Freewheelers 6.12 – Red Herring

Caine’s plan is devious, I’ll admit, but I’m not all that sure I’m ready to agree that it’s plausible. Having replaced the lug nuts and muffler and other parts of Buchan’s Lotus with painted gold, he arranges for Buchan to be recalled to England, where customs officers search the car. They’re not immediately ready to believe that he’s from MI-5 and they find the gold.

So what Caine wants to do, while actually moving the gold by boat, is convince Buchan that they’re scheming to smuggle it out £60,000 at a time on one hundred cars. I’m hopeful that Buchan won’t fall for this. Surely he’s going to realize that somebody tipped off customs, right? If they accidentally and randomly pulled him over, then it’s possible that they stumbled on the scheme, but the tip-off obviously means that Caine wants Buchan to think this is the real plan, meaning it’s a red herring. But will Buchan figure it out? The answers in the (hopefully) exciting conclusion, next time…

Freewheelers 6.11 – The Race

So all the action moves over to Amsterdam, and a windmill near the town of Weesp where Caine has holed up. Interestingly, Leonard Gregory didn’t get to come on location with everybody else.

For people who enjoy looking at the way British television used to be made, there’s a very curious little scene here in which Colonel Buchan discusses the criminals with Captain Rylandt of the Amsterdam police. As you often see with British TV from the seventies, the show is made with the exteriors shot on 16mm film, and the interiors done in the studio on videotape. Rylandt’s office is filmed, therefore it appears to have been shot in the Netherlands with the other material.

But Marie said that a couple of things about it clued her in to the likelihood that this wasn’t filmed abroad. There are two posters for the Rijksmuseum in Rylandt’s office, which struck her as being a lot like the captain’s office in an episode of Law & Order having a couple of posters of the Statue of Liberty. She also said that the actor’s accent wasn’t right. She was correct. It’s a British actor named Arnold Diamond, who had dozens of small roles in films and TV shows, mainly police dramas, in the seventies and eighties.

I wonder whether we’ll see Diamond actually on location in the next episode, or whether the producers shot this and other scenes in his office in the UK, using a film camera rather than building an office set in a studio, using the different appearance of film and tape to fool viewers into thinking he was really Dutch?

Anyway, it turns out that part of Caine’s plan involves smuggling some of the stolen gold back to the UK by way of disguised auto parts. Buchan’s own car is nobbled and the garage that the villains are using is recommended, and Ryan and Burke install a brand new solid gold muffler on his Lotus. Seems a shame that they had to paint it all silver, really.