Tuesday 3 February 2015

'Lord Peter Wimsey' series (1972 - 5)

Enjoying Ian Carmichael as Dorothy L Sayers' urbane, piano-playing amateur sleuth. Seventies' series is very stagy and studio-bound, and each given time to breathe over three hours' running time, though the first - 'Clouds if Witness' (publ. 1926; screened 1972) - unwisely extends to three hours 45, and feels draggy. Acting variable.

Picks up with the gorgeously titled 'The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club' (1928 / 1973), involving possible murder in stuffy gentlemen's club, set in 1922, and alluding to horrific after-effects of WW1 (now PTSD) in both Wimsey and a murder suspect. Includes Phyllida Law, Donald Pickering, Terence Alexander, John Quentin (who upsets us by shouting all the time, though his mad Pythonesque behaviour in the woods is oddly memorable).

Wimsey's dropping of g's in some words seems to have been something Sayers experimented with in at least one story and was I think symptomatic of a fad in upper class society.


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