Dalziel & Pascoe: Season 1

— Do you speak Austrian?
— No such language.
— How do they communicate? Semaphore?

One of the most beloved British TV series. It's like "Inspector Morse" inside out. In Morse, there's an intelligent, educated, gentlemanly inspector and a seemingly simpleminded, low-class sergeant, but here it's exactly the opposite: the inspector farts and burps (and is charming), and the sergeant is refined.

Despite the fact that there are two main characters and their names even gave the series its name, the central character and the main "highlight", in my opinion, is one colorful, defiantly ungracious, intentionally rustic, elderly detective Andy Diehl. Smart, attentive, persistent, with excellent instincts, an old-school police detective who knows his own worth, at the same time a devoted friend, reliable colleague and principled defender of justice, does not hesitate sometimes to pretend to be a stupid, uncouth soldier, he does not stop until he finds the criminal. The character, manners, and background of his young partner highlight the difference between them -the foundation of their duo's effectiveness, both policing and cinematography.

The series is quite well-made, a good diverse plot with interesting detective stories, everyday collisions and, sometimes, very dramatic events. The later seasons seemed to me more tragic, and in general the series is realistic and pessimistic, it has a lot of sad life details, difficult situations with difficult moral choices and contradictory details of the police service. They play acceptably, filmed and mounted quite simply, without gloss.

The impression was spoiled by the quality of the available video files, and not so much by the low image quality as by the low level of the audio track, especially in the first seasons, which, together with serious accents and not particularly intelligible speech in general, made perception very difficult. The almost complete lack of subtitles for recent seasons has actually made it impossible for me to watch them properly. I think it is more than likely that if I had come across a high-quality recording with good sound, image and subtitles, my score would have been significantly higher.

Language. They speak naturally, it is difficult to understand, especially without subtitles. There are many characters with a difficult regional accent, mostly northern. Diction is not a gift at all.

-It’s the 60s revival.
-Why do they want to revive them? They were bad the first time round.