Peter Davison arguably defied being typecast as the Doctor more than most of the actors who took on the role. By fluke or canny strategy, Davison managed to quickly and cleanly shed all vestiges of the Time Lord, ensuring that he maintained a long and varied career after leaving the TARDIS for the final time in 1984 with leads in series such as A Very Peculiar Practice, Campion, At Home With the Braithwaites and The Last Detective.
The Last Detective was an ITV comedy drama series that ran for four series between 2003 and 2007. Created by award winning screenwriter Richard Harris and based on a series of crime novels by Leslie Thomas, The Last Detective saw Davison take the lead role of Detective Constable “Dangerous” Davies, operating out of Willesden North CID. Nicknamed “Dangerous” because he’s anything but, the kindly and considerate Davies also earns the eponymous moniker of “the Last Detective” from his superior, who opined that he would always be the last detective he’d think of for any assignment, unless it was a task that no one else would want to touch. Thus treated as persona non grata by his colleagues, Davies is therefore consigned to dealing with the cranks and the timewasters, yet he nonetheless manages to routinely stumble upon major cases at every turn – cases which he ultimately has an uncanny ability to crack.
One of the qualities I always enjoyed about Davison’s characterisation of the Fifth Doctor was the manner in which he conveyed embarrassment and discomfort at his youthful physicality and how this outward appearance lead to others underestimating him. Following his regeneration at the end of Logopolis, this new incarnation finds himself surrounded by companions who, in theory, all look just a few years removed from him. Worse, these companions all recall the Fourth Doctor, an older looking incarnation that they each easily gave their respect and trust towards. This frustrating trait isn’t just confined to the regulars’ interactions either as, in many of the Fifth Doctor’s stories, he finds himself routinely dismissed by the very people he’s trying to help as delusional. This afforded Davison to do something he always did very well as the Doctor; the breathless and frantic acting as he tries to convince others of the gravity of the situation he has stumbled upon.
Of course, by the time that The Last Detective came around, Davison had comfortably entered his sixth decade and, athough he still occasionally possessed a boyish appearance (that “pleasant, open face” that Target novelists always referred to), especially when he broke into a smile, no one could say he was youthful. Besides which, whilst there’s no question of Davison being anything less than a versatile actor, it’s fair to say that he isn’t a chameleon who disappears inside a character. Whatever role Davison takes on, the character is still more or less recognisably him, but each is subtly invested with distinct differences. All that said, however, some of the qualities that he brought to his performance as the Doctor can be felt in the role of the equally underestimated Davies.
Just like the Time Lord’s companions, Davies’ colleagues at Willesden nick – particularly his dyspeptic superior, DI Aspinall (Rob Spendlove), and the sniggering, schoolboyish bullies DS Pimlott (Charles De’Ath) and DC Barrett (Billy Geraghty) – find it hard to invest any trust or respect in him, and nor does his estranged wife Julie (Emma Amos). The frustration that Davies feels from these attitudes is palpable throughout. Whereas the Fifth Doctor would deploy petulance and testiness in the face of such derision and scorn (a quality that worked so well for Davison’s characterisation – making his Doctor appear silly and amusing because of his wounded ego – but failed miserably for his successor, Colin Baker, who just appeared unpleasant when delivering such traits), Davies just has to resign himself to the mockery he faces, rising above it by throwing himself into his work and defying the naysayers by getting results against the odds or simply retiring to the pub with his feckless friend, Mod (Sean Hughes).
Davison’s playing of this, reminds me of something my late father would often say if he learnt he was the butt of someone’s joke; “as long as they’re taking the mick out of me, they’re leaving some other poor bugger alone”. It’s perhaps no surprise this was a series that my dad enjoyed.
