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Aug. 29, 2024
James reviews Sharpe on ITV4 and A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley on U&Yesterday.
James turns his analytical and sardonic eye on a gung-ho, action-packed Napoleonic war adventure and is not entirely convinced, while a documentary on the 'golden age' of British crime writing (Agatha Christie et al) and has a pop at the filler.
The image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:
A heroic man is holding a sword while a demure lady reads a book entitled ‘murder’. Napoleonic wars.
Chapters
00:07 - Intro
00:53 - contents
02:07 - Sharpe’s revenge
10:34 - A Very British Murder
21:48 - What’s up next and conclusion
Transcript
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Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the thirty-third episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’
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This is where I review Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews. Curious about future reviews? Check out the ‘What’s up next’ section at the end or on the website. That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.
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As a quick reminder, let me know if a star rating system would be helpful. So far, it’s a tie, but if it stays that way, I might just go ahead with it. As Caesar never said when crossing the Rubicon, well, why not?
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In this episode, I will review:
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Sharpe on ITV4 and
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A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley on U&Yesterday.
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So a bit of pure action/adventure/escapism set in the Napoleonic wars and, by way of contrast, a documentary maker who never lets relevance intrude into her passion for period dressing up. Both on Monday as I’m away the following weekend, and want to have a chance of posting this episode before then.
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By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:
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A heroic man is holding a sword while a demure lady reads a book entitled ‘murder’. Napoleonic wars.
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Again, some almost decent images this time. Either I’m getting better at prompts, or AI is becoming more powerful. I expect it’s the latter. Them pesky robot brains just can’t wait to take over.
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And on that depressing note, let us begin.
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Sharpe (S5 E1: Sharpe’s Revenge) on ITV4, Monday August 26, 6:45pm
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This is a boy’s own ripping yarn with swords, cannons and heaving bosoms.
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The opening credits roll over strident music heavy with bugles. Then we excitingly start in 1814 with the siege of Toulouse, ‘the last French town loyal to Napoleon.’ And there are the French, peering anxiously over the barricades.
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You can tell the bad guy immediately: he’s not in uniform, has glasses, wears a sneer, is called Ducos and is in charge of Napoleon’s treasure. His lip twists with scorn as he looks down at the advancing British. ‘Can I trust you,’ he asks the general in charge - a heavy chap called Calvet - ‘to kill Sharpe?’ Oh dear: already our hero is a marked man.
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And it gets worse: as if not satisfied with merely getting up the nose of a Frenchie or two - Sharpe punches a cowardly fellow officer, Wigram, setting up a duel at dawn.
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And even worser: while Sharpe is heroically taking Toulouse and thus bringing the war to an end, his wife Jane falls under the influence of the rapacious Mrs Wigram!
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And even worser still: the dastardly Ducos plots to steal Napoleon’s treasure and put the blame on Sharpe!!
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We’re getting peppered with subplots and set-ups. It’s all good stuff. There’s enough startled rabbits to make sure we get a full hour and a half of action. Plus commercials.
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I sort of enjoyed this. Perhaps I wasn’t quite in the mood for unsophisticated, action packed story-telling. Be that as it may, flat-vowelled Sean Bean makes a suitably hunky hero and the direction makes good use of the extras.
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Talking of extras, I freeze-framed one of the opening scenes and counted the soldiers lined up for action. I reckon there were between 30 and 40 of them, which is pretty lavish, but as an attacking force, stumbling up a steep incline in the face of cannon and musket fire, they looked pretty skimpy.
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There were lots of explosions and bodies thrown into the air or falling down clutching their vitals. It was not subtle, and I wondered - as I always do - if some extras, good at extravagant dying, are asked to don a different hat or another uniform and get killed over and over again. I imagine one of them arriving home, sitting down to supper and saying to the wife ‘I died 7 times today. 4 gunshots, two stabbings and a drowning. It’s a record.’ To which she replies, ‘That’s nice dear. Eat your kippers. I got them fresh.’
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So Sharpe has mountainous problems to overcome, starting with the duel, which ends with Wigram being shot in the buttocks, ha ha!
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But then Jane (Sharpe’s wife - oh, do keep up) departs with Mrs Wigram back to London, intent on getting hold of all his money. Oh no!
