Just one more thing... (Columbo)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Columbo
Date:	06/01/02 (1166 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brilliant..

Disadvantages: ...but dishevelled.

Columbo broke the mould of TV cop shows in that it wasn't a whodunnit - you knew whodunnit, and how, right from the start. This was refreshingly honest - other shows tried to keep you guessing, even though you always knew that the murderer was going to turn out to be the big guest star. After all, you don't hire Leonard Nimoy or Patrick McGoohan for a bit part!

Columbo was more of a provewhodunnit, as Columbo latched onto the killer immediately (sometimes for no apparent reason - possibly one weak spot
in the show) and then pursued him or her like a cat playing with a mouse, trying to break their alibi or trip them up. It's said there's no such thing as
a perfect murder - the murderer always makes at least one mistake. Well, even if they didn't, Columbo would just hustle them into making one... snapping away at their heels like a terrier, worrying them like a sheepdog circling a stray sheep. Like a dog with a bone, like a spider waiting for a fly to fall into its web, like, erm, ok, no more similes. He obviously had a razor sharp mind but would feign inadequacy to lull the suspect into a false sense of security. If I ever got murdered I'd want Columbo to investigate.

The show was one of many created by Richard Levinson and William Link
who have written and/or produced a string of hit shows like The Fugitive, McCloud and Banacek. Also, Steven Speilberg and Jonathan Demme both directed episodes of Columbo when they were mere rookies.

Lieutenant Columbo hates carrying a gun, drives a battered old Peugeot that looks like it was bought from a second hand car dealer in Dorset, and his pet sausage dog (memorably named 'Dog') is often sat in the back when he's called to the scene of a crime. We never saw Columbo's wife, Kate, although there was a spin-off series starring Kate Mulgrew of 'Star Trek: Voyager' fame as Mrs. Columbo. The less said about that the better.

By the way,
Columbo was based on a character in one of the greatest novels ever written: Petrovich in Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment".
Now there's a conversation stopper for you!

Peter Falk's glass eye is the result of childhood cancer (his right eye had to be surgically removed when he was three.) Before becoming an actor, he became a Certified Public Accountant. He also applied for a job with the CIA, but was rejected for being too left wing. Clearly the CIA prefer right-wing mass murderers and putative dictators to democrats, but I digress...

Although he won four Emmy awards for Columbo, Falk wasn't the first choice for the role, or even the first to play the detective - that honour went to Bert Freed in an episode of "Sunday Mystery Hour". I remember seeing that curiosity once in the middle of the night on Channel 4(?) in the 1980's.
Falk donned Columbo's trademark shabby raincoat for the first time in 1967, and then the regular series of Columbo TV mystery movies began in 1972, but only after Bing Crosby had turned down the part - allegedly because it would have meant too much time away from the golf course!

Some of you might have been surprised to see Falk in the BBC's Christmas blockbuster adaptation of The Lost World, assuming he must have died, otherwise why no new Columbos? In fact he HAS filmed one new episode almost every year for the last decade, but ITV seemed to have lost interest in showing them, having discovered that they could fill their prime time schedule with footy and hour-long 'specials' of Corrie and Emmerdale. Meanwhile the BBC repeated the early episodes to death in the afternoons.
Now, at long last, ITV has deigned to show us the most recent episodes... on Sunday afternoons! To treat an old favourite this way is as shabby as the great man's raincoat. I rate Columbo as one of the two greatest TV detectives ever. (Can you guess who my other choice w
ould be, I wonder?)

Including pilots, the original series ran to 45 episodes, and there have been 23 'New' Columbo mystery movies (so far). The most recent one, directed by Patrick McGoohan, featured Billy Connolly as the murderer - can you believe that?! Surely ITV aren't really going to dump that on a Sunday afternoon?

There's a complete episode list at:

www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/EpisodeGuideServ let/showid-1011


Oh, and just one more thing...
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| Is Lieutenant Columbo's first name Philip? |
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Whoops! No it's not. That little trivia fact was invented by Fred L. Worth, who is the author of several Trivia books. He suspected that people were nicking his trivia, so he set a trap by dropping this little nugget of misinformation into one. Then, lo and behold, it turned up in Trivial Pursuit!
Worth launched a $300 million lawsuit on the basis of this, but it never came to court because the makers of Trivial Pursuit freely admitted copying facts from many sources, and as the saying goes: when you copy from one source it's called plagiarism, when you copy from many it's called research!

N.B.
I copied some of that last paragraph...
... but I copied it from more than one source, so that's ok then. ;¬)

see:

http://www.triviahalloffame.com/columbo.htm
http://www.columbo-site.freeuk.com/firstnameco urt.htm
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