One for the rumpled - but not dirty - mac brigade

COLUMBO: PRESCRIPTION MURDER, Lowry, Salford

Here’s something you might not have known: Peter Falk was not the first nor even the second actor to play the famously rumpled detective.

Columbo first appeared in a one-off TV mystery in 1960 and his creators decided to give the cigar-chewing character new life in a play — this play — a year later.

The show closed before reaching Broadway but seven years later they tried TV for a second time. And this time, Peter Falk got his chance.

So you might not think it absolutely necessary, in reviving the play, to make the stage Columbo a Peter Falk Columbo — but that denies the overwhelming popularity of the now 82-year-old actor in the role.

Which brings us to this latest Middle Ground Theatre Company mining expedition into the rich seam of neglected classic and TV-related drama untouched by most other companies.

The company’s style is a simple one: get a famous name or two, find an interesting-sounding title and go for it.

Here the famous name has almost the notoriety of Peter Falk, being Dirk Benedict, one of the four original members — the handsome one — of TV’s fabled A-Team.

He has the cigar, though too long; he has the raincoat, though too clean and insufficiently creased, and he unfortunately also has most of Falk’s tics and gurns.

We rarely see Benedict without a Joker-style pained grin or one of his hands stroking back a fallen hank of hair as he dissects the carefully-constructed lies of his nemesis, Patrick Ryecart, as the callous doctor.

There is nothing much wrong with the performance except it is mere mimicry, rather than the building of a character. Peter Falk didn’t play Columbo, he invented most of his foibles and pretty much was Columbo.

In trying to recreate these mannerisms, Benedict remains too handsome, too tall, too clean-cut and is, not to put too fine a point on it, just playing at it.

This isn’t so bad: after all the TV series wasn’t exactly great drama. You get exactly what you expect, even if the supporting cast, especially Ryecart, is rather wooden.

Oh, and just one more thing: they only made 67 episodes of the TV show. To show them as frequently as they seem to have been shown, I reckon TV companies have repeated each episode about a hundred times. Haven’t we suffered enough?