307 Target

First  viewed  :  9  September  1977

My  memory  didn't  let  me  down  on  this  one. It  did  arrive  in  the  same  week  as  Secret  Army  and,  as  an  interesting  bit  of  trivia,  the  lead  female  character  in  both  series  was  called  L  Colbert  ( Louise  in  this  case ).  This  was  another  rite  of  passage  series  for  me. It  was  the  first  post-watershed  series  I  watched  alone , my  mum  no  longer  being  bothered  how  late  I  stayed  up  on  a  Friday,  and , in  the  second  episode,  presented  me  with  the  first  pair  of  naked  female  breasts  I'd  seen  since  babyhood.

So  who  was  the  luscious  lovely  who  helped  move  on  my  sexual  education ? Err  , middle-aged  Hilary  Crane,  best  known  for  playing  Tucker  Jenkins'  mum  in  Grange  Hill. who    flashed  them  in  a  vain  attempt  to  distract  cuckolded  husband  Ron  Pember  ( Alain  in  Secret  Army )  from  emptying  a  pan  of  boiling  water  on  her. It's  a  shame  that  they  didn't  swap  it  round  with  the  next  episode  in  which  case  my  first  glimpsed  pair  would  have  been  those  belonging  to  the  much  more  interesting   Katy  Manning, Dr  Who's  Jo  Grant   in  a  powerful  performance  as  a  desperate  junkie. Sadly,  Pamela  Stephenson  in  episode  9  stayed  under  wraps.

Apart  from  the  above  and  a  nifty  theme  tune   there's  no  reason  to  recall  Target  with  much  affection. It  was  an  over-violent  rip-off  of  The  Sweeney  which  had  Mary  Whitehouse  foaming  at  the  mouth. In  a  rare  triumph  she  managed  to  get  the  first  series  curtailed  to   nine  episodes  and  the  second  series  was  noticeably  toned  down.

It  was  set  in  Southampton, the  base  for  a  regional  crime  squad, and  some  of  the  storylines  started  with  a  ship  docking. The  main  problem  lay  with  the  regular  cast. The  lead  character  Detective  Superintendent  Steve  Hackett  ( which  no  doubt  caused  the  soon-to-be-ex-Genesis  guitarist  some  amusement )  was  played  by  Patrick  Mower  , a  charmless  actor  at  the  best  of  times  but  completely  repellent  here  as  a  sneering , violent, bullying  poseur  in  a  string  of  vile  jackets. You  shouldn't  be  watching  cop  shows  and  wanting  the  "hero"  to  get  a  right  pasting  but  that  was  always  the  case  with  Hackett. His  colleagues  weren't   much  better  ; his   leather-jacketed  subordinate  Bonny ( Brendan  Prince )   was  a  trainee  version  of  the  same  type   while  Philip  Madoc's  performance  as  his  boss  was   just  dreadful. He  looked  embarrassed  to  be  there  and  delivered  many  of  his  lines  turning  away  from  the  camera  and  mumbling  into  his  chest. Where  Target  might  have  scored   over  The  Sweeney  was  in  having  a  regular  female  member  of  the  team  but  alas  Vivien  Heilbron's  Det-Sgt  Colbert  was  an  impassive  cipher  accepting  Hackett's  sexism  and  bullying  without  protest  and  never  became  an  interesting  character.

The  series  had  a  bleak  cynical  outlook  , usually  filmed  in  the  dingiest  settings  available , which  at  least  reflected   the  times   but  you  missed  the  humour  in  The  Sweeney  which  had  some  semi-comic  episodes  to  lighten  the  tone. There  was   the  odd  attempt  at  banter  between  Bonny  and  Colbert  which  always  fell  flat  on  its  face  because  the  pairing  had  zero  screen  chemistry.

 There  was  as  stated  a  second  series  of  eight  episodes  and  plans  for  a  third  which  were  scrapped  and  resources  diverted  into  Shoestring  instead.  The  first  series  was  repeated  on  a  satellite  channel  in  1990  but  the  second  has  never  been  aired  since  and  the  BBC  have  so  far  resisted  calls  to  release  a  DVD.

Mower's  career  never  recovered  from  the  series'  poor  reception. There  were  no  more  star  vehicles  just  guest  star  roles  in  the  likes  of  Bergerac   then  a  big  gap   in  his  c.v. from  a  few  appearances  on  Countdown  in  1987  to  a  humiliating  appearance  on  Fantasy  Football  League  in  1994  because,  if  memory  serves,  David  Baddiel  had  discovered  him  trying  to  flog  watches  at  his  mum's  golf  club.  After  Baddiel  and  Skinner  had  royally  ripped  into  him  as  a  washed-up  has-been , he  appeared  at  the  end  of  the  programme  with  a  case  full  of  watches  to  sell  to  the  audience. Game  for  a  laugh  or  plain  desperate  to  get  his  face  back  on  the  box ?  You  decide. Since  2001  of  course  he's  been  part  of  the  regular  cast  in  Emmerdale    whose  casting  people  seem  to  have  a  penchant  for  picking  up  the  flotsam  from  previous  decades.

Madoc  did  manage  to  turn  things  around  after  playing  the  title  role  in  The  Life  and  Times  of  David  Lloyd  George  in  1981  and  eventually  got  his  own  detective  series  with  the  Welsh-set  A  Mind  To  Kill  in  1994.  He  was  still  working  shortly  before  his  death  in  2012.  Prince    remains  an   anonymous  jobbing  actor  while  Heilbron  now  combines  acting  with  some  lecturing  at  Cambridge  University.