Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Writers response, 27 April 2006
I dont usually quarrel with comments in reviews of my work but accept them as one persons opinion but in the case of Juans review saying the ending is stupid and that 'the writer threw the script in the air through frustration'.As the writer and actor in question I'm in an unique position to reply that this was'nt so.Yes,there were a lot of plot lines,that is why I created 8 separate endings for each individual strand of the second series(more about this on the commentary and OU doc).As for 'frustrated'-it was more an expression of joy and celebration that we'd made it through and the series was complete.Philip Martin,writer,'Gangsters'.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams of gangsters..., 6 May 2007
Most long-running drama series eventually end up almost as an inadvertent self-parody, but the comparatively short-lived mid-70s cult classic BBC series Gangsters is one of the few to so openly embrace this fate with each recommission. It's a curious beast, a constantly evolving entity that began as a fairly naturalistic shot-on-film Play For Today before becoming a largely shot-on-tape series with a much more theatrical style increasingly removed from its Get Carteresque roots. By the time the second and last series finished, in a final episode that's one of the most outrageously Brechtian bits of mainstream TV since the finale of The Prisoner, all pretence at realism had gone out of the window. Where writer Philip Martin played a key acting role in the Play For Today episode, in the second series he could occasionally be found on the sidelines dictating the scenes as they happened to a Pakistani typist or reading stage directions to a scene before turning up in the last couple of episodes (billed as Larson E. Whipsnade in a role originally intended for comedian Les Dawson) as a deadly hitman who disguises himself as W.C. Fields... and that's excluding the production crew's tombstones appearing in the surreal funeral scene that also sees the reappearance of at least one dead character, characters deciding to cut their dialogue because a scene is dragging on pointlessly, Terry Downes' comic mishaps with a couple of Molotov Cocktails or the leading lady walking off the set in disbelief.
At its best, before it sank under the weight of movie references and pastiches, it's a fascinating portrait of a multicultural Britain seen through its underworlds - Asian people traffickers, black pimps and strippers, Chinese drug dealers, Irish terrorists skimming local businesses to buy bombs - and the way that besieged minorities often feed off each other and find themselves in alliances with the far right would-be white supremacist liberators who are reliant both on the finance and the threat they provide. Indeed, despite causing a storm of controversy when first broadcast in 1976, it was still the first English-language TV show to have a Pakistani hero (Ahmed Kalil's Khan), albeit a less than ethical one who is more than happy to manipulate Maurice Colborne's recently released club owner John Kline from the straight and narrow in his determination to catch Saeed Jaffrey's jovially loquacious crooked community leader.
It's definitely hit and miss: sometimes it's uncannily dead on target, at others wildly mannered and unconvincing, with the tone veering from the merely comic to the drearily comic-strip, particularly in the cartoonish movie serial-like second series complete with its over-ripe performances, chapter titles, inscrutable villains straight out of a Fu Manchu knockoff and the most pathetic displays of martial arts ever seen on any screen. In most ways more is lost in the overtly fantastic second series than is gained, though Zia Mohyeddin's character is a welcome addition. Unlike the immigrants who are smuggled in, he's an educated and literate man but shares equally unrealistic expectations of the `Mother Country,' which he still sees as the England of Rudyard Kipling. He's aware that this is a land of the imagination so has no intention to ever go there until circumstances force him to do so, but even so his last scenes are both the most memorable and the most powerful in the entire run of the show.
If the show is a distinctly mixed bag, 2Entertain's new Region 2 DVD is an excellent package - remastered versions of both series and the Play For Today with group audio commentaries on 5 episodes as well as an interesting Open University documentary on the show's popular cultural references.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Strange but okay, 20 Dec 2006
(I just want to say from the start that even though I'm 24 years old, I love TV drama from the 70s. So if anything my prejudices lean in Gangsters' favour.)
This is a difficult show to write about. The first and second series are very different. Philip Martin came up with a number of intriguing characters (especially Malleson, Rafiq and Anne Darracott) and the original Play for Today sets thing up nicely for the first series.
The first series then progresses nicely, with good pacing, surprises, shocks and laughs along the way. Even though the tone of Gangsters takes some getting used to (it's quite eccentric), it's worth the effort. Malleson is a truly excellent character and Rafiq is often a pleasure to watch. But then we arrive at the second series.
Now, I don't mean Philip Martin any harm. He seems like a nice guy in the documentary, and an intelligent guy. But I wasn't impressed by the second series. It seems to think it's a clever programme - so clever that it needn't bother about being a good drama.
And in 1978 it probably WAS a clever programme. The down-playing of traditional dramatic devices, the self-parodying, the over-the-top nature of things, etc. In 1978 it probably was quite clever to "make the audience question the presumptions of drama" and so forth. But in 2006, we've done all that. And the trouble is, Gangsters' second series relies very heavily on this "cleverness". You see the writer dictating the script as it plays out, you get Anne Darracott commenting to camera, you get silly titles that tear you out of the action to scream in your ear "this show is a bit like a comic book!" Throughout, it just doesn't seem like we're supposed to be getting into the drama.
That is, until the final two or three minutes of the series, with the ballad of Khan's father. This was genuinely touching, I thought.
Then of course you get "that ending" with the script being thrown into the air. Now as I say, I'm sure this sarcastic, postmodern approach was clever in 1978, but not now. Everybody knows that when we watch TV drama we're probably watching something ridiculous that asks you to believe it is a realistic portrayal. That has been said and acknowledged and it doesn't need repeating. It is not an intellectual point anymore; it is a banal point. And worst of all, what has this approach got us? Thirty years after Gangsters, we're in a situation where all TV drama is postmodern, and we are never really supposed to "get into it". Look at Torchwood and the new Robin Hood, for example. So, this cleverness that you see in Gangsters is really just leading to a shattering of the illusion of drama. And I don't think that's something we should be thankful for at all.
I would prefer Philip Martin had put his intelligence into writing more fine drama like the original Play for Today and the first series, rather than putting it into the "clever", overtly deconstructivist tone of the second series. But there you go. Some people seem to love it.
If nothing else, Gangsters is a unique programme and I would certainly recommend you see the first half of it. The second half, approach with caution and charity!
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