Will Edie Shoestring make Trevor Eve a star?

BBC-TV is about to introduce their first ‘home-grown’ private eye. His name is Eddie Shoestring, and Shoestring has little in common with the dashing Jim Rockford's of this world. Eddie's patch is the downbeat West Country, where the Mafia has yet to spread its net, and a murder is front page news for weeks. The new series of 12 one-hour episodes stars Trevor Eve as the private eye, on the payroll of a local radio station, employed to sort out listeners problems - with his own radio slot, Private Ear. He gets involved in everything from unsolved murders to runaway husbands. Eddie is tough, but not violent, and the series takes more of a Raymond Chandler approach - brains and footslogging first, and strong-arm tactics only when strictly necessary. Shoestring producer Robert Banks-Stewart says Eddie is not the archetypal gumshoe - no trench coats with turned up collars, nor constant wise-cracks. "In fact", says Robert, "he's rather an untidy, vulnerable individual; an eccentric, with one or two strange habits and an off-beat sense of humour." The woman in Eddie's life is divorcee Erica Bayliss, played by Doran Godwin, a lady barrister, who rents the sleuth his flat, and often shares his bed. The series is quite a departure for the BBC, and they are looking for success. "All the cop series had begun to look like a rather tired formula," explains Robert, and this idea of tying a private eye in with a local radio station was different and attractive.