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And! Ducos’s plot gets Sharpe arrested and banged up for stealing Napoleon’s treasure! Not only that, but Wigram - sitting on a cushion no doubt - will preside over his trial!
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Lawks a mercy Mrs Goggins! How does he get out of this one!
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In many ways, this illustrates a central tenet of all action movies: you never ask ‘if’ but ‘how?’ The main hero never dies, so the question shifts from ‘if he escapes’ to ‘how does he escape?
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And in this particular instance, it’s via some rum to the guards and a haywain to Normandy, where Lucille - a beautiful widow - causes ructions between Sharpe and his best mate, who promptly toddles off to Paris with a pair of spectacles.
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Somewhere along the line - I forget how or why or when - our hero gets shot in the leg, so she has to nurse him. Wet flannels dabbing at bloodied skin. No cliche left unturned. And while he’s slowly getting stronger and building his muscles chasing hens, splitting logs and smouldering at Lucille like a dog on heat, in London his wife is getting amorous with a handsome chap with dramatic black sideburns. (Poof!)
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But word gets back to Sharpe that his wife is being less than faithful. So the chocks come off and - tastefully - behind closed doors - passions are satisfied.
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But by now the unreality of the relentless pace has got to me, and I’m only watching because I’m watching. They’ve gone to so much effort in providing this entertainment it seems churlish to not see it through to the end, but it’s getting to be a hard slog.
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One redeeming feature: the French talk French, and we are given subtitles. That’s always a plus in my book, as foreigners talking to each other in accented English just looks and sounds dumb.
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However - wait wait wait - did I just say ‘one redeeming feature’? That’s not fair: it makes it seem the whole program is rubbish except for a minor detail. This is far from the case. ‘Sharpe’ is firmly anchored into the solid foundations of good production values, competent direction and fine acting.
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But .. no, wait: first, a short bit of history.
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Bernard Cornwall, who wrote the original ‘Sharpe’ books, learnt his craft by dissecting the novels of Dennis Wheatley and closely following, almost page by page, Wheatley’s expert storytelling. But Wheatley was not a subtle writer. His action packed adventure tales depended on plot twists, coincidence and - frequently - supernatural elements. They are unabashed page turners, and, believe me, there’s nothing wrong in that. Who hasn’t wanted to write a best seller? I’ve tried many times, and always failed. So hats off to him and Cornwall.
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But this emphasis on action and pace often means the characters are driven more by plot requirements than internal consistency. As a result, scripts lack nuance and in the end just plod along, stolidly going from one event to the next, like a carthorse seeking shelter.
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Which is what happens in ‘Sharpe’s revenge.’ and over 90 minutes it becomes increasingly evident. Sharpe himself remains fairly consistent, as does Ducos, his arch enemy. But Sharpe’s wife does screeching U-turns, his best pal veers from friendship to hate, and the canny French general Calvet becomes Sharpe’s ally in the space of about 3 seconds.
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Perhaps on another day I’d have got out the popcorn, shoved my critical brain down the nearest available rabbit hole and just enjoyed it as I might well have done at the age of 14 or so.
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(Ha!) 14, eh? I’d have just gawked at the heaving bosoms.
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So, to wrap up: ‘Sharpe’s revenge’ probably succeeded on it’s own terms as a popular fast paced actioneer, but I won’t be putting it on series record this time.
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Three and a half stars out of five, maybe. Which is only half a star less than those I might award to:
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A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley (The Golden Age) on U&Yesterday, Monday August 26, 9:00pm
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Oh dear, I suddenly feel as confused as a cup of tea wearing a hat! Just a couple of months ago, I reviewed Andrew Marr’s excellent ‘Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers,’ which also analyzed the ‘golden age’ of crime fiction, the subject of this episode of Lucy Worsley’s ‘A Very British Murder
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I thought some of it looked familiar. But I’d forgotten. Poor old Andrew Marr had slipped into that thick memory porridge slurping away at the back of my mind. God, the things I’ve forgotten. Sometimes, in the wee small hours, when I’m half thinking I’m cold, half thinking a bit of cheese would be nice and half wondering how I ever became a maths teacher, memories surface, like a long dead bodies floating up in an Agatha Christie novel called ‘The corpse in the lido.’ (Ooooo!)
