Tuesday 26 March 2019

Dick Turpin, Season 3 (1981)




Dick Turpin finds himself enmeshed in a colonial affair when feisty Marylander Jane Crosby comes to Britain to present the government with evidence that the Governor of the Colony has been Up To No Good.  The Governor, of course, has plans of his own for young Jane, and has a significant advantage in that he has enlisted the aid of the young woman's amoral fiance in his schemes.  Of course, he doubtless wasn't planning to have to deal with the Old Country's most notorious highwayman ...

I've previously explained that this was the last series of Dick Turpin to be produced, even though it was not the last to be aired.  It's also the only one to set every episode into one single narrative, as Turpin and Jane romp all over southern England in their quest to bring down the nefarious Governor.

So does the shift to a connected narrative have much impact on the entertainment value of the show?  Well not really, to be honest.  It still feels quite episodic in structure, with a series encounters and escapades that constantly tend to reset the main narrative's status quo (a technique that old Doctor Who also frequently used), and several of the vignettes fell rather like padding, at that.  What could have been an interesting experiment in the structure of the show is ultimately little more than a gimmick.

The cast gamely mug it up for the camera (and there are plenty of "Hey, it's that guy!" cameos, probably most notably from Donald Pleasence and Patrick Macnee), but they can't do much with the fundamental lack of ambition showed by the script.

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