Scotland Yard is showing on Talking Pictures TV - and I'm relishing every minute of every episode

I'm particularly enjoying the splendidly boastful sequence and presenter Edgar Lustgarden's borderline-salacious, lip-smacking, dead-eyed intros:

The 39 episodes of Scotland Yard were shot between 1953 and 1961 as programme-filler for...

...cinemas, but they were shown on American television and eventual transferred to TV in the UK, which is where I must have seen them in the early '60s. Looking at them now, it's easy to see that they weren't originally made for British television - believe it or not, the production values were too high: there's a lot of location filming, for a start - which is what makes up for the stilted direction and the distinctly iffy performances given by many of the bit-part actors. The shots of London streets, with their bombed-out, rubble-strewn gaps, the general shabbiness of the buildings, and the lack of street markings remind me of what it was like when I arrived in the late '50s - and they do a nice line in rural crime scenes, which always seem to have been shot in freezing cold weather.

Russell Napier as Inspector Duggan

The use of locations makes up for the improbable nature of many of the plots: they're supposed to have been based on actual crimes, but the crime-fiction neatness of some of the stories, and the cunning complexity of some of the criminal scams seem a trifle unlikely: I've read a lot of true crime books, and I'm convinced more of these tales would have appeared in them. I also doubt that Scotland Yard would have been quite so relaxed about its detectives jetting off to foreign climes at the mere sniff of a clue: "Sergeant, one of the words on this crumpled piece of paper found in the dead woman's hand looks a bit Spanish to me - book me on the next flight to Barcelona." I've also lost count of the times a Detective Sergeant says, "So you mean that Nobby Crump and Dieter Schultz...", only for the Inspector to respond with, "...one and the same person? Yes, Sergeant - that's exactly what I mean!"

Apart from the locations, the attitudes of everyone involved are a constant source of delight and/or amusement. Foreigners are all exactly as you'd expect them to be: wily, excitable, craven, violent, romantic etc. Criminals can be silenced with a stern "Here, that's enough of that!" The first thought that pops into the mind of the rural police when faced with anything more puzzling than a cat stuck up a tree or a missing bicycle is to call in the Yard, whose help is always hugely appreciated. Not every detective speaks like a member of the aristocracy, but they all sound solidly middle class - when, in reality, they were a pretty rough lot (at least, they were according to former Met police officer Dick Kirby's fascinating The Guv'nors, Ten of Scotland Yard's Greatest Detectives). But so what? Scotland Yard is a rather poignant reminder of an era when we automatically assumed the police were solidly on the side of sensible, decent citizens, whose attitudes they largely shared - it's hard to imagine this lot in "gay pride" squad cars or scouring the internet for hate crimes.

Scotland Yard also has the distinction of giving rise to at least two very funny parodies. The first one, with Stanley Baxter as Edgar Lastgasper, is from the 1960s:

This one, with Robbie Coltrane as Edgar Dustcarten, nicely captures the impression Lustgarden gives of enjoying the details of grisly murders just a little too keenly: