Blu-ray Movie Review

Further into Darkness

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 27, 2012

The fourth series of Inspector George Gently arrives on Blu-ray less than a year after it first aired in the U.K. in September 2011. A fifth series is currently in production. The only remaining gap in the Blu-ray releases is Series 2 from 2009, which Acorn Media will hopefully fill soon.

For anyone not already acquainted with this first-rate police drama set in the 1960s in the northeast of Britain, I refer you to the reviews of Series 1 and Series 3. Each episode of George Gently is a standalone entry, but there's evolution in the lives of the two lead characters, Det. Chief Inspector Gently and Det. Sergeant John Bacchus, as the show has progressed. Depending on one's sensitivity to spoilers, reading further in this review may bring exposure to unwanted information.

Series 4 establishes a different tone from previous seasons, in large part because less time is spent exploring the relationship between the two leads. It's 1966, and two years have passed since Gently relocated to Durham County from London following the murder of his wife. After their initially rocky start, Gently and Bacchus appear to have settled into a routine, and Bacchus seems more relaxed following the resolution of the divorce that made him prone to erratic behavior. (He's even dating again.) For the most part, the episodes in Series 4 focus on the cases themselves, although one of them turns out to have great personal significance for Gently, because it involves someone he's known for years.

Note: For reasons unknown, the two episodes of Series 4 are presented on Acorn Media's disc in the reverse of their broadcast order. They are discussed below in their original order, with broadcast dates noted. I strongly recommend viewing them as broadcast, because the second episode ("Goodbye China") plays more effectively as a conclusion than an opening.


Series 4.1: "Gently Upside Down" (Sept. 4, 2011) 4/5

The title refers to a TV pop show hosted by a slimy lecher named Tony (Neil Morrissey). It features live performances by bands reminiscent of the early days of the Beatles, while attractive teens dance around them and personnel in the control room instruct the camera crew to focus on the most attractive female legs. Kids from local high schools line up to appear on Upside Down. Two of them are Hazel Holdaway (Kate Bracken) and Shelley Marshall (Jade Byrne), students at a nearby school where Hazel's father, Peter Holdaway (Vincent Regan), is deputy headmaster and teaches a poetry class. Hazel sufficiently impresses the show's producer, Hogge (Chris Coghill), to be considered for a permanent spot as co-host.

On one evening when Hazel and Shelley are attending a broadcast of Upside Down, the body of their schoolmate, Mary Claverton (Shannon Tarbet), is found in Pinnock Woods, where wild animals have dug up her shallow grave. As Gently and Bacchus investigate, they discover a tangle of troubled relationships. The dead girl was considered a bright student with a promising future, but her working class parents say that she'd recently become a stranger, as if she'd entered another world. Mary and Hazel had been best friends for years, but lately they'd seemed more rivals than friends.

The poems in Mary's notebooks are filled with images and phrases that could be taken as mere fantasy, but they suggest an affair with a much older man. According to Shelley, all the girls at school have a crush on the music teacher, Mr. Nugent (Kieran Bew), and Mary's father, Joe Claverton (Sean Gilder), once threatened Nugent for paying too much attention to his daughter. Then again, Mary's notebook contains alarming things about her father as well.

The more Gently and Bacchus cycle through the worlds that Mary traversed before her death, the more guilty everyone looks. By the time the murderer is identified, almost no one has emerged with their honor intact. George Gently is set in an era when so-called "traditional values" are supposedly dissolving under the relentless assault of a self-indulgent youth culture, but in "Gently Upside Down", it turns out to be the adults who constitute the "Me Generation".


Series 4.2: "Goodbye China" (Sept. 11, 2011) 5/5

Gently's Irish informant known as "China" disappeared from the show after Series 1, but he played a critical role at the outset. It was China (played in the pilot by Sean McGinley) who persuaded Gently to pursue his wife's murderer north to Durham County and provided crucial information that allowed Gently to bring the killer to justice. China followed the grieving detective north, where (now played by actor Tony Rohr) he proved useful in both of the cases that made up Series 1. But China's drinking grew progressively worse, and he became useless to Gently as a "snout".