The Last Detective made its debut on ITV with a pilot episode broadcast on 7th February, 2003. This feature length story was an adaptation of Thomas’ 1976 novel, Dangerous Davies – The Last Detective. Audiences with good memories may have found the story familiar, as it had previously been adapted into a TV film twenty-two year earlier with another Doctor Who stalwart, Bernard Cribbins, in the role of the hapless Davies and even a future Doctor in the shape of Colin Baker found in the supporting cast. As with the novel, the pilot sees Davies initially tasked with a rather menial assignment of keeping tabs on an old gangster, only to find himself drifting into an unofficial, one-man investigation into a decades-old, unsolved case.
One of Davies’ sources to the gangster’s whereabouts is a retired small time con (Leslie Schofield) whose daughter went missing twenty years earlier. One night in the early 1980s, the popular seventeen year old Celia Norris (Joanne Froggatt) went out to party with friends and never returned home. Though her clothing was later found on a towpath, Celia’s body has never been recovered and no one has ever been apprehended for what happened to her that fateful night. Some years later, her mother (Rachel Davies), gave birth to another daughter, Josie (also played by Froggatt) who, at seventeen now, provocatively tests her budding sexuality out on Davies as he makes his enquiries.
Enquiries that, with the aid of Mod, lead him to a variety of suspects that include Celia’s cocksure suitor Burridge (Rupert Farley), a shy admirer (Ian Targett) and Parsons (Andy Greenhalgh), a ladies underwear thief and cross-dresser who stumbled upon her abandoned clothing and was initially the police’s prime suspect, before hitting upon the unlikely culprit himself, Raymond Yardley; a much-loved and soon-to-be-retiring desk sergeant at Willesden North nick, played by Davison’s A Very Peculiar Practice co-star David Troughton, whose father Patrick played the Second Doctor and who himself has appeared in three Doctor Who stories; The War Games (1969), The Curse of Peladon (1972), and Midnight (2008).
In a shock twist that has developed greater modern resonance in the wake of the Sarah Everard murder, Yardley discovers Celia distraught after a boy she was out with tried to get physical and offers to drive her home. En route, Yardley (whose disabled wife suffers from chronic pain, ensuring that their relationship is sexually non existent) too begins to make plays for the teenage girl and, when he is rebuffed, he murders her and disposes of her body in the underground, disused WWII bunker on his allotment. With bitter irony it is revealed that, whilst the allotment was searched at the time of Celia’s disappearance, the police didn’t bother to check Yardley’s patch, as he was one of their own, after all.
Of course, apprehending “one of their own” during his retirement party doesn’t win Davies any friends. Sent to Coventry by the sneering Pimlott and Barrett, he is called into Aspinall’s office to be informed that, whilst some unseen senior officer commends Davies’ excellent detective skills that successfully cracked the decades old cold case, he will be “the last detective” that Aspinall will ever call upon in future, unless it is for the rubbish jobs, in which case he’ll be first in the queue. The stage is subsequently set for Davies to prove his mettle, making his way through a web of crime that may one day give his colleagues pause to reconsider and, even if they don’t, Davies doesn’t care; after all, he likes his job and just wants to serve the people he comes across along the way as best he can. Fortunately, however, as the series progresses opinions do slowly change around Davies.
As an adaptation of Thomas’ novel, The Last Detective thankfully excises quite a lot. It’s not just a chunk of extraneous plot detail, which helps to streamline and simplify the narrative, a lot of things that would have felt dated by 2003 are also mercifully dropped. If you watch the original adaptation starring Bernard Cribbins, you’ll find a more faithful take that affords the star the opportunity to play to his comedic strengths by highlighting the bumbling and hapless, accident-prone nature of Davies as he appears on the printed page; routinely beaten up and injured, he makes his way through the investigation swaddled in ever increasing bandages.
Some other examples of humour – and I use that term loosely – are also dropped, such as the way in which the character of Parsons is depicted. In a rather squalid passage in which Davies bullies the man, we’re introduced to Parsons as a reformed character; a member of the local Salvation Army. It’s only when Davies leaves that the reader is privy to Parsons taking off his uniform to reveal a body clad in women’s underwear. It’s hard to get a handle on what Thomas is trying to do with this depiction – is he inviting us to laugh at Parsons or treat him with suspicion as we realise that he is not the changed man he is at pains to present himself as – but the fact of the matter is it’s a reminder of how unfair the world is that someone has to deny his authentic self.
