Yep, excellently written, and the story doesn't talk down to its audience. This is the first in the series, so if there was only one ep available, this was the one to get. There isn't much drumming in this week's story, or description of the music and how it feels to play in a band, and those were the real selling points to me, reading it as a kid.
You can tell the writer is a jazz fan, and very probably a drummer himself.
This set-up episode was chiefly Blyton-esque, concerned with derring-do, a robbery and heroic saving of a crook from drowning.
Kid Laine (the drummer) is an Alf Tupper figure, so you just swap the worn out ragged pair of spikes for a worn-out pair of drumsticks. He's honest, perennially cheerful and supernaturally talented. He's in effect the boy's Cinderella, pure in heart and indomitable.
Kid doesn't offer up his catch-cry "gimme room!" in this story, but I remember the ones I read as a boy weren't concerned with his life on a Mississippi steam boat (as this first one is) but with life in the grimy city, where he played in a band of youngsters, often on floats drawn through the town. I guess the writer warms to his theme later, and develops the world the Kid lives in.
I would love to know who wrote this.
