Outside the Blue Box: Virtual Murder – A Torch for Silverado (1992)

2026 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Jon Pertwee. As such, it seems only fair that we shine a light on an example of his work, specifically a relatively overlooked example of his work at the twilight of his days.

The early 90s BBC telefantasy crime series Virtual Murder is not a show that many will remember. Made by BBC Pebble Mill and broadcast just the once on Friday evenings in the summer of 1992, it has never been repeated (no, not even on UK Gold back in the day), nor has it ever been commercially released, yet its place in oblivion is quite peculiar when you consider its cult appeal. It was created by Harry Robertson and Brian Degas, boasted scripts from the likes of Vengeance on Varos‘ Philip Martin, and had a knowing plethora of vintage era TV guest stars smattered across all six episodes. Many of these guest stars also had Who connections of their own; former Ice Warrior Bernard Bresslaw, Kinda‘s Richard Todd, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy‘s Peggy Mount, The Happiness Patrol‘s Ronald Fraser, and, in the fourth episode, A Torch for Silverado, Bernard Horsfall of The Mind Robber, The War Games and The Deadly Assassin, and the Third Doctor himself, Jon Pertwee. Other guest stars were no less impressive; Jill Gascoigne, Tony Robinson, Alfred Marks, Sam Kelly, Julian Clary, Dora Bryan, Helen Lederer, Hugh Quarshie, and even Sean Pertwee too. It’s funny that the casting of famous faces had been used as a stick to beat John Nathan-Turner’s Doctor Who with, yet here such casting proved nostalgic and welcome.

Harry Robertson was a Scottish musician, bandleader, music director and composer best known for penning the 1958 Lord Rockingham’s XI number one hit single ‘Hoots Mon’, as well as scoring Hammer films such as The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire, and Twins of Evil. By the late 1970s, Robertson diversified into a writing career and was responsible for the screenplays of the Children’s Film Foundation feature Sammy’s Super T-Shirt (1978) and the sword and sorcery bonanza Hawk the Slayer (1980), before joiningforces with Brian Degas to create the 1991 BBC drama series Specials. Billed as a rival to ITV’s successful The Bill, the series followed a group of special constables in a fictitious Midlands town, but, like Virtual Murder the subsequent year, it only lasted for one series. Brian Degas was an Argentinian born prodicer and writer who penned scripts for several ITC dramas like The Saint, The Baron and The Strange Report, before branching out into the movies with script consultancies/editing on Barbarella and Danger Diabolik. He was probably best known for co-creating the hit 1970s BBC/Universal WWII POW drama series Colditz. Cannily, Degas was something of a pioneer in the exploitation of ancillary rights to TV properties, and utilised Colditz‘s success across a range of lucrative merchandising projects including Airfix kits, soundtracks, action figures, and board games.

Though Specials was a flop, the BBC clearly had some optimism for this creative pair and their next project, Virtual Murder, would seek some inspiration from those classic ITC shows of the 1960s that Degas contributed scripts to. Right from the off, Virtual Murder was designed to be The Avengers for the 1990s – though the BBC, perhaps mindful of appealing to a wider audience than simply cult TV fans, preferred to sell it as the UK’s answer to Moonlighting. The series concerned the curious cases of Dr John Cornelius (Nicholas Clay), a hunky psychology lecturer at a provincial Midlands university, and his equally attractive flame-haired partner Samantha Valentine (Kim Thompson), who called him “JC” for short. Each week, this stylish and sophisticated pair would hit pause on their sexual frisson long enough to investigate eccentric and peculiar incidents that had flummoxed the local police, as represented by the mac and fedora wearing Inspector Cadogan (Stephen Yardley; Genesis of the Daleks and Vengeance on Varos) and his sidekick, Jude Akuwudike’s Sergeant Gummer. Across six episodes, these outlandish cases took in vampires, crazed judges, cycling Santas, men in rabbit suits, aged pyromaniacs and brave new digital worlds. On that last point, it’s worth noting that the series original title was Nimrod, but someone clearly thought better of that and found Virtual Murder, the title of the only episode written by Harry Robertson (he kept busy providing the series with its theme tune), one which explored the criminal possibilities of VR, to be a much more appetising prospect. Ultimately, Robertson’s script, which was originally intended to launch the series, was pushed back to become the series’ finale, entitled Dreams Imagic.

