"A Touch Of Frost" is also a personal favourite of mine, even if it is my fourth time watching an episode, as with this one. Though Cherie Lunghi seemed wasted to me, John Lyons (Sgt Toolin) and especially Bruce Alexander (Chief Superintendent Mullet) are as good as ever. David Jason looks considerably older than his 68 years here. I can't help thinking the producers/writers have fatally compromised the Frost character into a complete muddle. One incongruous aspect is that he keeps making "Del Boy" style jokes -- very childishly. When Mullet asks him who the suspects are for murdering a clown, he answers "Uh, Punch & Judy?" This hardly squares with Frost screaming close up in the faces of people who have come into the station voluntarily, and making all sorts of wild-guess accusations at them. Over the past few episodes he seems to have lost his once-redeeming compassion entirely. He even yells at a highly distraught witness, and then when it's explained to him that she has a severely debilitating phobia about clowns, a condition that is common knowledge, Frost quips casually, "Well, it's not common knowledge around here!" This only points up that Frost has got stupider and more wilfully ignorant with age and more experience -- highly unrealistic. When at the end the sympathetic pastor tells him she's sorry for everyone, not only her "client" who was banged up for years by Frost, but for Frost also. She says she can't imagine how Frost must be feeling now -- still believing the "slow" man is guilty until Frost is knocked over the head by incontrovertible evidence that the man is totally innocent and was actually the friend of the two victims many years before. The look of total confusion on Frost's face in response to this is priceless -- very good acting. And totally out of line with Frost's previous history of going the extra mile for, and getting in trouble for it, those who are intellectually challenged, even a suspected child molester who was "backward" socially.
Review of Dead End
