Randall and Hopkirk
(Deceased)
Set 1 DVD

While one private detective walks these mean streets, the other ... well ... you can see right through him

	Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) Set 1 DVD
	Starring Mike Pratt, Kenneth Cope and Annette Andre
	Written by Tony Williamson, Mike Pratt, Donald James and others
	Directed by Cyril Frankel, Jeremy Summers and others
	A&E
	Four-disc set
	MSRP: $79.95

By Adam-Troy Castro

any private eye mysteries begin with the detective investigating the murder of his partner. In Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), the early-'60s private-eye series from the BBC, the murdered partner Hopkirk (Cope) sticks around to provide his hapless pal Randall with invisible supernatural aid. And it's a good thing, too: because until the intangible, white-suited Hopkirk emerges from the grave to announce that the hit-and-run that took his life was no tragic accident, Randall (Pratt)—a dour sort who doesn't seem to have much in the way of detective instinct—honestly found nothing at all suspicious about his best friend's death.

Doomed by his interference to spend the next hundred years on Earth before allowed another chance to enter the afterlife, Hopkirk becomes Randall's silent partner in the marginal detective agency that has provided them both with a poor living. Hopkirk is matter-of-fact about the whole thing, chatty to the point of distraction even as Randall tries to hold up his end of conversations with other people. He doesn't seem to get all the implications of being dead; for instance, he's upset that Randall drives his car, and he's upset indeed at signs that Randall's getting chummy with his widow, Jean (Andre). Still, he finds using his ghostly abilities to keep Randall alive a full-time job.

Their cases together bring them in close contact with murderous spiritualists, mind-controlling sanitariums, Chicago mobsters, hit men and missing persons. Of course, certain complications are inevitable. For instance, in any story where a guy has a companion visible and audible only to himself, he will prove totally incapable of refraining from talking to that invisible person in public. Even if he knows that he must be circumspect or be considered mad, he will still interrupt conversations with everyday ordinary folks in order to argue with the phantasm. Total strangers will think him insane. Those who know him well will be mollified by his lame excuses about thinking out loud. This is only to be expected.

Turns out that the dead one is the live one

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), a British detective series from the 1960s, is a proud member of this tradition. Randall sits in laundromats, next to his partner the ghost, and absently discusses business matters with empty air while civilians bug their eyes in consternation. He doesn't last two full episodes before getting forcibly committed to a loony bin: though that loony bin is of course the site of various evil doings, and the episode's end finds him pretending that his crazy behavior was all a gambit to catch the bad guys.

The show belongs to other traditions as well. For instance, it's a well-worn cliche that private detectives are supposed to be struggling, debt-ridden sods who don't have enough clients and can barely pay the rent. Randall and Hopkirk spend much of their shared career pinching dimes, in a penurious state which is often reflected by the show's production values. (See one early episode, where a careening automobile smashes into a lamppost offscreen, and is then shown, post-accident, pressed up against the lamppost with no evident damage to either car or post. Any impression that it actually crashed there, and wasn't just carefully parked in that position by a production assistant warned not to scratch the paint, is purely accidental.)

The show is stingy in other areas, as well. Many of the episodes are slow-paced, arriving at obvious conclusions. There are few flights of imagination beyond the existence of a ghostly protagonist. There's little tragic resonance to the plight of the young man struck down in the prime of life, forced to watch his beautiful blond mascara-abusing wife soldier on without him. In what may have been a deliberate act of irony, the dead Hopkirk shows much more life and charisma and humor than his dour partner Randall.

And yet—and yet—there's something here: a certain likability that makes these shows enjoyable even when nothing of tremendous interest happens in them. There are clever little character bits, and some moments of genuine humor. It's a show that ambles along without ever aspiring to a gallop, but the amble is a pleasant one.