T.J. Hooker: undercover

Just about every cop and detective show eventually has an episode where a main character requires going undercover to nail the perps. Hell, even Columbo did it in the episode Columbo: Undercover, where Columbo, if memory serves, plays an old, confused down and out drunk in a hat and was at one point beaten up using the blunt end of a telephone. I try not to think about that episode much. It was a sad and embarrassing day for both of us.

I don’t recall Quincy M.E. going undercover – though I am sure he did a lot of work under the covers on his yacht at the marina, if you get my meaning, smooth coroner that he is – and so keeps integrity points for that.

It seems, however, that T.J. Hooker – the early 1980’s vehicle for William Shatner – resorted to working undercover more than most. The programme being rather poor in general made no mistake and kept the tone of the undercover aspects similarly ridiculous.

Now I realise that a certain amount of suspension of belief is required on behalf of the viewer and so we must forgive the obvious issues of 3 street cops (of whom one is a young lady called Stacey who appears to be nothing more than a receptionist in a police uniform at the Police Academy) going into dangerous undercover operations with seemingly little to no preparation or backup. But even without, it seems, the necessary training or support they are the worst undercover cops I have seen:

In a plot involving the complicated scenario where diamond thieves (a hired heavy, a helicopter pilot, a pornographic filmmaker and girl who is a dancer-cise instructor which the filmmaker is blackmailing with their linked past – like if the A-team had gone wrong) in a series of thefts, steal some diamonds then make off in their signigture move by hotwiring helicopters (!!) [don’t get me started on the concept of the many helicopters just left lying about in back alleys in the realm of T. J. Hooker] – T.J. Hooker needs Stacy to go undercover to check on their one lead, the filmmaker.

It’s ok for Stacy – the filmmaker bloke doesn’t do 70’s funk movies since he was busted a few years back, these days he does innocent dancer-cise instruction videos.

Stacy gets the gig by dancing and exercising on the podium and following the, albeit, dubious directions of “now add a bit eroticism, but not too raunchy!” [yep, that's how it started the first time]. She’s onto to something too: after another successful workout video in the can she has found a note with a phone number in a bin. Unfortunately she is discovered looking at the paper by the filmmaker. She drops the note and heads off to the showers. Her smoke [or heh, heh, steam] screen doesn’t work and soon the filmmaker is suspicious.

So suspicious in fact, that he goes to the changing room and picks the lock of her… er… locker. He doesn’t need to dig too deep to find her Police Badge. I mean, come on! I am no fully trained police officer but to have your badge with you, and out of your control while undercover surely is the in the top 5 things not to do when on undercover operations?

Needless to say her cover is soon blown and it is only a matter of moments before her life is in danger as the heist group fire up another chopper.

Thankfully in the T.J. Hooker universe the crooks are often just as bumbling when things go “undercover”.

T.J Hooker and Jim Corrigan are working undercover as a couple of big time cocaine dealers. The Feds are quick to note that they are quite possibly not experienced enough to pull this off and so Washington wont give them the $30,000 needed to continue with the operation. T.J. Hooker mystifyingly tells the Federal Agent, “I’ll use my own funds”. Fine, but at least take a wire, the Agent reasons. “No wires!” Hooker spits back. Despite this perhaps now perilously blending the lines between working undercover using government money and evidence gathering techniques and simply doing a $30,000 drugs deal T.J. Hooker and Jim bash on.

Once in the neon lit and velvet furnished bar, the two undercover cops are searched for wires. “You can’t be too careful, you might be cops” they are told as the goon pads them down. Clean, they sit down to conduct business. The drugs dealer tells them that business has been good and displays his threads to them as proof, gold tooth gleaming from his grin. [The suit appeared quite flimsy to me and the shirt although very red, hints that maybe business is not that good as it seems to be missing half its buttons – the poor drug lord is using a yellow medallion to try and distract from this, unfortunately it only seems to highlight it].

