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Detective Stories - Blake's Two
Aug. 9th, 2024 11:30 amMore exploration and enjoyment of 1960s BBC TV drama. Detective was an anthology series that ran for three seasons under three different producers, The survival rate is patchy, and I really wish that I could see Richard Wordsworth as Gervase Fen in the first ever episode, The Moving Toyshop, or John Carson as Alan Grant in the third season's adaptation of The Singing Sands.
We do have two versions of Nicholas Blake's poet-detective Nigel Strangeways. In End of Chapter (season 1, episode 4, TX 20.04.64) he is played with laid back good humour by Glyn Houston, and I can't help but wonder if the production team had a particular poet in mind when casting him.
This is a busy production which ambitiously tries to adapt the whole book into a teleplay with a running time of just under an hour. In my opinion it doesn't work - it hits the plot points too quickly, and the cast are off the leash playing heightened literary types caught up in scandal and murder at a publishing house. (The company includes Geoffrey Bayldon and Richard Carpenter, Catweazle and his creator.) There's some complicated blocking from director Patrick Dromgoole to try and speed things along, but the limitations of studio production in 1964 - camera bumps, fluffed lines, no re-takes - make this feel more amateur than was intended.
Nigel Strangeways is re-incarnated as Bernard Horsfall in The Beast Must Die (season 2, episode 6, TX 21.06.68 - my mother's eighteenth birthday). The 1938 novel is updated to a contemporary setting (as it will be in Claude Chabrol's film the following year). This is, I think, a terrific production, with a tight and intelligent script.
We do have two versions of Nicholas Blake's poet-detective Nigel Strangeways. In End of Chapter (season 1, episode 4, TX 20.04.64) he is played with laid back good humour by Glyn Houston, and I can't help but wonder if the production team had a particular poet in mind when casting him.
This is a busy production which ambitiously tries to adapt the whole book into a teleplay with a running time of just under an hour. In my opinion it doesn't work - it hits the plot points too quickly, and the cast are off the leash playing heightened literary types caught up in scandal and murder at a publishing house. (The company includes Geoffrey Bayldon and Richard Carpenter, Catweazle and his creator.) There's some complicated blocking from director Patrick Dromgoole to try and speed things along, but the limitations of studio production in 1964 - camera bumps, fluffed lines, no re-takes - make this feel more amateur than was intended.
Nigel Strangeways is re-incarnated as Bernard Horsfall in The Beast Must Die (season 2, episode 6, TX 21.06.68 - my mother's eighteenth birthday). The 1938 novel is updated to a contemporary setting (as it will be in Claude Chabrol's film the following year). This is, I think, a terrific production, with a tight and intelligent script.
This picks up the novel from about halfway through, summarising Felix's motive for vengeance in less than thirty seconds, courtesy of a powerfully edited sequence of the hit and run.
(The blurry diary entry in the last frame, the four words that drive Felix on, are written on Thursday. 21st March, 1968).
And pretty much the next shot we see is the Beast himself, George Rattery, played by Francis Matthews. He's ten minutes away from being poisoned, and Matthews' is so unpleasant in the role it's clearly an outcome devoutly to be wished for.
The Rattery household is as toxic an envrironment as any of those seen in Maigret, and Felix's infiltration of it (the first half of the book that we don't see) is plausible thanks to the empathy and warmth of Andrew Downie. Horsfall's Strangeways is more ascetic and cerebral than Houston - and he gets to recite lines of poetry at the end : "I have had worse partings, but none so / that gnaws at my mind still". (This is from the last verse of Walking Away, written by, of course, Cecil Day-Lewis).
It's a pity that we didn't get a series of Strangeways after this, as his partnership with the investigating officer, Chief Inspector Blount, works really well. Robert James is shrewd, canny, and Edinburgh Scots in the part, and the dynamic between them is at its best when they team up to interview General Shrivenham (Richard Hurndall resembling the First Doctor here more than he did in The Five Doctors.)
BBC Genome doesn't list any repeats of this since transmission, which is a shame. The impression I get from Richard Marson's biography is that Verity Lambert regarded her time on the show as producer of the 1968 run as just a job of work rather than a passion project. Tina Wakerell and Anthea Browne-Wilkinson, director and script editor, had worked with her on Adam Adamant Lives - the director in particular gives this episode a finesse that is noticeably absent from The Case of the Late Pig, a barely coherent version of another 1930s novel featuring a series detective that was shown in this run six weeks later. More on this next time, perhaps!
Current distraction
Sep. 12th, 2023 02:45 pmThe Doings of Doyle podcast, hosted by Paul M Chapman and Mark Jones. I was given a hardback omnibus of six short story collections of ACD's at a formative age, and also bought this facsimile edition of non Holmes writings for The Strand Magazine while on holiday in Canada in 1982. So some of this material is as embedded as a Terrance Dicks adaptation in my mind.
One of the joys of the podcast is that it is a genuine conversation by enthusiasts, and one blessing especially is that their voices contrast (Paul M Chapman's tones are precisely what I would expect the possessor of such magnificent Victorian whiskers to sound like). They place the works in the course of ACD's prolific and lucrative career, and look at the works of contemporaries as inspiration and competition. (I did not know that after reading Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, ACD wrote to his brother to say - and I paraphrase - "I will not be taking Machen to bed with me again.")
One of the joys of the podcast is that it is a genuine conversation by enthusiasts, and one blessing especially is that their voices contrast (Paul M Chapman's tones are precisely what I would expect the possessor of such magnificent Victorian whiskers to sound like). They place the works in the course of ACD's prolific and lucrative career, and look at the works of contemporaries as inspiration and competition. (I did not know that after reading Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan, ACD wrote to his brother to say - and I paraphrase - "I will not be taking Machen to bed with me again.")
