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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 282176" data-attributes="member: 23">How To Dial A Murder <img src="https://i1.wp.com/columbophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Opening-titles.jpg?w=720&ssl=1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 557px" /><img src="https://i1.wp.com/columbophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/IMG_2680.png?resize=502%2C376&ssl=1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 494px" />As mentioned a couple of posts ago, my viewing order seems to have gone skew-whiff. According to the air date order, Murder Under Glass should follow Try And Catch Me. But on my DVD set this episode is placed in between them. This means I’ve skipped from November 1977’s season premiere to the penultimate episode of the original run from April 1978. Irritating, but never mind. I will have to keep my eyes peeled to ensure the final episode of the original series is watched at the right time. Another notable aspect of How To Dial A Murder: while I’ve sufficiently forgotten almost every episode so far enough to feel like the first time watching, from the moment I saw the dogs and the Citizen Kane “Rosebud” sledge I could remember enough of the programming and de-programming to the keyword for a number of important moments to come right to the front of my memory. Not that this spoilt my viewing. It’s still a perfectly watchable episode with some nice performances, a reasonably clever murder plot and some shrewd detective work. The soapy cliché murder motive - with King Galen having had an affair with his best friend’s wife, prompting the cuckolded husband to kill them one-by-one - doesn’t seem that cliché here, because it’s the exception rather than the rule. The mysterious pre-episode death of his wife added interest and raised the stakes to a degree, because Dr Eric Mason had apparently already got away with murder once before. As Mason, Nichol Williamson made a decent enough killer, exuding control, suppressed anger and plenty of smarm. He reminded me of a young Gordon Jackson (and was born very close to Jackson’s birthplace as it turns out), with a bit of the Alec Guinness to him I thought. The young women both had nice presence as well. Kim Cattrall’s character captured a certain type of young person: the one who attends institutes in an attempt to find themselves and ends up lured in to something resembling a cult. It feels like a very Seventies thing to do. Tricia O’Neal is an actress I feel as though I know better than I do. I’ve only really seen her in one-off appearances like this: several Murder She Wrotes, a Hart To Hart, the victim of Edgar Randolph’s abuse in Dallas and so on. But she always makes an impression. Plus she has that elfin Kate Jackson/Adrienne Barbeau thing going on (in fact I sometimes struggle to differentiate between Tricia and Adrienne). She’s as reliable as ever here as the dog trainer. And Dog is as adorably unreliable as ever. The main strike against this episode for me is for the writing, which feels as though the writers’ reach exceeded their grasp. It was clever in its intentions, but I couldn’t help feeling that perhaps it had too much going on at times and I also felt that certain notes had been hit before. As clever as the murder was, there were echoes of the “death by post-hypnotic suggestion” seen in A Deadly State Of Mind, combined with the “hooked up to a heart monitor” seen in Troubled Waters.  And so it was no surprise to me when the burst of excited activity on the EKG graph was produced. Other unsurprising “surprising” moments felt telegraphed due to slightly clunky writing, including the moment where Columbo accidentally stumbled on the keyword used for the kill having left his dictaphone on.The episode also felt a little gimmicky in places. Pop culture references can be fun, but even though the antagonist’s obsession with Old Hollywood was key to the murder and its resolution, it almost feels at times as though the crew had simply raided the Universal props warehouse and built scenes around what they found. Likewise, as nice as the visuals were, Columbo visiting the Old West ghost town which was clearly on the Universal backlot couldn’t help feeling a little unnecessary and even cheesy. This means How To Dial A Murder isn’t a top tier episode for me. It’s by no means terrible. It simply feels rather workaday compared with some of its stablemates. On the plus side, Patrick Williams's score elevates this episode. There are a lot of Herrmannesque strings, and some low cello notes are especially welcome as they sound more than a tad sinister. Plus some more organic-sounding thumps and beats for some of the unsettling moments. </blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?