Kinsey

In an era of glamorous lawyers courtesy of LA Law, Kinsey was made by the BBC and set in Birmingham.

It ran for two series in the early 1990s. Leigh Lawson played Neil Kinsey a maverick solicitor. You see this in the first episode when he uses subterfuge to evict a commercial tenant.

His problems begins when his partner runs off stealing their client's money. The Law Society have installed a rival solicitor to oversee his practice. To keep his firm going a new female solicitor has come in as a partner from a bigger firm who he has a romance with, an ex-wife to contend with and there are all the cases he has to deal with.

Doing a legal series in Britain is never sexy or glamorous. The series Rumpole of the Bailey was successful because of the waspish humour from its writer and nothing to to with Leo McKern being remotely sexy.

Here is a Birmingham that was undergoing some transformation and the series tried to represent a multicultural city. Local actress Meena Syal had an early role.

However this was a middling series and I think Lawson was pleased and mildly surprised that it returned for a second series. The opening episode was memorable for its set up of characters and events. The way Kinsey evicted a shop tenant for not paying the rent is far fetched but establishes the character as a maverick.

However the rest of the series was very predictable and unmemorable.