#cluff

Zane Russell Cluff

Age: 21

Arrest Date: Fri 8/20

Time: 1:42 PM

Status: In

Charge Count: 3

Agency Severity Charge Statute Type

Ada County Sheriff M Failure to Appear (No New Offense) - MD MFTA Warrant

Ada County Sheriff Probation Violation - MD MPV Warrant

Content warning: suicide

This blog post gives away the plot of the episode.

Cluff (1964 - 5) isn't a series I'm familiar with because I don't tend to go for shows about policemen, and for the practical reason that it hasn't been available on YouTube very long. There is also the problem that at least some, if not all, of the first series was wiped so only the second survives apparently. It's about a small fictional town's community policing, centering on the titular Sergeant Caleb Cluff.

This is only the second episode I think I've ever seen, and I much prefer this one to the first, so this isn't an objective impression, but if I had to compare Cluff to another show it would be Dr Finlay's Casebook. What I mean about this is that Dr Finlay's Casebook has a knack of lifting the lid on a hugely complicating moral and social issue for a TV show and dramatising what is involved. It's also not really about the medicine. Similarly on the basis of what I have seen Cluff may not really be about the policing; it's about the society and the personalities involved. In fact I suspect this may be much closer to most people's real lives in the 1960s than any of the weird and wonderful television I love so much. Something I've really noticed about this show is that for the period it seems to move quite a lot faster, with frequent changes of scene and dialogue which is lively if not quite sparkling.

In The Chicken, Cluff's dog comes across a frozen chicken with has been lost and turns out to be stolen. It is traced to old friends of Cluff's, Cissie and Spencer Lawton. Cissie is bedridden and they appear to be living beyond their means. I simply refuse to believe that nowadays the sheer amount of police time spent in this episode would be spent over the theft of one frozen chicken, although the entire episode is essentially a protracted exploration of what is going on for the Lawtons.

Essentially they have got into a situation where Spencer isn't coping very well, almost single-handedly caring for his wife and also working full time in an auction house, where he is taken advantage of and underpaid. He is one of these people whose sense of pride means that he won't accept any help from the state and can't countenance the idea of his wife being in hospital, and something has to break. Unfortunately the episode ends with the couple attempting suicide together by gassing themselves, rather than in any legal consequences, which is an example of the sort of thing that makes me say that the show isn't so much about the policing.

It is also of great interest to me that Cluff focuses on Spencer Lawton's employer as being the cause of the problem here. He does almost nothing in the auction house, is dependent on Spencer to do all the jobs even though he's completely unskilled, including jobs like keeping the accounts. This isn't a perspective on their situation which would have struck me personally: my own inclination would be to say that Cluff should be telling Spencer to pull himself together and accept the help that's available to look after his wife, rather than wearing himself out with no help whether care or financial. For a short drama this is an interesting perspective on what is obviously quite a common situation when a family's circumstances change. I did appreciate the way Cluff was upfront with the boss about how badly he was treating his employee, though.

Sylvia Coleridge's role is as the bedridden wife, and she is mainly superlative in it (see my criticism below), speaking in an entirely different accent to her normal one and coming across as quite a different persona to the rather eccentric roles she is perhaps best known for.

My only real criticism of this episode is that unfortunately I think Sylvia Coleridge's accent slips halfway through and she's much less 'northern' towards the end. I also have a criticism which will sound slightly ridiculous, which is that I refuse to believe that Cluff would let his dog get away with as much as it does: in the titles we see it putting its feet right up on his coat, and in this episode when he goes to see Cissie Lawton, the dog puts its front legs up on the bed and only then does he ask her if that's alright. I think in a country town he would soon get in trouble with a dog that wasn't closely controlled.

Other than these minor criticisms this is a great series which obviously has a solid fan base judging by the number of photos uploaded to IMDb, and which (on the basis of what I've seen) is good at raising complex issues and resolving them in interesting plot devices.

Image credit: IMDb

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