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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 282884" data-attributes="member: 23">Columbo Goes To The Guillotine continuedAnthony Andrews has good presence and felt genuinely dark at times as Elliott Blake. Now and then there was a touch of a the Hannibal Lecter to him. Indeed, I found myself wondering if his character was based on the breakout success of Anthony Hopkins in The Silence Of The Lambs until I realised that this episode preceded the film by several years (it’s still feasible he’s based on the version of the character from the book. Or even the Manhunter film. There are even scenes in which Blake is dressed in a white jumpsuit, just like Brian Cox in that film).But… he was also incredibly obvious as the killer. He feels a little arch, rather like the Eighties vogue for stock nasty British characters in American TV and film. Think Ben Carrington in Dynasty or Philip FitzRoyce in Jaws 3D, throw in a hefty dollop of Simon Cowell’s TV persona and you’ve got Elliott Blake. He was fun to watch but lacked nuance, and there was very little to give me empathy for his character. He pretty much just went round screwing people over. In turn, this made the key relationship of the episode - that between Columbo and the killer - far less interesting than I’d hope for. I don’t really watch Columbo to boo and hiss the moustache-twirling villain like a pantomime. I expect more. Whether its the character or the actor, Blake also threatens to out-ham Peter Falk at times, most notably in an over-long scene where he visits the crime scene with Columbo and wanders round pretending to pick up on the victim’s suicidal energy which is almost embarrassing to watch. The killing is one of the more extreme, perhaps suggesting a new level of threat for this new era (it did yield one of the episode’s funnier moments where Columbo pointed out the murder weapon to Blake and told him the victim had been lying there “only without a head”). Naturally, this means that the Gotcha is arguably the most extreme so far. I’ve already made plain my feelings on the killer trying to do away with Columbo, but this also comes with Columbo literally putting his neck on the block and actually counting on the killer trying to kill him. To my mind he had no way of predicting how Blake would react and while it made for a TV-friendly bit of suspense, ultimately Columbo seems reckless to the point of stupidity. And the less said about the "bang" at the end the better. I feel like I’ve piled on the negativity with this episode, but actually it had a number of good things going for it. All the same, it’s going to take some adjustment to get fully on board with this Nineties era version of Columbo. Perhaps I never will. </blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?