Only the Brave

Great Show, But Season 8 DVDs Have Been Edited
UPDATE x2: Unfortunately, I've had to deduct a star, and return this review to its original 3-star rating. Acorn (whom I purchased the DVD from) made a very public spectacle of attempting to put things right with me regarding the edited DVD situation. Unfortunately, it's been over 3 months, and they never sent a new, unedited DVD to me as promised. To make matters worse, attempts to contact them via their Facebook page have gone unanswered.

The product itself ("New Tricks" Season 8) is definitely a 4-star affair, and I don't want to harm its rating. As it stands with the distributor (Acorn), however, that is decidedly a 1-star operation, and so this review once again goes back to 3 stars.

UPDATE: Since this review was published, Acorn have responded (both on Facebook and in the comments section of this review), and have been a class act in their acknowledgement of the issue, and how they plan to address it. I wanted to make readers aware of this, and that I am...

New Tricks
This show is fantastic! There's nothing like a British who-dun-it. They always do things with style and grace. With New Tricks, you have one gritty, attractive female, Superintendent Sandra Pullman (played by Amanda Redman) who's in charge of three disfunctional, misfit retired copers who don't always like to play by the rules. In fact, they often ignore proceedures altogether. But that's part of what makes this show so great. Actors James Bolam, Alun Armstrong, and Dennis Waterman brilliantly play their characters - Jack Halford, Brian Lane and Jerry Standing, who encounter some strange cases at their ever-moving U.C.O.S. (Unsolved Crime and Open-Case Squad) headquarters. They solve the crimes no one else wants to deal with. They may do some unconventional detective work in the process, but these "old-timers" are far more "experienced", "clever" and "vastly knowledgeable" - compared to their younger counter-parts. This is definitely not like American cop shows (thankfully)...

Another Excellent Season
It is very hard to come up with a police series which is truly original as the subject has pretty much been done to death from every angle over the years. However, the producers of New Tricks managed to do just that when they launched the pilot in 2003. Not really surprising that the show has run and run and we are now up to the eighth series and it has reached a total of 66 episodes. Good to see that we had 10 episodes this time round as in Series 7, rather than the 8 in earlier series.

Despite the long running nature of New Tricks, the script writers still seem to come up with original and sometimes quite offbeat plots. For example the last in the current series concerned the case of a zoo keeper whom it had been assumed had been mauled to death by a tiger, but whom the team suspect was killed before being put in the tiger's enclosure. As is usually the case, the truth, when it is teased out, is far from straight forward. Also good to see that we were not left with a...

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