A Torch for Silverado was the fourth episode in the series, broadcast at 9:35pm on Friday, 14th August, 1992 to 4.9 million viewers; a drop from the 6.53m who tuned in for episode one and, seemingly, enough of a reason for the BBC to pull the plug on the show’s hopes of a second series. Today, of course, terrestrial TV would kill for an audience of 4.9m. The episode was penned by Tim Aspinall, a journeyman scriptwriter and producer whose credits included Thirty Minute Theatre, Coronation Street, The XYY Man, Hazell, The Bill, Jemima Shore Investigates and Perfect Scoundrels, and directed by Peter Rose, then a relative newcomer to the industry but today, an in demand director for all the major soaps. It opens with an intriguing pre-credits title sequence that begins with a bewhiskered Pertwee, clad in chef whites and complete with the traditional toque upon his head, standing before rising flames – a portent of stuff that is to come. For now, Pertwee’s character, who we will learn is a Spaniard names Luis Silverado, is working as a cook at fellow guest star John Bluthal’s Italian restaurant and, although he’s got a hospital appointment, he makes an exception for a pretty lady customer and prepares her omelette and green salad (or “one dish delish for the laaydee”, as he puts it). And the lady? why, it’s Samantha Valentine. We then cut to two doctors examining an X-ray. Weirdly, the junior of the pair is My Beautiful Laundrette‘s (and Mindwarp’s) Gordon Warnecke, but he’s shot in profile in the near dark and has just one line “He’s a very tough old boy”. His senior colleague agrees to talk to him, concluding with the line “What does a man do when he’s told he’s only got two weeks to live?”

Obviously, the tough old boy is Pertwee’s Luis, and we are about to find out just what he plans to do with his last two weeks on this mortal coil – and it’s not getting your affairs in order and swimming with dolphins. We cut from a close up pan of the X-ray to more rising flames. Except we’re not in the kitchen this time. The flames are destroying a load of porn mags on the shelf of a sex shop that a cut to the exterior reveals is called “Come Again” Sitting in the cafe opposite is a cheroot smoking, beret wearing Luis, watching the smoke escape from the building. “What is it?” the cafe owner asks, craning his neck to see as he wipes down the tables. Luis turns to the camera to announce “Bang-bang time” before the sex shop explodes and we crash into the titles and Robertson’s rather lovely theme tune.

Has Luis just burnt down a sex shop? His subsequent appearance, dressed to the nines in a charro suit and ornate silver belt buckle, at Goodies Club, a local den of inequity, would suggest that he has. One of the ladies working there attempts to gain his business, but Luis confuses her with his request for “the Mexicana twist” and his rhyming patter of “fornication…jubiliation…and then, maybe, renumeration” and the next scene depicts the smoking remains of the club in the daylight and the fire crew who have been busy putting the fire out. “What happened?” asks a passing Luis, again dressed in overcoat and beret, of a mother and her child. The latter points towards the ruins. “Oh, that’s bang-bang time” the old Spaniard decrees, tousling the boy’s hair. Later, Luis is on the phone to a sex line, an amusing sequence which sees the camera pan across the operators, all middle-aged and clad in tabards, doing their knitting as one proclaims “I like to put my breasts against the window pane when it’s raining. What do you think of that?” Luis doesn’t think much of it at all. “I think titillation causes degradation. Maybe even incineration” he warns. “It’s bang-bang time!” Yes, he’s a twisted firestarter!

The old dear who Luis has just disturbed is the route into this spate of arsons for John Cornelius, as her daughter is currently one of his students and it is her mother’s income from the chat lines that is paying her way through college. She explains that from what she’s learnt about psychology from her daughter, Luis is a dangerous pyromaniac, a “headcase”, and begs for Cornelius to help. Cornelius makes enquiries with Cadogan and Gummer about any spates of arson, and learns that not only has a massage parlour has gone up in flames since Luis’ phonecall, but they’ve also received several anonymous letters addressed to the long-derelict Watch Committee that reveal their hatred for the local sex industry and threaten their businesses. These handwritten letters provide a clue; Cornelius’ colleague Professor Owen Griffiths (Alan David) identifies the elaborate calligraphy as a “demotic cousin of our legal copperplate” taught from Puig to Barcelona in the lower middle class education system until the middle 1930s. They’re looking for a Spanish man over the age of sixty; “a prince in rags” Griffiths concludes.

