This edition received some criticism from journalist Stanley Reynolds in the following day's Times, though Reynolds liked the series overall.
Among his observations were: "One off-putting thing in the first episode was the jarring period note struck by the actors playing Chicago gangsters. Mr. Reeder had been called in to protect a mobster who had fallen heir to an English country estate. Once again we had to put up with the normal appalling job British actors make of Chicago gangsters.
Of course, the series is semi-comedy, but this does not excuse bad acting. There is something marvellously comic about the sudden lurching from excessive unbridled violence to equally excessive and unchecked generosity of the stereotyped exterior type Chicago mobster, but where the actors in, say, The Untouchables are able to hint at this psychological flaw with every gesture, British actors seem to give us only a bad parody of Runyonese. The Chicago gangsters, however, were peculiar to this episode: the fault will not run throughout the series."
Among his observations were: "One off-putting thing in the first episode was the jarring period note struck by the actors playing Chicago gangsters. Mr. Reeder had been called in to protect a mobster who had fallen heir to an English country estate. Once again we had to put up with the normal appalling job British actors make of Chicago gangsters.
Of course, the series is semi-comedy, but this does not excuse bad acting. There is something marvellously comic about the sudden lurching from excessive unbridled violence to equally excessive and unchecked generosity of the stereotyped exterior type Chicago mobster, but where the actors in, say, The Untouchables are able to hint at this psychological flaw with every gesture, British actors seem to give us only a bad parody of Runyonese. The Chicago gangsters, however, were peculiar to this episode: the fault will not run throughout the series."
This edition was joint 12th in the charts with an audience of 6.25 million.
As this was under the JICTAR ratings system, the 6.25 million referred to numbers of homes, rather than numbers of individual viewers.
As this was under the JICTAR ratings system, the 6.25 million referred to numbers of homes, rather than numbers of individual viewers.