Shoestring (1979–1980) watch online

Shoestring is a British detective fiction drama series, set in an unnamed city in the West of England and filmed in Bristol, featuring the down-at-heel private detective Eddie Shoestring (Trevor Eve), who presents his own show on Radio West, a local radio station. Broadcast on BBC1, the programme lasted for two series, between 30 September 1979 and 21 December 1980, comprising a total of 21 episodes. After the second series was broadcast Eve decided not to return to the role, as he "wanted to diversify into theatre roles". Subsequently, the production team began taking popular elements of the series and revising them for a new series, Bergerac, set in Jersey and first shown in 1981. BBC Books published two novels written by Paul Ableman, Shoestring (1979) and Shoestring's Finest Hour (1980).

Shoestring was repeated on terrestrial television in January 2002, with 14 of the 21 episodes shown on daytime BBC One. However, due to scheduling, between six and eight minutes of footage was cut from every episode.

The first series was originally scheduled to be released on DVD in its entirety by DD Home Entertainment in 2005, but the idea was abandoned because of the high cost of music rights licensing. In 2011 2|Entertain confirmed it had picked up the rights to release the series on DVD and announced the first series would be released on 17 October 2011. They announced that all 11 episodes would be uncut except for one minor music replacement, meaning that it would be the first time the series had been seen uncut since UK Gold repeats of the series in the early 1990s. This DVD was later deleted.

In June 2017, Network Distribution announced that a DVD box set of both series was planned for release on 16 October 2017 and would contain a book on the series written by Andrew Pixley. The complete series (minus the book) has since been re-issued on the BBC label in September 2024.

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