Despite being shot on videotape, the death knell of any hope to make Virtual Murder a sophisticated successor to the big budget pop art of The Avengers, never let it be said that they didn’t have an eye for striking, eccentric imagery. Earlier we saw Luis arrive home to his flat and the camera was placed on the ground which meant for a distinctive shot, and who could forget the old dears operating the chat lines? There is also the introduction of Cornelius and Samantha, which had them dancing whilst conversing about buying a house in Provence, which lent a rather eccentric Steed and Mrs Peel nature to their appearance. Now, as Cornelius’ investigation takes him to the burnt out Goodies Club, he finds a little girl dressed as a fairy and dancing in the blackened ruins to The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker. Her mother enters, and it’s the woman that spoke with Luis that previous evening. Her daughter, she reveals, is on her way to a birthday party. From talking with her, he identifies Luis as the pyromaniac, but she throws a spanner in the works; Luis left at midnight and the fire didn’t start til 4am. Virtual Murder may have had an eye for good visuals, but it also had a lot of plot conveniences too. We’ve seen how Cornelius has a colleague who can identify the calligraphy in the poison pen letters, now we’re about to see him seek assistance from a Professor Donn (Bernard Horsfall, sporting a Scottish lilt), whose perpetual short fuse around Cornelius is rather apt; he’s an expert on explosive devices. What exactly is he teaching at this Midlands Uni? Cornelius asks him if a silent fuse that runs for over three hours could be possible? “A candle in a closet” is Donn’s answer. “A standard domestic candle burns at the rate of approximately one inch per hour”.

We next find Luis, struggling through intense pain, as he makes his way to a narrowboat on the canal. There, open for business, is Madam Rita, Palm Reader. Played by Barbara Young, she and Luis go way back. In fact, they were once lovers. This scene reveals Luis’ motivations as the score riffs on Concierto de Aranjuez, which I guess reminds us that he is Spanish. Thirty years earlier he was the proud owner of El Silverado Cabaret, and a pimp for a chorus of stable of girls that included Rita. Though he looks back fondly on “all my lovely dirty girls”, Rita reminds him that he was a violent brute who once punched her in the neck for keeping back a fiver for her mum. There’s also the suggestion that he made her abort his child too. It seems Luis cannot get over the fact that his business was closed down, whilst others have come along in its place offering sex over style. Despite Rita’s pleas, he insists that now is the time for the “degradation…incineration…conflagration” of these tawdry newcomers.

If you’re wondering where Cornelius’ answer to Mrs Peel fits into all this, well here she is. Samantha has returned from Provence (“Too damn hot, they put garlic in the tomato sauce, and all my worst Kings Road chums were there”) just in time to identify not only the terminology in the poison pen letters – the Mexicana Twist being “a trick on a brothel menu” – but also the handwriting; it’s familiar to her, but she’s not sure where she has seen it. Of course, we the viewers now that she’s seen it at the Italian restaurant she frequented in the pre-credit sequence and, as that’s exactly where she is taking Cornelius and Griffiths now, the missing piece of the jigsaw is about to be found. It leads them to Luis’ flat which, in a dramatic twist (as opposed to a Mexicana one), is rigged with explosives. Yes, it’s bang-bang time again, and Cornelius is caught inside. The next scene sees him coming round in hospital with a bandaged head and eye. Rather conveniently, Luis is also in the hospital, having collapsed after staking out another club to torch. On his deathbed, Luis gives Rita his belt and a letter to the police. “It’s bang-bang time” he says, breathing his last. Inspector Cadogan gives Cornelius the lowdown on Luis once he’s discharged from hospital. He fought with the militia against Franco before arriving in the UK where he married two English girls (“both common prostitutes”) and was sent to gaol for brothel keeping. Rifling through this dossier, Cornelius discovers that Silverado’s was raided and shut down exactly twenty years ago to the day. Could it be that Luis intended one final hurrah before death caught up with him?

The dynamic duo head to the club that was once Silverado’s. Now entitled The Bucket of Blood, it’s a disco-cum-brothel managed by the kind of offensive Chinese stereotype that was commonplace in the 60s ITC dramas but really was a long way from tolerable in the supposedly politically correct early 90s. As Samantha chats with the girls, Cornelius manages to find the offices. He begins to look for the explosives that Luis has left behind, but is discovered by the now cleaver-wielding Offensive Chinese Stereotype (it really is appalling; it’s like they’re going for Goldfinger‘s Oddjob whilst giving him broken English dialogue that implies he has the IQ of a child) and he has to convince him that the club is in peril. Reunited with Samantha, the trio discover the bomb and Cornelius rings Donn who intructs him how to defuse it over the phone. It’s a scene with all the tension of a pleasant Sunday morning in the sunshine.