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Now I’m not going to compare the two. After all, Marr’s getting on a bit and Worsley’s fond of bright red lipstick, so no contest there. Anyway, the time frames are different: he starts with Edgar Allen Poe and finishes in the present, while she trundles around between the wars.
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So, unless I can make a fun comparison, I won’t mention Marr again … probably.
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Lucy Worsley - the most perky of perky historians - starts with the notorious Dr. Crippen, who murdered his wife and scarpered on a steamship to Canada with his lover Ethel wearing boy’s togs. On finding the body and tracking him down, the police gave hot chase in another - faster - steamer.
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In fact, Worsley spends the first 9 minutes of the allotted 45 on the Crippen story. And why not? As she gleefully says, it had it all: gruesome murder; illicit romance; an Atlantic chase. Even new technology (the Marconi wireless). Wow!
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Crippen was a poisoner, so Worsley strides purposefully along a reconstructed street from yesteryear, and enters an old-fashioned chemist’s shop to introduce her next subject, Agatha Christie, who trained as a hospital drug dispenser and was fascinated by poison.
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This neat transition is typical of a Worsley documentary. She treats the various subjects like stops on one continuous tram ride through the past. It’s the difference between a textbook with separate and carefully labelled chapters (Crippen. Christie. etc) and a narrative story.
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And to maintain the sense of continuous progress, she is seldom still. Not content with just mentioning how Christie took long solitary walks to work out dialogue, she tells us this while marching over hill and dale. You just know that if a train is somehow relevant, she’ll get on one, steam if possible, to watch the moving countryside while the engine toots and powers into a tunnel.
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It makes watching her simple, easy and instructive.
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Christie took four years to write her first novel, ‘The mysterious affair at Styles.’ which set the classic murder mystery template for the period. Country house, small circle of possible suspects, maps, clues, a fragment of a will, a grand summing up and - most importantly - a new type of detective, the antithesis of Sherlock Holms: a fussy little Belgium called Hercule Poirot.
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Personally, I never saw his appeal. I always preferred Miss Marple. When the TV adaptations came, David Suchet became Poirot and was him for about a zillion years. But Marple changed as frequently as cans of soup.
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Worsley interviewed P. D. James and asked ‘why do women make such good crime novelists?’ Which, as leading questions go, is a corker, and for an instant I felt like sending her a strong email: ‘Really Worsley, you can do better than that. Hurumph! Bah! Humbug!’ But of course I didn’t. There’s enough electronic vitriol floating about without me adding needlessly to it.
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But - ever on the move - Worsley toddles along to be initiated into ‘the detection club’ which had candles, solemn oaths and a skull called Eric. She had to promise to stick to a set of crime writing rules which sounded much like the ‘rules’ Andrew Marr had unearthed when he ploughed the same field. But - as Worsley isn’t a crime writer, she couldn’t do the whole thing and it all quickly collapsed into giggles, which was rather nice, particularly when she found out ‘Eric’ was probably female.
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But some good points were made about how Christie and her ilk treated murder as an intellectual puzzle. It was probably no coincidence ‘the golden age’ was also the time crossword puzzles, chess and mystery games became popular.
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Another seamless Worsley transition then occurred (she really is good at these) as one of the founders of ‘the detective club’ was Dorothy L Sayers, so within seconds we have slid into a short back story of this writer, who we are plonkingly told ‘had a very big brain’ and ‘isn’t just the best of the golden age of detective story writers, she’s a great novelist, full stop.’
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Well, with that recommendation, I immediately looked in my local library for a Sayers novel. But it appears they’re thin on the ground in my particular area. Well, ‘thin’ is overstating the case: there were none available. Mind you, since the pandemic I’ve not actually visited my local library, but get out ebooks instead. Much easier at 10:20 in the evening and if you spill coffee, no soggy pages.
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We are shown a drawing of her dashing, aristocratic hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. Monocle, slight sneer, teeth! A strong contender for upper-class twit of the year. But we are told this is just a veneer. Underneath it all he’s a war-damaged individual who wakes screaming in the night. OK. I can go along with that. And if I ever get to read a Sayers novel, I’ll let you know what I think.