Once the deal is done, T.J. Hooker draws his 6-shooter under the table and gets the information he needs.

It seems that you really can’t be too careful if you are drugs lord – although perhaps making sure your goon doesn’t just check to see if the stranger you are in dealings with has a wire but is also checking he isn't packing heat in the form of a large police issue gun is the very least you should expect.

Some say they can hear the dragging of binders at night

My office is like many other offices all over the place. Open plan, full of the clicking of keyboard buttons and has a regular department newsletter. Ours is called the Bulletin. Its primary function is to disseminate information which is not high priority to staff. The stuff which doesn't need an e-mail or a shout across two desks. And much of it is as dry as you are probably thinking.

The usual fare is the latest bit of sector development, an upcoming social event or a reminder of a future bit of work scheduled.

That is until I came across a strange discovery. Files in the Vault rooms under the office, in the basement of the ancient building are old and of no use. But when I happened to find myself down there - the files had been moved. They were jumbled, mixed and cluttered.

I tidied them then, as anyone would, staked out the basement for weeks: Taking all manner of readings and noting all findings in a leather bound journal. My tenacity was rewarded when, many checks later, I noticed the files once more in the wrong order. I tidied them again and retreated once more into my Hide with my flask. You can imagine my delirium, then, when again I found the files out of sequence!

I immediately wrote an article for the Bulletin, my keyboard buttons clicking away in the open plan office:

Like the diamond biting wind, I write! Riding down the proverbial Bulletin chimney, ruddying the failing embers in the hearth. There is, of course, warm syrups and still, smokey hazelnuts to glow you golden into the deep blue night - but just now I wish to tell you a tale which contains a most serious review of mystery indeed.

I have dealt with 3 instances now where runs of files and volumes have been found on the shelves in the vault rooms in disarray. An entire series out of sequence, material untidy on shelves and books, generally, moved out of their proper location.

There is only one reasonable conclusion a near rational person can make from all this - these rooms are haunted by a ghost or, I am afraid, more inevitably, ghosts. I don't want to alarm anyone but they almost certainly are the souls of Burke and Hare searching for living bodies to drag to Limbo for medical research by dead doctors.

Should you witness any ghostly goings on or find evidence of activity, you suspect, by spookticles please let me know. I will be sure to arrange for you to sit in the vault rooms in the dark over night and you can record anything else you see or hear with a pad of paper and pencil.

I received no uptake on my offer.

Strangley, as a post-script to this blogette, I discovered [with no one willing to sit in a room in the dark until something happens who else was going to go to possibly extreme measures simply to find out what was going on with some binders no one uses and few cared about and, actually, even less had heard of before I wrote the article? Exactly] that the vaults were at one time an entrance, now bricked up, to the building. This entrance, though potentially convenient for those working in the building was in fact blocked by a local monger's workshop yard. The men spoke to the monger and agreed that should he allow clear passage with a new asphalt path and secure gate they would pay him for the work and the right to use the entrance. The men, the monger claimed, never paid him a penny for his work and took them to court. He lost.

So it seems I was way off. This was not Burke and Hare after all but is the spirit of the monger. Moving the books, most likely, trying to drag them to Limbo for literary research by dead doctors.

Night Driving (part 1)

Driving in the back of beyond recently all the elements were in their place for a cheap horror movie. It was great, like being in a Stephen King paragraph. Sung by Chris Rea.

It was late at night and the constellations were easily found in the cloudless, moonless sky. We were a long way from home and we were on the old road: no markings, no street lights and no road signs. As it wound round and rose and fell the car lights only found the trees at the edge of the woods encroaching at the verges, branches still leafless from the long winter, and occasionally when on the rise, the headlights showed us the branch tips ahead, overarching high above crossing the road and entangling with those of the trees from the other side. Behind us was the great blackness. The Smiths song How Soon Is Now? whined on the radio.

We were not sure even if we heading in the right direction let alone if on the right path.