Here in the 2003 adaptation, Parsons is not a member of the Salvation Army and Davies does not torment or intimidate him (he does, however, make the odd snarky remark such as “You must have thought it was Christmas” when Parsons recounts finding Celia’s clothing), but we do see him disrobe after Davies leaves and, yes, he is wearing women’s underwear. I think we’re still being invited to laugh at this reveal, and that in itself is uncomfortable, but it’s somewhat more wryly done and the emphasis seems to be on how haughty Parsons had previously been in his defence that he is a changed man, rather than “look at the man dressed in bra and pants”.
Another thing that is thankfully removed from this adaptation is sex. In one example in the novel, it’s played for laughs, as Davies must fend off the physical advances of Celia’s friend Ena Lind, now a sex-starved pillar of the local community, but in others it’s so seedy and of its time as to leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Celia’s boyfriend Burridge is depicted on TV as a cocksure, no-good Jack the Lad figure, but in the novel (where he is named Boot) Thomas goes further, detailing how, as a youth club leader, he would get fifteen-year-old girls to strip for him and take it in turns with them on the trampoline. It’s all a bit Jimmy Savile really.
Worse is to come in the characterisation of Celia’s troubled sister, Josie. I’ve mentioned how, as portrayed by Froggatt, she often acts provocatively around Davies, including one scene in which the vulnerable young girl, born in her dead sibling’s shadow, appears before Davies in the dress that Celia wore on the night she vanished – the dress Parsons found. In the novel this sequence goes much further as Thomas depicts her not only wearing these clothes, but also performing a striptease for Davies that ends with her breaking down in tears. There’s a real unsavoury edge to Thomas’ writing, mixing misery, heartache and squalor with a creepy titillation that is presumably designed to appeal to middle-aged male readers. Thankfully none of this appears in the Davison iteration, which is designed to appeal to the same sort of modern day ITV Sunday evening audiences.
The Last Detective was brought to the screen by producer Nick Hurran (who also directed this pilot and went on to helm several Matt Smith-era Doctor Who episodes, including the show’s fiftieth anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, in 2013) and the writer Richard Harris, whose awesome credits include The Avengers, The Saint, Hancock, The Wednesday Play, Redcap, No Hiding Place, Man in a Suitcase, Adam Adamant Lives!, Public Eye, The Sweeney, Shoestring, Hazell, Play for Today, Sherlock Holmes, Outside Edge, The Darling Buds of May and A Touch of Frost, as well as writing the screenplays for feature films such as the 1970 thriller I Start Counting and the 1991 Liza Minnelli vehicle Stepping Out.
Across four series, Harris and many fellow writers (including Silver Nemesis’ Kevin Clarke) delivered stories of a quality that expertly navigated the fine balancing act of comedy and crime drama. Taking its tonal cue from the central mystery in this pilot, each story was handled with an admirable tenderness and a poignant, bittersweet flavour. It was, as one reviewer at the time put it, “TV as it used to be made”.
As Davison himself recounts in his 2016 autobiography, Is There Life Outside the Box?, the series appealed to the audience and the litmus test for this could be found in an unusual practice from ITV’s Head of Drama Nick Elliott. To ensure his output had the popular touch, Elliott would routinely ask his department’s cleaning lady what shows she liked and The Last Detective was always mentioned favourably. Unfortunately, the show came to a close in 2007 following Elliott’s departure – presumably his successor didn’t bother to ask his cleaning lady’s opinions.
Whilst it’s a shame it didn’t get to run longer, the four series we have still stand as examples of, if not of “TV as it used to be made”, then as the last gasp of a specific craftsmanship in popular drama and the ability to tell stories with cross-generational appeal. Drama doesn’t have to be dumbed down, nor does it have to be striving for a cinematic aesthetic, all flashy bangs and whistles. It could just as easily be as intelligent, quietly unassuming and as successful as the character of Davies was himself.
