User Reviews

Wrapping up the night each time I go out on a weekend with friends to Milton Keynes by watching charming delights such as Lady in Distress (1939-also reviewed) before going to bed,I've been hoping that one day the TV channel Talking Pictures would offer an online option.

Taking a look one night in November at their Twitter page, I was happily caught completely by surprised, from the news that Talking Pictures were launching a free Encore streaming service in December!

Trying to decide on what my first viewing from the service would be, I was thrilled to find episodes of a long lost TV series that the team behind Talking Pictures had recently found,leading to me getting told by a dead man.

View on the episode:

Made just a few years after ITV had launched, director co-director (of the studio sequences) Richard Gilbert marks his penultimate episode of No Hiding Place, by closely working with outdoor director Richard Sidwell, (who shot sequences with film on location) to bring flashes of style to this TV Noir, via great match-cut dissolves between the cops and the suspects,along with Sidwell display a merry inventiveness, by having having the kidnapper go to collect his ransom from a phone box, only to find himself being held captive, when a large dog presses its paws against the door.

Whilst the manner in which it is all wrapped up is rather abrupt, the script by Roger Marshall jumps over the sudden stop with snappy exchanges between cops Lockhart and Blake (played with a fitting gruffness by Raymond Francis & Barrie Cookson) as their hit and run murder investigation runs into an unfolding kidnapping, where the voice of the dead man looms.

A man is knocked down and killed. A ransom note is found on him but the police do not know who has been kidnapped.

A good start, but the story is resolved far too quickly due to lazy coincidences and convenient events.

The mother of the kidnapped victim reports the kidnapping to the police, and it just happens to be DCS Lockhart at Scotland Yard that she goes to see, and he is invesstigating the kidnapping.

The man who calls about the ransom seems not to be involved in the kidnapping, and was a chancer hoping to con the parents out of the money - but how did he know about it when the police hadn't yet gone public about the kidnapping and the likely victim?

The police identify that the kidnapper had had his hair singed by a barber (that dates it - how many barbers would singe hair these days!) but they manage to question all the barbers suspiciously quickly; it was very convenient that he had been killed just after leaving the shop rather than anywhere else in London.

The police conveniently already have a list of all the known lock-up garages in the area and even know which have whitewashed walls and which don't, ignoring the fact that tenants may have whitewashed the walls of the garage they are renting even though it it listed on the police list as having unpainted walls. Is that plausible?

They manage to trace the victim too quickly, even though she has not had any food or water since the kidnapper died.