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After the Sayers/Whimsey puff job, Worsley hightails it to Liverpool to talk about another real life murder that got the good folks of 1931 avidly reading their newspapers. The case of William Herbert Wallace, a chess playing insurance agent with a moustache.
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Wallace had a tortuous alibi involving telephone calls, a mystery man and a non-existent address. Worsley catches a tram to illustrate this. The music darkens. On returning home, Wallace finds his wife bludgeoned to death in the parlour.
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On the flimsy basis of his lack of emotion, no other suspects and his small round Crippen-like glasses, Wallace was arrested, tried and convicted.
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But - in a final twist - he was acquitted by the court of appeal, and sold his story as ‘the man they did not hang.’ (Woo!)
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Worsley is now summing up. Sitting amid standard Agatha Christie characters (the young thing, the colonel, a vicar and a maid with a white mob cap) she said that in the literature of this ‘golden age’ of crime fiction, murder had been sanitised and trivialised. There was no mention of fascism or the great depression, or anything unpleasant. But in reality, murder then - as now - was driven mainly by poverty, alcohol or abusive relationships. Indeed, she makes a compelling case for referring to the novels of Christie and Sayers as ‘snobbery with violence.’
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This is Lucy Worsley at her best. She’s powerfully summed up all that has gone before and constructed an argument that should have then finished the program.
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But she’s got about 10 minutes left so - in a section that looks remarkably like padding - she moves on to the 1930s and the rise of crime films, concentrating on Alfred Hitchcock.
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To me, it looks exactly as if she’s found some unshown off-cuts from a previous documentary, possibly about the influence of film leading up to WW2, and just shovelled it in.
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After all, she only really covered two writers (Christie and Sayers) in any depth. Where were Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey? And that’s just the women. Also, about 15 minutes was spent on the real life cases of Crippen and Wallace. Crippen I can just about understand, but Wallace? I smell filler.
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(sigh)
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As you can probably tell, I’m usually a great fan of Lucy Worsley. I like her chirpiness and intellectual rigour. She explains things clearly, puts forward compelling arguments and is not averse to donning an outfit or two.
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But ‘A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley (The Golden Age)’ doesn’t do her justice and ultimately looks like a rush job. Maybe I should not watch with such high hopes.
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After all, dashed expectation is the mother of all negative reviews.
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And that misquote from Antonio Banderas concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’
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Next time I will review:
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It Should Happen to You (1954) on Film4, Tuesday September 3, 11:00am and
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Home and Away (S 37 E 133) on 5* Wednesday September 4, 6:00pm and Home and Away (S 37 E 134) on 5* Wednesday September 4, 6:30pm
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OK, so there’s a comedy film from 1954 because somewhere in the back of my head bells are ringing, so maybe I’ve seen it and loved it or seen it and hated it or - more likely - I’m confusing it with something else entirely. And - Gawd help me - two episodes of a soap opera I’ve heard of but never seen. Both next week, as I’m away for the weekend on a family bash.
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Don’t forget, let me know about star ratings. As ever, contact me via email to contact@IReviewFreeview.com or through the website IReviewFreeview.com where you can also click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ to see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.
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Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:01,000
Hello, I’m James Brook, and welcome to the thirty-third episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’
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This is where I review Freeview programs. Go to IReviewFreeview.com to search, listen, or indeed read and/or comment on all my reviews. Curious about future reviews? Check out the ‘What’s up next’ section at the end or on the website. That’s IReviewFreeview - all one word - dot com.
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As a quick reminder, let me know if a star rating system would be helpful. So far, it’s a tie, but if it stays that way, I might just go ahead with it. As Caesar never said when crossing the Rubicon, well, why not?
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In this episode, I will review:
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Sharpe on ITV4 and
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A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley on U&Yesterday.
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00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:07,000
So a bit of pure action/adventure/escapism set in the Napoleonic wars and, by way of contrast, a documentary maker who never lets relevance intrude into her passion for period dressing up. Both on Monday as I’m away the following weekend, and want to have a chance of posting this episode before then.
