My wife and I have discovered a British TV series, available on youtube at no charge, which we’re plumb crazy about: George Gently.
Veteran actor Martin Shaw plays Gently, a long-time London police detective who has moved to Durham in the north of England. His cases are tremendously difficult, demanding not only good police work but difficult moral judgments. He is lumbered with a callow young sergeant (Lee Ingleby) who has an awful lot to learn.
The thing that positively sends me about this series–which is still in production, by the way, after several years of great success–is the character of Gently himself. He is protective of the weak. His wife having been murdered by London gangsters, he has become, in his grief, not bitter but deeper, more sympathetic. He is rock-solid good: in fact, his London career came to a dead end because he never compromised, never bent the law, never permitted himself to be corrupted. And he is strong–morally and physically strong.
This is a very rare combination in a fictional character, these days. The fact that this show exists, and that many people watch it, tells me that the people of Great Britain have not yet forgotten what a real man is. They can still recognize one when they see him.
Let’s face it, Britain has pretty much gone to the dogs. But not yet entirely. There is still George Gently. Somebody out there still knows what a man’s supposed to be. And if ever this poor, fallen world needed real men, it’s now.
The show (we haven’t yet seen all the episodes) has no overt religious content. But to me the character of Gently seems profoundly Christian in all the best sense of the word. I wish I could ask Martin Shaw what, if anything, he’s learned from playing Gently. I think I’ve learned some valuable things from watching him.
“He [Tolkien] created a body of work that is imbued with a profound wisdom-a wisdom that our civilization desperately needs-drawn very largely from the Catholic faith in which he was raised.” Caldecott, p. 4