3-09. Amos Green Must Live

A housekeeper (Annette Crosbie) unwittingly helps the angry Casey
(Stefan Kalipa) with a plan to assassinate a Member of Parliament.

Air Date: June 24, 1970. Written by: Ray Jenkins. Directed by: Jim Goddard. Produced by: Reginald Collin.


THE PLOT:

A wealthy black American Civil Rights activist is found dead.  Which wouldn't usually be a matter for The Section, except that a book of matches was found in his pocket, left by his killer.  A second matchbook was also delivered: to Member of Parliament Amos Green (Corin Redgrave). Green has been targeted for assassination!

Green has risen to power by opposing non-white immigration. He uses economics to bury the racism in his message, but every canine in England must be smarting from his constant dog whistles. Still, The Section cannot allow his death. While Cross acts as Green's bodyguard, Callan investigates.

May Coswood (Annette Crosbie), Green's housekeeper, manages to evade Callan without ever being aware that he's following her. She goes to the assassin, a black garage owner named Casey (Stefan Kalipa). He sends her back, angrily telling her not to return. Her odd behavior alerts Cross, however - even as Lonely, following Callan's instructions, manages to bumble his way into danger...

Cross guards snooty politician Amos Green (Corin Redgrave).

CHARACTERS:

Callan: So let me get this straight: The highly-trained, eternally capable Callan manages to lose track of a simple-minded housekeeper who doesn't even know that he's there? As the scene plays, I'm not even sure how he managed to miss her. Surely a change of clothes wouldn't throw him that much? The reason she evades Callan is to do with the plot - specifically, that if Callan is his usual competent self, then the episode will end at the twenty minute mark.

Hunter: Most of the too-few good moments belong to him. William Squire's dry line deliveries are particularly effective at Green's party at the end. First Hunter reminds Cross that, if anything happens, Cross should remember that he is important and protect him first. Then he corners Green for some small talk, politely yet acidly observing how opportunistic Green's political evolution has been.

Cross: Bizarrely, this mostly bad episode is one of Cross's best showings.  He is absolutely professional, refusing to let Green bait him into political arguments and taking common sense precautions from the moment he arrives. He picks up on the housekeeper's behavior, and lets her spend time thinking about her situation before cornering her in the episode's best scene: a simple telephone call in which Hunter reads out a list of garages, with Cross repeating the addresses while studying the woman's reactions.

Lonely: Is made a racist just for this week, all for the sake of Callan scoffing at the hypocrisy of him having a problem with how anyone else "smells." It's not that Lonely disliking black people contradicts anything we've seen before; it just feels like a bad fit for his character. I'd also argue that it's not exactly smart to sabotage your most likeable (and probably most popular) supporting character for the sake of a cheap shot.

Cross guards snooty politician Amos Green (Corin Redgrave).

THOUGHTS:

Amos Green Must Live was never intended to be the final episode of Series Three. It was meant to air around the mid-season, and that shows through details such as Hunter relying more on Cross than on Callan (the exact opposite of the end-of-season situation). However, a Snap Election was called - and given the episode's plot, centered on the attempted assassination of a Member of Parliament, and the deliberate resemblance of that MP to the controversial Enoch Powell, the decision was made to move it to the end of the season.

Which means that the story behind the episode is more interesting than anything happening on-screen.

Amos Green Must Live is an Issue Episode. I emphasize that it's possible to produce a good issue episode: for example, Doctor Who's Rosa was surprisingly well-written and entertaining, with some of the best character material of its season; and Quantum Leap dealt engagingly with issues on a regular basis, including racism in The Color of Truth and domestic abuse in The Kamikaze Kid (just to name two of many examples). Too often, however, and in too many series, such episodes end up falling into one or more of several pitfalls: undermining regular characters to advance the issue; failing to tell a good story; and even presenting the all-important issue in a way that is so muddled and/or artificial as to push viewers away from the point the episode's trying to make.

This was scripted by Ray Jenkins, who previously wrote the excellent Let's Kill Everybody and the quite good Death of a Friend. Which goes to show that it takes a truly skilled writer to fall into every Issue Episode pitfall on the list!

The story is paper-thin. Casey wants to kill Amos Green. For some reason, he sends him a sinister matchbook instead of just lying low until it's time to put his plan into effect. Callan stops him at the last possible moment. And... that's about it, with no particular twists or turns.

Many Callan episodes have overcome thin plots with excellent character work. This one does the opposite. Callan becomes utterly incompetent so that the unwitting May Coswood can evade him. Lonely becomes a racist just to prop up the message. Guest characters are two-dimensional, with only Corin Redgrave managing to acquit himself well as the snooty MP. Meanwhile, Annette Crosbie, as May, seems to be trying to indicate some mental disability that isn't actually in the script. Finally, Stefan Kalipa's Casey is a complete nonentity, and Kalipa overplays every wailed line he gets.

The message is ludicrously muddled. It's made obvious that the script despises Green and has sympathy for Casey, an educated man who has been unable to find work because of his accent and skin color. But Casey's ending breakdown, in which he cries about how much better his childhood was and how poorly he's been treated in England, actually seems to advance Green's views. A racist or xenophobe could look at this speech and say: "See, they're better off in their own countries," and cease any further critical thought on the matter.

Even if the story otherwise worked (and it really, really doesn't), it would still lose a point or two for its ending. The ending is so abrupt that it's actively hard to follow, and no sense is given as to how Callan thwarts the plan. He's just magically in place, even after we're flat-out told that he doesn't have time to get there. Couldn't we have seen him telephone Hunter to let him know the details, and let Hunter and Cross take it from there?

So... A thin story, a muddled message, and characterizations that are compromised in an attempt to prop up both story and message. There are a few good moments, mainly courtesy of William Squire's Hunter. Overall, however, this is almost certainly Callan's worst surviving episode, if not its worst episode full-stop.


Overall Rating: 2/10.

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