Kojak Season Four   Starring: Telly Savalas Mediumrare Entertainment RRP: £34.99 FHED2688 Certificate: 15 Available 29 August 2011

Although Telly Savalas had a successful film career - Battle of the Bulge (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Scalp Hunters (1968), On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), Kelly's Heroes (1970) - he will be best remembered for his iconic portrayal of steely New York cop Kojak.

Kojak was a CBS show which originally ran for five seasons between 24 October 1973 and 18 March 1978, only being cancelled when audience numbers started to drop off. A later revival saw a number of TV films made.

The basic premise of the show followed Lieutenant Theo Kojak, who was of Greek extraction a point very much to the fore in the stories, as he and his team confronted crime in New York. Like all cop shows, Kojak had its own set of novelties which distinguished it from other similar shows, including the lolly pop, bald head and hat often sported by the character as well as his catch phrase ‘who loves you baby’.

Kojak: Season Four (1976. 990 min) consisted of twenty five episodes. Given its age, one of the interesting things to see is the changing attitudes both towards the police and the very thin line which New York’s finest would walk, between staying inside the letter of the law or feeling free to lean on people to get results. On occasions both Kojak and his team stepped over the line in their pursuit of right, rather than the law.

Not all of the stories concentrated solely on the external criminal threats, sometimes a show would either encompass parts of the characters home lives, or their home lives would become part of a case. Episode one - Birthday Party - is such a case in point when Kojak’s niece is kidnapped. This allowed the show to display Kojak’s Greek origins as well as bring in his extended family.

For a modern audience this episode also displays the second nice point about watching old shows, spotting actors who would become much more famous, in the case of Birthday Party we have a very young Richard Gere playing Geno Papas, hood with a heart. Given the success of the show, guest artists would be well known character actors of their day and even the occasional star, making the transition to television work.

So, season four is spread across five DVD discs, containing all of that season, five stories to each disc, each a little under fifty minutes. Given the age of the show the picture is pretty good. Although it is grainy with some evident dirt, there’s nothing here which will realistically spoil your fun. The episodes are shown in their original aspect ratio with a mono audio track. There are no extras.

The gritty look that the series took at the realities of the New York criminal underworld made for compulsive watching. Even today the quality of the acting, writing and the type of subjects the show was willing to tackle make the show as watchable today as it did back in the seventies.

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Charles Packer