Recently, over at at Ray Banks' Saturday Boy blog, I was reminded of Frank Marker.
While we think of sixties and seventies TV cops as sophisticated post James Bonds , Marker, who was played by Alfred Burke in the sixties television series PUBLIC EYE was no Simon Templar or John Steed, I can tell you. Marker had a lot more in common with the character that Richard Burton played in the film The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or Edward Woodward’s Callan. In fact Marker is almost an amalgam of Callan and his occasional side kick Lonely.
Apparently, Public Eye ran for 10 years –from 1965 to 1975- and although I haven’t seen it since then I remember it quite well and very fondly. Marker moved from a dingy office in London to another flea pit in Birmingham and eventually to Brighton, and I can still picture him walking along a wind and rainswept sea-front, looking like someone from a Morrissey song.
Marker looked like a soggy mongrel and he was a walking hard luck story, getting knocked about by the police as well as criminals and even being framed and sent to prison.
As you can see from the picture, he was no Jason King!
This post recently appeared at The Tainted Archive as part of the TV COPS WEEKEND.
4 comments:
Nice one. I grew up on Hawaii Five-0, and The Streets of San Francisco.
I'm a huge fan of "Inspector Morse", R.I.P John Thaw.
What's the skinny on "The Sweeney"? It sounds like it was a good one, and kind of groundbreaking in certain ways.
Sean. Thanks for stopping over agin. The TV Cops wekend at The Tainted Archive has a hell of a lot of info on things like The Sweeny film. A blog well worth following.
Makes me think a bit of Rockford. Definitly not the pretty boy kind of fellow. Not suave and sophisticated. but I liked him.
Garner was a brilliantly dry actor. Rockford was a fantastic underdog.
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