Comics on TV: Dempsey and Makepeace

Comics fan Stuart Vandal recently caught an episode of Dempsey and Makepeace in which a character is seen reading a British comic, so, yes, it’s time once again for Comics on TV!

Dempsey and Makepeace was a British-made cop show that teamed maverick American cop James Dempsey (played by Michael Brandon) with prim, posh British cop Harriet Makepeace (played by Glynis Barber). It was hugely popular at the time, largely because of the great chemistry between the two leads which elevated it beyond the standard “cops from different backgrounds forced to work together” formula.

It certainly didn’t hurt that Barber and Brandon are decidedly non-unattractive people. And they presumably found each other somewhat fanciable because they later married in real life, and not only are they still together, they were in fact betrothed on 18 November 1989 which means they’ll be celebrating their thirty-second anniversary today (that is, the day this article goes on-line)! The very happiest of anniversaries to both from all here at Rusty Towers!

Of particular interest, I imagine, to Rusty Staples readers is that Glynis Barber had previously played the title role in the BBC’s early-80s adaptation of the Jane newspaper strip (Daily Mirror, 5 Dec 1932 to 10 Oct 1959)…

… and more recently Michael Brandon appeared as Senator Brandt in Captain America: The First Avenger.

Like many popular British TV shows of the era Dempsey and Makepeace featured in their own annuals (dated 1986 and 1987, so most likely published in the autumns of the preceding years), both containing articles, text stories and comic strips.

Fan-favourite comic artist Sean Phillips even provided the art for one of the strips in the 1986 annual…

(Oddly, though, there doesn’t appear to have been a Dempsey and Makepeace strip in Look-In, which seems to me to be a perfect match for the show.)

But back to that episode that brought us here… In the third-season episode “Birds of Prey” (first broadcast on 4 Oct 1986), criminal Keith Lymon is reading a copy of The Beano…

“Birds of Prey” was the second episode to feature the character, the first being the season two finale “The Bogeyman,” broadcast on 2 Nov 1985 (no known connection with the comic The Bogie Man from Fat Man Press, by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Robin Smith, four issues between Sep 1989 and Sep 1990).

Keith Lymon is played by Nick Brimble, in my opinion a very underrated actor who’s been a stalwart of British movies and TV for decades. (As far as I can tell, his only appearance in a production based on a comic book was Sheena in 1984, the movie based on the American comic Sheena, Queen of the Jungle… Although he also played a character called Brickman in the anthology series Screen One in 1994, but I suspect that’s got nothing to do with Lew Stringer’s character of the same name.)

The copy of The Beano that Lymon is reading is #2290, dated 7 Jun 1986:

Normally I spend some time tracking down the issue in question but in this case Stuart did all the legwork and found it himself! Thanks, Stuart! He’s also found quite a few other British comics on TV shows that I’ve missed (I hope to add them to the site soon) so I hereby award Stuart the marginally-coveted and utterly invaluable Rusty Staples Eagle-Eye Comic-Spotters’ Award! (This is a non-physical award, said to be worth around a billion million pounds! Sadly, it’s non-transferable.)