Sunday, September 3, 2017

Doctor Blake Mysteries: “The Food of Love” (December Media, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. last night, just before they showed an unusual presentation of the San Diego Symphony performing a so-called “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” concert live at the Embarcadero Marina, I put on KPBS for a Doctor Blake Mysteries episode that, like the last Endeavour show I’d seen, was about a murder involving a rock ’n’ roll star. The Doctor Blake Mysteries show is set in the small outback town of Ballarat, Australia and takes place in the 1950’s, after Blake relocated to his original home town following service as a medic with the British army in World War II, and this show, called “The Food of Love” (though the plot involves love far more than it does food, literal or metaphorical, unless the title is supposed to be a reference to Shakespeare’s line, “If music be the food of love, play on”!), deals with a concert appearance by Australian rock star Bobby Lee (the quite attractive and boyishly handsome Steve Danielsen), whose real name is Gunther Hansen, who founded a four-piece band with his friend, pianist Walker (Daniel Hills) — only they were supposed to be equal partners, with Walker writing the songs and Lee singing them, but Lee got a bad case of egomania and insisted that he be treated as the star. Lee collapses and dies just as he’s leaving the theatre and about to be mobbed by fans (one wonders where the concert security people were; even in 1957, there was plenty of history of singers with large teenage followings, like the young Bing Crosby in the early 1930’s and the young Frank Sinatra in the early 1940’s, getting mobbed by their fans with such intensity that their lives were in danger: Sinatra said he switched from wearing tie-on bow ties to clip-ons because fans would grab for his bow tie, and until he started using clip-ons this would put him at imminent risk of being strangled), and it turns out when Doctor Lucian Blake (Craig McLachlan) autopsies him that he was stabbed but in such a way that he bled internally, not externally, his blood filling up his body and ultimately drowning and stopping his heart. The police investigation focuses on three potential suspects: Walker, who was heard arguing with Bobby after the concert over credits and the musical direction of the band; Mattie O’Brien (Cate Wolfe), whom the constable in charge of the investigation locks in the town jail through most of the episode because she hit a younger officer who was trying to search the alleyway where Bobby collapsed for the knife used to stab him; and a free-lance moralist who runs a local church and distributes a pamphlet he wrote condemning rock ’n’ roll as “the devil’s music.” (Of course I immediately wanted one of the characters to come back and mention that rock has its roots in Black American gospel music and therefore it is not the devil’s music, but the Lord’s!)

Along the way Dr. Blake, who has to deal with an official constabulary of especially stupid and stubborn people even by the meager standards of credentialed cops in this sort of mystery story (where the police have to be dumb so the audience will believe they need the help of the private “sleuth” character to solve the crime), though since in addition to a working doctor in Ballarat he’s also what would now be called a forensic pathologist, responsible for conducting autopsies on people who’ve died under mysterious circumstances, and therefore is a part of official law enforcement himself, discovers 1) that Bobby Lee’s real name is Gunther Hansen (whether he changed it simply because “Bobby Lee” would have more rock-star cred or a German-sounding name would make him unpopular with people still bitter about World War II isn’t explained by writer Pete McTighe); 2) that the social-work client Mattie was supposed to be looking after at the concert, Shirley Freedman (Nicole Gulasekharam), not only had a secret crush on Bobby Lee but believed he had actually had sex with her, fathering her baby (whom she had aborted under-the-table — when Dr. Blake learns this he angrily demands Shirley rat out the doctor who did her procedure, which she commendably refuses to do), and was sending her secret messages via the lyrics of his songs (which in fact he didn’t even write himself — Walker the piano player did); and 3) Bobby Lee’s killer was Gerry Bowen (Peter Flaherty), Shirley’s father and the owner of the local pub (where Dr. Blake had stored Bobby Lee’s body because the cellar was cold and there was no room at the official morgue), because he was convinced Bobby had ruined his daughter even though in fact they had never even met, much less had sex (which rather begs the question of who was the father of Shirley’s aborted baby — or even whether there was a baby or she just had what’s called an “hysterical pregnancy,” in which a woman develops all the biological signs of being pregnant except a fetus in her womb). 

Along the way we get to hear two songs representing Bobby Lee’s output, “Stop Hanging On” (supposedly Lee’s latest single and credited on the imdb.com Web page for this show to “D. Cornelius, R. Merecith and T. Page”) and “Six O’Clock Rock,” written by Johnny O’Keefe, the real-life Australian rock star of the late 1950’s and pretty obviously the model for Bobby Lee’s character. (His biggest hit, “Real Wild Child,” was covered by Buddy Holly — who heard it when O’Keefe opened for him on an Australian tour — and Jerry Lee Lewis, and Lewis’s version was used in the otherwise disappointing Australian coming-of-age film Romulus My Father.) The songs are effective and it’s genuinely charming when, as part of his investigation, Dr. Blake starts picking out the chords to “Stop Hanging On” on his home piano and ultimately decides he actually likes rock ’n’ roll. He also mentions having seen Gene Krupa, whom he describes to the young people as hopelessly old-fashioned even though the adulation that surrounded Krupa in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s was quite similar to what Elvis Presley and the other 1950’s rockers went through — and, as I noted when Charles and I watched the film Rock, Rock, Rock! together and I noted that the final song was a big-band instrumental featuring ex-Duke Ellington tenor saxophonist Al Sears, distinguished from swing only by the harder, more emphatic backbeat the drummer was playing, big-band music and early rock ’n’ roll weren’t really all that different. McTighe (who I believe is a well-regarded mystery novelist as well as a screenwriter) deserves credit for avoiding some of the more transparent devices he could have used — at one point I was expecting he’d have it turn out that Bobby Lee was actually the scapegrace son of the minister who was picketing his show — though when the minister is confronting Dr. Blake and explaining his own checkered past as an armed robber and heavy drinker, and Blake is accusing him of murdering Bobby to dispatch him to hell ahead of schedule, I’d have liked the minister to say, “Oh, no, I didn’t want him dead! I wanted him to find Jesus and turn his life around like I did!” At the same time, the fact that there are so many issues and possibilities McTighe and the show’s director, Declan Eames, couldn’t get into a 54-minute running time is an example of this show’s strength.