Heartbeat, the half-surreal institution

Heartbeat, the TV series. British institution, ran for years. I’d never seen it, but got to see an episode for the first time in my life.

I was immediately jarred. There’s a story about a car crash that traps a couple of people. The soundtrack is by the rock band Cream, a track called ‘I Feel Free’. Now, like all rock music, and Cream were the real deal, this is expressively limited. It is also a performance the likes of which people do not aim for much, with a great, bold, tune. The music speaks, half accidentally, of class breakdown—“I feel free…. I can walk down the street and no‐one is there…”. There’s a hint of sexual freedom too. The performance is needle‐sharp, people who have practised and involved themselves for hours, days, a lifetime.

But what are these visuals I see? The ones I marked down were one of those old petrol pumps, a thing made when petrol was a dream and glamorous. The pump was engineered, a fantastic and expressive build in metal with a brand‐display as proud‐headpiece, like the haircut of a young man. And enamel signs everywhere, those old enamel signs from before the age of mass paperprint. How do they fit with Cream? So I looked these items up with a web search.

I’m telling you right now, I was not looking for what the reviewers like to call ‘anachronism’, and the web calls ‘mistakes’. I am fairly sure that a long‐running TV series backed by substantial resources would spend time on getting the right object into a scene. Good enough for me, anyway. And the set designers seem to source, and the cameramen frame, with love. No, I was intrigued by what seemed to be a slip in my understanding. I had petrol pumps placed a lot earlier than music by the band Cream. So I looked. And quickly came to two results. First, the petrol pump on show was probably correct for the time—more on this further down—but that my instinct not wrong, the heyday of the petrol pump started in the 1920’s.

And now of those enamelled signs. I half suspected this would be more difficult, and it was. Enamel as technique goes back to well before anyone would call modern history. It survives because that application of powdered glass and tint, then fusing, makes eye‐bewildering effects of joyous depth, which last forever. Later some paints could approach the same effect, albeit by way of foul petroleum derivatives, and these paints were good enough to gain the name ‘enamel’. Now, I was interested in the products that advertised the joys of consumerism, where the art of typography had transferred from the printed page to the painted metal. ‘Castrol Oil’ and ‘Frys Chocolate’ were the two I thought of, though I quickly turned up ‘Lyons’ and ‘7up’. I got the dates as a stretch between the 1920’s and 1940’s.

As a cross‐check, I threw in the the old railway promotion posters from England. The railway meant so much to the industrial worker, and these images in saturated colour of peaceful places, the patches of black and lineless style, say a lot. I nailed these as a 1950’s item, mainly. More on this too, in a moment.

I’d expect that, in Heartbeat, other people would pick up on the styles of dress. That’s fair enough, and interesting in itself, but doesn’t cover what jarred me.

If the set‐designers or followers of Heartbeat wished to raise something with me, they would likely say that Heartbeat was set in a, for England, fairly remote community. For example, enamel signs may have survived the nation‐wide metallic meltdown of W.W.2. History, the designers may even propose, is all about us, as is the future, and this place would have been slightly on the side of history. Quite right, I’d agree. But me, I’m into the TV series. The set designers have avoided what people call ‘kitsch’—an imitation of past activity with trace sediment—and avoided repurpose, by turning Heartbeat into a treasure chest of collector activity. It’s like wandering through an antiques shop run by an enthusiast.

And what story is this hooked to? A couple of people in a car, who, it turns out, were hoping to run away together to Spain. Well, that jars me more. You see, people have been running away to foreign places for a long time—I’d point you is the direction of Lord Byron. But this story is particular about Spain, and about some missing money from a local firm. Put those together and I start to think about a very different age, when sexual liberation, as it was called, worked it’s way into the lives of middle‐management and salespeople, in short, the 1970’s. Groping the secretary—which has recently lead a shift in social perception and code. Not to mention the rise to the surface of some openly acknowledged ugliness.

There’s an odd stride to this story that I liked. There was no effort to make the characters show for much more than their place in the tale, and no effort to force the drama beyond what it was. It was what it was, two people running away, which then revealed through the car crash that they had gathered their cash by defrauding a local firm. The story then ricochets around what the fraud may mean to the community.

There was also, in this episode, and I assume most episodes, a second story of mostly comedy drama. Some of the local pub‐goers decide to run a bit of a poker game on the sly. They organise this, then drag in a reluctant party, only to find the reluctant party is a reformed gambler, who takes all, including winning a lorry. This is fixed by a feisty woman who knows the gambler’s mother. Ah, though, the woman sorts it out? How, umm, post‐Millennium. As a story. Radar blips on every side.

Look, the idea of a small community used as an island to discuss wide issues, usually as a comedy, has appeared in many places. Off the cuff I can think of outstanding examples from India, Italy, and Scotland. I’m sure others could contribute. I guess it’s an archetypical instinct, like clowns who open umbrellas with no material in them. But Heartbeat is not quite that—it has no satirical intent. The two stories I watched, in the single episode, are more to do with ‘Stories you recognise and know’, set into this collectors home, as though the stories themselves are like the petrol pump. And I’ve not even mentioned the central premise, of village policemen, the way this is used of a part with the rest of the show, modest. It is not a surprise to me that ‘Heartbeat’—you get the title?—arrived in the 1980’s, precisely the time when class breakdown finally destroyed the authority of the English policeman, the ‘Bobby’.

So what we have is a show that, despite the fact that Wikipedia tells me Heartbeat settled on a temporal positioning of late 1960’s, drags in elements which, for me, refer to any and every era since Georgian times to the outset of the 1900’s. That makes me think, because there’s a lot of Heartbeat that is a little Georgian—a knowledge that life and living is ok, but that there are elements of unrest about, and that somehow there is a decline in the world that can be arrested by ignorance. Or perhaps that ignorance is the best way of getting through days that, if you think about them, are too complex. And that you had best take advantage of the greatness of the age on offer. Where Heartbeat, or this episode anyway, succeeded for me is in it’s modesty. And it’s avoidance of faint thinking through it’s joy in collecting and story.

Let’s get back to The Cream. Any quick read of the progress and ends of the musicians in The Cream will tell you a lot about the times they came from and what happened then. Far more than Heartbeat can. And sure, Heartbeat is ducking those dramas. But ‘I Feel Free’ was, as the story unwound, an appropriate choice of music. And resonant. As were the enamel signs and the petrol pump. So Heartbeat, at this point anyway, was avoiding ‘kitsch’ and insight for modesty. Nobody fought to keep it, but people were sad when, after 18 years and 372 shows, it ended. It’s not hard to see why.

Final note: the episode I saw was ”Stormy Weather”, from Series 14, of 18 series.