Public Eye: Six Guineas a day Plus Expenses

by Andrew Pixley

Across its successful ten-year run, the quirky inquiry agent casebook of Public Eye became one of ITV's greatest drama successes. Frank Marker - as played by Alfred Burke - was a loner whose immense integrity and dogged looks won him a legion of fans in millions of homes across the United Kingdom. this exclusive new book is an exhaustive, in-depth look at the creation, production, broadcast and reception of all eighty-eight editions, from its debut in the North and Midlands via ABC television to its days as one of Thames Television's greatest chart-topping hits.

Paperback

First published November 1, 2012

Reviews

[Alan Benjamin Clarke · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Six Guineas a Day Plus Expenses" offers a lot of information to those who are interested in technical/archival matters such as recording dates, studios used, uncredited cast members, crew members, whether a scene was shot on 16mm, 35mm, or whether it was an OB transmission. However, it offers very little in terms of analysis and trivia which, in my mind, are the real gems of books such as these. Unlike Pixley's "Callan" book which is informative and entertaining, here the sections detailing the behind-the-scenes work on "Public Eye" are brief, curt, and don't go into enough detail, biographies of the main players sound like averagely written Wikipedia articles, quotes from newspapers too long and largely uninformative, and the plot summaries of the missing episodes confusingly written. Perhaps the making of "Public Eye" wasn't really that interesting or eventful to fill out an entire book, but why then write it at all?