8
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By the way, the image for this episode was generated by a free AI image generator with the prompt:
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A heroic man is holding a sword while a demure lady reads a book entitled ‘murder’. Napoleonic wars.
10
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Again, some almost decent images this time. Either I’m getting better at prompts, or AI is becoming more powerful. I expect it’s the latter. Them pesky robot brains just can’t wait to take over.
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And on that depressing note, let us begin.
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Sharpe (S5 E1: Sharpe’s Revenge) on ITV4, Monday August 26, 6:45pm
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This is a boy’s own ripping yarn with swords, cannons and heaving bosoms.
14
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The opening credits roll over strident music heavy with bugles. Then we excitingly start in 1814 with the siege of Toulouse, ‘the last French town loyal to Napoleon.’ And there are the French, peering anxiously over the barricades.
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You can tell the bad guy immediately: he’s not in uniform, has glasses, wears a sneer, is called Ducos and is in charge of Napoleon’s treasure. His lip twists with scorn as he looks down at the advancing British. ‘Can I trust you,’ he asks the general in charge - a heavy chap called Calvet - ‘to kill Sharpe?’ Oh dear: already our hero is a marked man.
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And it gets worse: as if not satisfied with merely getting up the nose of a Frenchie or two - Sharpe punches a cowardly fellow officer, Wigram, setting up a duel at dawn.
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And even worser: while Sharpe is heroically taking Toulouse and thus bringing the war to an end, his wife Jane falls under the influence of the rapacious Mrs Wigram!
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And even worser still: the dastardly Ducos plots to steal Napoleon’s treasure and put the blame on Sharpe!!
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We’re getting peppered with subplots and set-ups. It’s all good stuff. There’s enough startled rabbits to make sure we get a full hour and a half of action. Plus commercials.
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I sort of enjoyed this. Perhaps I wasn’t quite in the mood for unsophisticated, action packed story-telling. Be that as it may, flat-vowelled Sean Bean makes a suitably hunky hero and the direction makes good use of the extras.
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Talking of extras, I freeze-framed one of the opening scenes and counted the soldiers lined up for action. I reckon there were between 30 and 40 of them, which is pretty lavish, but as an attacking force, stumbling up a steep incline in the face of cannon and musket fire, they looked pretty skimpy.
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There were lots of explosions and bodies thrown into the air or falling down clutching their vitals. It was not subtle, and I wondered - as I always do - if some extras, good at extravagant dying, are asked to don a different hat or another uniform and get killed over and over again. I imagine one of them arriving home, sitting down to supper and saying to the wife ‘I died 7 times today. 4 gunshots, two stabbings and a drowning. It’s a record.’ To which she replies, ‘That’s nice dear. Eat your kippers. I got them fresh.’
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So Sharpe has mountainous problems to overcome, starting with the duel, which ends with Wigram being shot in the buttocks, ha ha!
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But then Jane (Sharpe’s wife - oh, do keep up) departs with Mrs Wigram back to London, intent on getting hold of all his money. Oh no!
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And! Ducos’s plot gets Sharpe arrested and banged up for stealing Napoleon’s treasure! Not only that, but Wigram - sitting on a cushion no doubt - will preside over his trial!
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Lawks a mercy Mrs Goggins! How does he get out of this one!
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In many ways, this illustrates a central tenet of all action movies: you never ask ‘if’ but ‘how?’ The main hero never dies, so the question shifts from ‘if he escapes’ to ‘how does he escape?
28
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And in this particular instance, it’s via some rum to the guards and a haywain to Normandy, where Lucille - a beautiful widow - causes ructions between Sharpe and his best mate, who promptly toddles off to Paris with a pair of spectacles.
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Somewhere along the line - I forget how or why or when - our hero gets shot in the leg, so she has to nurse him. Wet flannels dabbing at bloodied skin. No cliche left unturned. And while he’s slowly getting stronger and building his muscles chasing hens, splitting logs and smouldering at Lucille like a dog on heat, in London his wife is getting amorous with a handsome chap with dramatic black sideburns. (Poof!)
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But word gets back to Sharpe that his wife is being less than faithful. So the chocks come off and - tastefully - behind closed doors - passions are satisfied.
