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MESSAGES FROM BEYONG
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Dear Allan, While I very much enjoyed your article on Randall and Hopkirk, I’m more than a bit fed up with the actual episodes. That’s because I’ve got a house-mate who never tires of watching them, so I’ve had to sit through the entire bleeding series on constant repeat for the last three years on the GREAT! TV channel.
I first watched Randall and Hopkirk when it was originally broadcast, but my recollections of it were a bit vague as I was so young then, and I hadn’t watched it again until the recent re-runs. Looking at it now, I am disappointed with the very poor production.
For example, there is far too much use of screens (and a very bad use at that) for background when the characters are in a car (they look like they are spinning around while floating ten feet above the ground!). In the episode ‘But What A Sweet Little Room’ the character Julia Fenwick gets run over by a car, but it happens in a small mews, and the car is a trundling Morris Minor, so there’s no realistic possibility of the car getting much above ten miles per hour, and the actress playing Ms. Fenwick is clearly running on the spot before a screen that shows a much brighter background.
This seems very short-sighted and lazy, even for a late 60’s fantasy drama. Did the programme’s makers believe that viewers wouldn’t notice or that they wouldn’t care about these glaring discrepancies? It feels like the entire series was shot in just one week.