In "Goodbye China", Gently receives a letter from China's sister-in-law advising him that his old informant has died in the neighboring town of Wellaby. The news is especially disturbing to Gently, because he'd last seen China only three months earlier, when, looking much the worse for wear, China contacted the detective for a handout. Not liking what he saw, Gently tried to give the grizzled alcoholic a push in the right direction, telling him to move somewhere new, clean up and start over. To emphasize how serious he was, Gently gave China all the money he had on him at the time, then told him they were done. Now Gently wonders whether he might have pushed too hard on a fragile man.

As much from a sense of duty as a guilty conscience, Gently begins a routine investigation of China's death and immediately finds discrepancies. The coroner's report says that China was a homeless derelict living in an abandoned factory, where he died from head trauma sustained in a drunken fall, but China's body has injuries that aren't on the report and lacks injuries that should be there if he died as the coroner claims. Further inquiry raises doubts about whether China was drunk, where he was living, whether he was ever in the abandoned factory and how he actually arrived at the hospital where he died.

Because Wellaby is outside of Gently's immediate jurisdiction, he has to bring his concerns to the police superintendent for the area, Alan Shepherd (Neil Pearson), who happens to be an old friend and colleague from London. Shepherd is as straight as they come, Gently tells Bacchus, which makes it particularly worrisome when, during their first meeting, Shepherd is cooperative but evasive. He must be protecting someone, Gently concludes. About half an hour into the episode, the audience is provided with a major reveal on that score, but Gently doesn't discover it until much later.

A young officer on Shepherd's force, Sgt. Molloy (Dean Lennox Kelly), is clearly involved in something fishy, as is his wife, Terri (Christine Bottomley), a nurse at the hospital where China was admitted. So, too, are a teacher at a local school, Paul Collison (Darren Morfitt), and the Blackburn brothers, David and John (Jay Miller and Niek Versteeg), two teenage hooligans so notorious locally that their own father (Mark Benton) considers them a lost cause. But how does any of this connect to China's death?

The explanation, once Gently has stripped away all the lies and cover-ups, turns out to be both exceedingly simple and infuriatingly complex. Indeed, as Gently sits at the end and surveys the landscape of misdeeds and moral equivocation his investigation has revealed, he finds a letter China wrote him just before he died, and reading it brings tears to his eyes. For all his faults, Gently's old informant was one of the few truly decent men he knew.

George Gently, Series 4 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Production of George Gently relocated to England from Ireland with Series 3, but the show continued to use seaside locales and pastoral settings to underline the country setting as a new beginning for the beleaguered inspector. Not so in Series 4, where even the small-town and country locations seem dark and dingy. The hi-def image capture is ably presented on Acorn Media's 1080i, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, with a picture that is clean, sharp, detailed and almost entirely lacking in video noise or aliasing while the image is in motion. (Screencaps are a different matter.) As in previous episodes, the color palette remains muted, although the "Gently Upside Down" episode makes some allowance for Sixties fashion, and flashback sequences are typically presented with more saturated colors, as has been the case in previous episodes. Black levels are very good, and there are no compression issues.

George Gently, Series 4 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Acorn Media continues to provide George Gently with a PCM 2.0 track, which is basic and effective, emphasizing dialogue and essential effects. There is a general sense of environmental ambiance, but otherwise nothing special from the surrounds and no major work for a subwoofer. The underscoring for "Gently Upside Down" was provided by Dominik Scherrer, who scored Series 3, and for "Goodbye China" by Anne Dudley, an Oscar winner for The Full Monty.

George Gently, Series 4 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes (SD; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 13:34): This entertaining featurette was made on location during the filming of Series 3, episode 2, "Peace and Love", and features interviews with Shaw, Ingleby, guest star Warren Clarke and director Daniel O'Hara. Although it was made in connection with a specific episode, the featurette focuses on the series in general and particularly on the relationship between Gently and Bacchus.


• Addtional Trailers: At startup the disc plays trailers for Acorn Media, Agatha Christie's Marple and Going Postal. These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

George Gently, Series 4 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

George Gently has its lighter moments, but as police procedurals go, it favors the darker tone of a series like Prime Suspect, rather than the macabre tongue-in-cheek wit of something like Midsomer Murders. Series 4 maintains the level of quality that fans have come to expect from the show, while forcing its lead character to descend even further into a moral abyss where he seems to be the sole source of illumination. The only positive note is the cheerful police sergeant, Liz Thompson (Lucy Akhurst), who in "Goodbye China" persuades Gently to teach her son how to fish. Maybe there's hope for the melancholy detective after all. Highly recommended.