Taggart - Out of Bounds (1998)
Taggart is a detective series set in Glasgow, originally headed by Mark McManus as Jim Taggart. The drama is always gritty, and there are usual several bodies within the first few minutes. McManus died in 1994 and the series continued with his two lieutenants in charge.
The story Out of Bounds is set is a boys' fee-paying school. When teachers start getting bumped off, the investigation reveals a strange set of circumstances that started with the death of a German teacher before World War 2. There is increasing talk of serious bullying as well, although at first that is not connected with the murders.
Meanwhile Jan Dickson (Susan Brown) is the catering manager and the new Deputy Head, to be Head Teacher next term, tells her off in a startlingly abrupt manner that her dress sense is not good enough, apparently meaning that she shows too much cleavage.
The headmaster discovers a present-day incident of bullying and goes berserk, and is only just prevented by the detectives from assaulting two schoolboys. When he is asked why he reacted so strongly, he says that he should have done it decades ago, when there was a bad bout of bullying; a boy called John Chisham was on the receiving end. As luck would have it, the school kept large individual photographs of former pupils, and we find Chisham's. It looks strangely familiar, but no-one can actually identify who it might be nowadays.
With three teachers gone, the headmaster is about to take a celebratory drink when it is accidentally spilt, and it burns a hole in the table; it is acid, and Jan Dickson emerges from the shadows, wearing her old school uniform -- the style hasn't changed in 30 years apparently, and it is actually too big for her now -- and she asks, "Why didn’t you drink it, it was meant for you?" It turns out that she was John Chisum, and she had a sex change a couple of years after leaving the school.
It's a pity that a respected British detective series used such a hackneyed plot -- transsexuals portrayed as intrinsically warped.
HF April 2007
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Taggart - Out of Bounds
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