Telly Gold

Do you remember 'Terry Badge' from the late '70s on British TV? It was one of the lesser-known detective dramas but I loved it. Terry's unique angle was the way he would solve crimes by applying complex mathematical formulae.

I have had a fantastic idea to update the show a little and bring it back to our screens, where it rightly belongs.

It goes like this:

Terry Badge is a physics PhD with a brilliant academic record and promising career which he has chosen to abandon in order to enable him to concentrate on his obsession of building a robot called 'Mark'. Mark is human-shaped as all good robots should be. Human-shaped, monkey parts. Terry works on Mark on an old narrowboat moored along the Thames in South West London where he lives with a small dog called Gizmo.

Terry kind of represents that 'everyman' character in terms of his isolated mental anguish, scraping along making a living by writing the odd bit of computer code freelance from his boat and working part-time as a dustman. Every week, the stunning, power-dressed Eleanor Tight comes to see Terry. She's an old college friend who has ambitiously worked her way up the police ranks since graduating first at Hendon - 'Top Truncheon'. She always finds Terry tinkering with half-finished bits of Mark and brings him various cryptic unsolved crimes and freshly scraped ape offal, in exchange for which he solves the mysteries by applying incredibly complex bits of non-linear mathematics.

Top scientists try to lure Terry away to the world of high-energy weapons research. Yes, top scientists, lure away, every week. As the theme music fades in, you see white-coated boffins being chased off the boat by Terry at the beginning of each episode. It remains just Badge and Gizmo and Mark. Terry wears denims and has long, shaggy hair. Gizmo has an electronic collar that activates whenever he strays over the sides of the boat, delivering an electric shock so strong it makes him involuntarily defecate. Mark is never finished. Never.

Each episode ends with a solved case which Terry nerdily explicates to the foxy cop amid painfully unrequited sexual tension while a surreal and profoundly unsettling quip from the half-finished module of Mark lying in bits on the workbench sets off the whole gang guffawing at the ironic way in which Mark's unremitting existential horror always seems to provide a humorous backstory to the sleuthing events of the week. Freeze-frame on the hearty laughter and into the soft rock outro.

This is gold - pure liquid tellygold.