Thread by @ajcdeane

#Deanehistory 148.

Columbo is the best TV detective. This is unarguable. But what may be unknown about our favourite rumpled sleuth is that he was also the cause of, and solution too, one of the biggest problems faced by the Romanian government.

In the 1970s, few American television programmes were broadcast behind the Iron Curtain. Columbo, with its strong, frequent anti-elitist narratives, a humble servant of justice and the state proving the undoing of evil capitalist wealthy toffs, was an exception.

As a result, much like Norman Wisdom’s black and white movies, it proved even more popular in some Communist countries than it had been at home. In Romania, Columbo was aired twice a week.

But there was a problem.

All good things come to an end (or, in Columbo’s case, a decade long hiatus). They stopped making new episodes of Columbo. Long accustomed to their government’s controls and deceit, many Romanians believed that in fact their own regime was to blame for the new episode drought.

It turns out that sometimes people can undergo the most awful privations and repression without militating against their oppressors, but losing their favourite TV show is just that bit too much to bear.

Romania’s government genuinely feared that there would be riots.

Thus it was that the U.S. State Department called Peter Falk one day and shared the representations they had received from Bucharest, entreating him to make a public-service announcement, in Romanian, which he did not speak.

Falk, kind to a fault and as a good citizen understandably keen to prevent social unrest based on a false premise, looked down a camera lens and phonetically read out some words in Romanian which, he was assured,

constituted an explanation of the fact that they had actually ceased shooting new Columbos rather than the repeats which were all Romanians could now get being a result of communist import quotas or restrictions.

It worked. Peace returned to the streets of Romania, and another decade-long bout of new episodes emerged only after the fall of the Berlin Wall when liberalisation swept the communist regimes of the East.

Which is for the best, because if all they’d been able to get on TV in the 1990s had continued to be Columbo and the Romanians had been subjected in the cauldron of those closed market conditions to 1992’s “No Time to Die,”

a Columbo episode of truly execrable qualities absurdly converted from an Ed McBain novel, riots in the streets would have been the least of it.

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