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The Best...TV misery guts

Warren Clarke as Andy Dalziel in Dalziel and Pascoe.
  • Posted at 3:45pm
  • 23 June 2008
  • by DavidWhitehouse-RT
  • 1 comment

Is there a more curmudgeonly character on television than Andy Dalziel?

All right, Victor Meldrew is a miserable old sod with the semi-permanent expression of a man forced to lick a dog's scent from a thistle, but at least we know it will always end in a joke at his expense. And Inspector Morse might be a grumpy old goat on occasion, but after a glass of wine and a bit of Mozart he could always invite Lewis over for a friendly game of Scrabble and a bit of a laugh about the day's grisly murder investigation. Even Scrooge saw the error of his ways eventually, bah humbug.

The truth is that the smart money in the TV misery guts stakes is on Warren Clarke's portrayal of the eponymous crusty old git in Dalziel and Pascoe. Dalziel is an unholy collision in flesh form of everything that signifies whether or not a person is a miserable b****r. In the style of a miserly television detective, let's consider the evidence.

* Jowls. No-one has jowls like Warren Clarke. They hang so low on his face, dragging his mouth into the inverse crescent of a scowl, that he looks like the computer-generated version of Scooby Doo. He even had jowls when he played Dim in A Clockwork Orange, and that was in 1971! Can you imagine just how jowly they've had the chance to get since then? Any more and he'll be a St Bernard.

* Attitude, class and generation. Dalziel is a hard-talking, no-nonsense Grinch flying in the face of a world that's changing around him. He is that archetypal working-class grouch that televisual stereotyping has subsist on a diet of booze, fags, fry-ups, moaning and politically incorrect rants. He is old school. OK, so was John Thaw in The Sweeney. So is Philip Glenister's excellent DCI Gene Hunt in Life on Mars. But one of those series was made in the 1970s and the other is set there. Dalziel is a 21st-century b*****d, out of time and out of fashion.

* Partner. A misery guts's partner is most important. Dennis Waterman built a career out of it. But in Pascoe, Dalziel has a foil who only serves to highlight what a sour-faced grump he is. Pascoe is clean-living, healthy-eating and modern-thinking. He is everything Dalziel isn't and should be.

In short, then, you wouldn't want to share your Christmas dinner with him, but at the same time you just wouldn't want him any other way. Superb, for a mardy arse.

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  • Posted on 06 November 2008
  • at 7:39pm
  • by paulsp

one of the best t.v. detective series ever and that's saying something considering how many of this genre have been made over the years since television began!

The mix of drama and humour, high production values and brilliant acting from the two leads puts it into a class of its own.

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