Watching A Torch for Silverado, it’s easy to see why Virtual Murder failed. From its initial cancellation and down the years since, many have posited various reasons for this, ranging from it being broadcast in the summer, when audiences are out enjoying the weather. to being shot on cheap looking videotape. Speaking in 2002, TV historian Andrew Pixley recalled his thoughts on the series warmly “Finally, somebody had been brave enough to craft a modern thriller which, while captured on videotape, boasted all the style, fun and imagination of the great British film series of the 1960s such as The Avengers and Department S“. But the truth behind its lack of success is that the style, fun and imagination just wasn’t very well realised at all. The key issue with this particular episode’s failings is the writing. The motivation behind Luis’ explosive revenge is really hamfisted, hard to believe and not very well explained; is Luis’ sole reason for pyromania because he’s affronted by the tacky nature of the industry he was once part of? We know that Luis is a man out of time – he composes his threats to the defunct Watch Committee – so I suspect it’s a commentary on the relaxation of licencing laws around sex shops and that he’s aggrieved that what once cost him his freedom and prestige in society is now legal. It’s possible that these laws were in the news at the time, but they now mean very little to audiences thirty odd years later and a lack of clarity in the script just muddies the water. I personally think it would have been better to have depicted him as a man on a more morally personal crusade (perhaps a man whose daughter, arriving in England from Spain, found herself forced to sell her body to a series of abusive men) rather than someone angered that he’s been reduced to cooking at a restaurant whilst others have taken his place in the local sex trade? Whilst Jon Pertwee was clearly something of a coup for the series and further evidence that the range of guest stars attracted to the stories was impressive, his casting presents the episode with something of a problem. Viewers who were familiar with Pertwee in kids favourites like Doctor Who and Worzel Gummidge will naturally feel sympathy towards him, but it’s never clear if we’re meant to sympathise with the character of Luis. Is he “a prince in rags” as Griffiths suggests, or is he, as Rita says, a violent pimp who abused his girls? I feel a bit unfair here, because Pertwee himself, as you can see from these snippets of interviews around Virtual Murder was very pleased with his performance and keen to play more dramatic roles of this kind that were utterly different to those he had previously been associated with.

Critical reception at the time can be best summed up by Lynne Truss for The Times who said that Virtual Murder was “The Avengers re-written by someone who had heard about it once but never actually saw it” That’s quite harsh, but it is fair to say that neither the writing, nor the performances by Clay and Thompson, capture the chemistry and spirit that Patrick Macnee shared with Diana Rigg, Honor Blackman or Linda Thorson. Sadly, characters of John Cornelius and Samantha Valentine just come across as a pair of smug yuppies. Some revisionism sees commentators claim that Virtual Murder pre-empted The X-Files but, apart from an attractive male and female investigative duo and some outlandish, dark fantasy, there’s precious little DNA shared between them. What Virtual Murder actually pre-empts is the triumphant return of Doctor Who in 2005, by way of several shows that seemed to hope to fit the TARDIS shaped void that had been left in the schedules since its cancellation in 1989. As such, Virtual Murder is an early foreunner of what Paul Hayes refers to in his book, The Long Game: The Inside Story of How The BBC Brought Back Doctor Who, as “Not Doctor Who”. Though Virtual Murder is a series that Hayes has overlooked in that tome, he nevertheless explores how plans were apace to create new drama that emulated some of the appeal of 60s and 70s cult TV. Bugs burst onto the screens on Saturday evenings in 1995 and wasn’t afraid of its inspirations, if the Radio Times‘ headline of “The Avengers for the 90s” was to be believed. A surprising success, the show ran for four seasons until 1999 ansd was followed by the less successful Michael French vehicle Crime Traveller in 1997. Also making its debut that year was the hugely popular Jonathan Creek, which ran, on and off, until 2016. Invasion: Earth, The Vanishing Man, The Last Train, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Strange all followed before Russell T Davies finally convinced the BBC that the time was right to bring back Doctor Who. These programmes, whether successful or not, all helped to remind TV executives that telefantasy was a viable genre. As such, I think that a little bit of long overdue gratitude now ought to be laid at the feet of the near-forgotten Virtual Murder.

If you’re interested, all six episodes of Virtual Murder are available to watch on YouTube.