Festive Fayre

Christmas drivel - the definition of drivel being used here being stuff that does not appeal to me - having washed over the ITV3 schedules, action was required. So off to the Tadworth Childrens' Trust charity shop in Epsom High Street, the source of many fine DVDs, for example a collection of Greta Garbo films (see reference 3). The source on this occasion for four slim boxes of Adam Dalgliesh mysteries: roughly 1,000 minutes of viewing at roughly 1p per minute. So not bad value for middle of the road senior viewing.

We have now done one mystery, and done a Morse on it. That is to say, watch the mystery, read the book and then watch the mystery again. At the end of which one feels one has a grip on what is going on. Not that different to the procedure for Henry IV Part I, concluded in the previous post (see reference 2). The book had the advantage over the Morse books of managing without their seediness, their boozing, fags and dirty mags. Dalgleish is a real gent., even if much of that is lost in the TV version.

The story involves four flawed barristers. One who is making mistakes because he is too old and does not know when to stop. One who has an expensive wife and bends the rules to make the money needed to keep her (and her shopping habit) in appropriate style. One - the one who gets killed - who takes her duty of defence too far, too often getting the guilty - including the evil guilty rather than just the greedy guilty - off. In her defence, one should say that she never defends the same person twice, thus providing herself with some moral cover. But there is a real point here: how far is it proper for a lawyer to take the need for all to have the benefit of a defence, whatever one might think of the people concerned and of what they are charged with. And lastly, one whose obsession with neice and nephew, lead him to murder. Played by a fat man, now a veteran of Midsomer Murders, whom I confused with the rather less cuddly Cracker. At least I now know that there are at least two very fat actors treading the boards, the death of Robert Morley notwithstanding.

Being impatient, the written story was taken from the amazon kindle store, downloaded via my desktop, having still not got around to connecting my kindle to the wide world. Costing, I may say, slightly more than double what I paid for the TV version. P. D. James is not yet in the world of all you want to read for £1.99, in the way of Trollope or Dickens. And the first time I have read anything on the kindle for a while, some months I should think.

The TV version sticks to the written story fairly well. But despite its 150 minutes, it still drops some of the diversions. So we lose the diversion about the agency specialising in legal cleaners. We lose the diversion about the former husband of the murdered lawyer, gone to self-sufficient ground, deep in the country. We lose the poetical and senior management trimmings of Dalgliesh - although we are left with the improbability of a police commander heading up, hands on, a murder squad. We lose one of his two side kicks and much of the by-play in his squad.

But I do find out about the Temple Chruch in London, an ancient foundation and companion to the rather less grand Round Church in Cambridge. Perhaps of a similar age to the church in Smithfield (see reference 4). A place we shall visit once it reopens in the New Year. Once the home of no less an outfit than the Knights Templar. I have yet to get to the bottom of how that turned into lawyering. Brutally suppressed for having become a state within a state, only to be reborn in different clothes?

In sum, a well made bit of television drama. Roy Marsden a bit wooden, but serviceable. Young villain very good. Rest of the cast and the production as a whole, fine. Fine to the point that one is little bothered by the improbability of the story, which is all as it should be. Full of sound and fury, signifying very little. Tricky enough to keep the brain cells ticking over, tricky to the point where one is unlikely to pick up all the clues on a first viewing. Proper escapism

PS: we once saw Marsden as Malvolio at the Thorndyke Theatre at Leatherhead. Very wooden in that, not helped by a production mainly concerned to trash Malvolio. No room for respect for a faithful & probably efficient servant.

Reference 1: https://www.thechildrenstrust.org.uk/.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/henry-iv-part-i-part-ii.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/resweded.html. Plenty of other stuff to be turned up by the search term 'garbo'.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Bartholomew.