Coming round another bend a pitch-staked home made sign shot into view black on white: Logs For Sale. Not long after, a single floored small farmhouse clung to the road side and a small lamp above the front door was on. At the back there were the logs, piled high.

Someone suggested we stop and ask the log merchant for help.

Yeah right! Just because he sells logs doesn’t alter the fact he has an axe.

To be fair the axe maniac probably thought he had a good business model: There are all these trees, there is no competition nearby - in fact there is no one at all for miles around, I don't have that many overheads and living in a place that is a little run down, it'll give it character for customers who potentially could be anyone in a car given they all have to pass me because there is no alternative route once they are on this long, narrow road. I'll put up a sign. And with this old rusty axe I am saving money on petrol for a chain saw. The axe is pretty much going to pay for itself. I am going to call it Lucy. What's that Lucy? No, I don't think we should do that, Lucy, that's bad.

Yep, sign or no sign, I can’t see him getting too much business to be honest.

We drove on, our speed renewed.

When numbers don’t really figure

A solemn government health warning segmented between songs on the local radio station announced:

5000 people each year die in this country directly because of smoking. 5000 people: the equivalent of a town’s population. Smoking kills.

This struck me as quite a specific population of a town. Almost too specific one might say. What are they trying to hide in these conveniently populated towns, somewhere, out there? Now no one is saying they are some sort of genetically modified towns built to enable the trialling of the provision for a human civic-cubed future. No one has mentioned that at all here. Nope.

Anyway, I digress. Could there be harder hitting ways of illustrating the 5000 dead for those too busy driving their Volvo in drive-time traffic to simply imagine 5000 dead people as “a lot”?

5000 people: the equivalent of an impressive regional militia. 5000 people: the equivalent of 5 times the number of oak tress in Sherwood Forest. 5000 people: the equivalent of an audience at a Girls Aloud concert. 5000 people: the equivalent of 5000 frogs standing together side-by-side, hand-in-hand, and one of the frogs has a crown on its head. And they are all singing Band on the Run. As a round.

Certainly makes you think. Terrifying.

Pineapple should always or never taste like this

What of modern culture in New Zealand? Of course it has the musical group Crowded House, and very popular they are too with their light harmony brand of Beatles-esque pop. But after this, I was unsure what else New Zealand had. Actually wait. Crowded House are Australian. New Zealand doesn’t even have Crowded House.

As it turns out they may not have Crowded House but New Zealanders do have the confection called Pineapple Lumps. And what a strange and awful thing they are. By all accounts a gift direct from God
[fair play, seems likely], these little chocolate covered fondants have been kept a minor secret from the rest of the World, but I encountered some recently.

On eating one of the nuggets two facts became very apparent. They are deceptively chewy and I think it hugely unlikely the people of New Zealand actually know what a pineapple tastes like.

Much like when early explorers believed rhinoceroses lived on nothing but air just because they watched them for a bit and did not see them eat, it seems clear the people of New Zealand have been shown a watercolour picture of a pineapple and asked to think about how it might taste. Then take that thought and put it into chocolate covered chunks of pallid yellow and seal them in bright yellow bags to sell to other New Zealanders thereby perpetuating this travesty of man redesigning nature.

The taste, in reality to me, lies somewhere between a banana [though, in a bizarre story parallel of which I cannot say too much, I don’t know what bananas actually taste like] and sweet potato – a sort of mix of yellow fruit and roots and cold, soft bark… in a chewable form. On the other hand perhaps the sweet makers of New Zealand actually have the right idea and pineapples indeed should taste like this and it is the Pineapple itself who we should be questioning.

The packet, in a frankly folly of self redemption, conveniently lists a number to call should I not be fully satisfied with the product.
... ... ...
Needless to say, still chewing, I had to be immediately and physically retrained from dialling the number: “But I have the international area dialling code! I just want to talk to them! It’ll be day there! I have the coooodde!”