It was once one of the most watched TV detective series in the country, with more than 20 million people tuning in every week to see the latest escapades of private detective and local radio station presenter Eddie Shoestring as he runs around Bristol solving mysteries.
Before the likes of Teachers, Skins, Being Human and The Outlaws were filmed and set in Bristol to put the city on the TV map, there was Shoestring – a show which had more viewers than any of them. And now, 45 years after Shoestring became the first to showcase the delights of Bristol to a national audience, fans of the show can retrace some of the key locations in the city that were used in the series.
Bristol tour guide John Hughes, who has run a ‘Haunted and Hidden Bristol’ walking tour for more than 20 years, has created a brand new tour which celebrates Shoestring and the places around the city that the series made famous.
The series was first broadcast in September 1979 and quickly became a massive hit, in an era when there were only three channels and few people had home video recorders to watch things ‘on demand’.
The series never explicitly named Bristol, but it was set in an ‘unnamed city in the West of England’, and the radio station Eddie Shoestring gets a job at in the first episode is named ‘Radio West’.
The series made a household name out of Trevor Eve as the titular Shoestring, and the 50-minute long programmes ran up to Christmas 1979, with a second series commissioned quickly to be filmed in 1980 in Bristol and run the following autumn.
It was national news when Eve surprisingly quit the role to do more theatre work, and the producers of the programme took the format and some of the ideas and created Bergerac – set in Jersey – instead.
When the second series was being filmed in 1980, the outdoor location filming became something of an event with large crowds often gathering to catch a glimpse of the action. Among them was a young John Hughes who was a huge fan of the show.
He said he wrote the tour to celebrate Shoestring, which is enjoying a new lease of life on streaming services after a new DVD box set of the series was released by the BBC a couple of months ago.
“The walking tour runs from Clifton Village to Bristol Bridge and will take in lots of exterior locations including Eddie’s flat in Clifton Village, the radio station in Welsh Back, many title scene locations and famous episode locations filmed in Clifton and around the Old City,” explained John.