Buried Gems: Out

Tom Bell was a great English character actor. He specialised, as his obituary in 2006 so accurately described it, in playing ‘sinister characters with an air of understated menace.’ As gangster Frank Ross in the classic 1978 series Out, Bell carried the series.

Trevor Preston’s hard-hitting gangland drama is about a bank robber who comes out of jail and is obsessed with finding the informer who put him in prison. Worryingly, Bell said if his acting in Out, “I knew I was Frank Ross, I just play myself.”

I can remember the teasers before the show screened even now. ‘Frank Ross is OUT’ a character told the audience. At the same time graffiti appeared around London: ‘Frank Ross is Innocent,’ cheekily playing off the 'George Davis Is Innocent' graffiti which could be seen all over the capital, a reference to real-life robber Davis, who had been set up by the police.

In the series Ross has been banged up for eight years for an armed robbery that was thwarted by a grass. This is important. Frank isn’t some namby-pamby innocent. He really is an armed robber, hard as nails, old school. He just wants to find the grass. As the series progresses Frank pieces together the puzzle, and takes his revenge bit by bit. While Frank has been banged up things have changed. His wife is in a loony bin and his son is going off the rails. The great Brain Croucher (Travis in Blake’s Seven and Ted Wills in Eastenders among many other things) plays Frank’s only true friend Chris, and Brian Cox does a memorable, camp turn as gangland rival McGrath.

Trevor Preston, who wrote the series, is also interesting. Born and brought up in south London, Preston’s upbringing informs most of his writing. A ‘bit of a tearaway’ as a lad, Preston’s first choice of career was boxer. Instead, he went to art school, and then started writing for TV. He became part of Thames TV’s Euston Films group, which ushered in a really fertile  era in British drama. Preston contributed to The Sweeney and Special Branch before being commissioned to writer Out. What I like about Out, and why you should get it now that it is available on DVD, is the overall style of the thing. It’s shot like a movie: bleached out windows, great outside locations, and attention to detail (an obsession with sharp three-piece suits dates from this series) and the way it echoed other things like Get Carter. It’s bloody good.

Buy it.