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But by now the unreality of the relentless pace has got to me, and I’m only watching because I’m watching. They’ve gone to so much effort in providing this entertainment it seems churlish to not see it through to the end, but it’s getting to be a hard slog.
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One redeeming feature: the French talk French, and we are given subtitles. That’s always a plus in my book, as foreigners talking to each other in accented English just looks and sounds dumb.
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However - wait wait wait - did I just say ‘one redeeming feature’? That’s not fair: it makes it seem the whole program is rubbish except for a minor detail. This is far from the case. ‘Sharpe’ is firmly anchored into the solid foundations of good production values, competent direction and fine acting.
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But .. no, wait: first, a short bit of history.
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Bernard Cornwall, who wrote the original ‘Sharpe’ books, learnt his craft by dissecting the novels of Dennis Wheatley and closely following, almost page by page, Wheatley’s expert storytelling. But Wheatley was not a subtle writer. His action packed adventure tales depended on plot twists, coincidence and - frequently - supernatural elements. They are unabashed page turners, and, believe me, there’s nothing wrong in that. Who hasn’t wanted to write a best seller? I’ve tried many times, and always failed. So hats off to him and Cornwall.
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But this emphasis on action and pace often means the characters are driven more by plot requirements than internal consistency. As a result, scripts lack nuance and in the end just plod along, stolidly going from one event to the next, like a carthorse seeking shelter.
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Which is what happens in ‘Sharpe’s revenge.’ and over 90 minutes it becomes increasingly evident. Sharpe himself remains fairly consistent, as does Ducos, his arch enemy. But Sharpe’s wife does screeching U-turns, his best pal veers from friendship to hate, and the canny French general Calvet becomes Sharpe’s ally in the space of about 3 seconds.
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Perhaps on another day I’d have got out the popcorn, shoved my critical brain down the nearest available rabbit hole and just enjoyed it as I might well have done at the age of 14 or so.
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(Ha!) 14, eh? I’d have just gawked at the heaving bosoms.
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So, to wrap up: ‘Sharpe’s revenge’ probably succeeded on it’s own terms as a popular fast paced actioneer, but I won’t be putting it on series record this time.
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Three and a half stars out of five, maybe. Which is only half a star less than those I might award to:
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A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley (The Golden Age) on U&Yesterday, Monday August 26, 9:00pm
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Oh dear, I suddenly feel as confused as a cup of tea wearing a hat! Just a couple of months ago, I reviewed Andrew Marr’s excellent ‘Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers,’ which also analyzed the ‘golden age’ of crime fiction, the subject of this episode of Lucy Worsley’s ‘A Very British Murder
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I thought some of it looked familiar. But I’d forgotten. Poor old Andrew Marr had slipped into that thick memory porridge slurping away at the back of my mind. God, the things I’ve forgotten. Sometimes, in the wee small hours, when I’m half thinking I’m cold, half thinking a bit of cheese would be nice and half wondering how I ever became a maths teacher, memories surface, like a long dead bodies floating up in an Agatha Christie novel called ‘The corpse in the lido.’ (Ooooo!)
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Now I’m not going to compare the two. After all, Marr’s getting on a bit and Worsley’s fond of bright red lipstick, so no contest there. Anyway, the time frames are different: he starts with Edgar Allen Poe and finishes in the present, while she trundles around between the wars.
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So, unless I can make a fun comparison, I won’t mention Marr again … probably.
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Lucy Worsley - the most perky of perky historians - starts with the notorious Dr. Crippen, who murdered his wife and scarpered on a steamship to Canada with his lover Ethel wearing boy’s togs. On finding the body and tracking him down, the police gave hot chase in another - faster - steamer.
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In fact, Worsley spends the first 9 minutes of the allotted 45 on the Crippen story. And why not? As she gleefully says, it had it all: gruesome murder; illicit romance; an Atlantic chase. Even new technology (the Marconi wireless). Wow!
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Crippen was a poisoner, so Worsley strides purposefully along a reconstructed street from yesteryear, and enters an old-fashioned chemist’s shop to introduce her next subject, Agatha Christie, who trained as a hospital drug dispenser and was fascinated by poison.
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This neat transition is typical of a Worsley documentary. She treats the various subjects like stops on one continuous tram ride through the past. It’s the difference between a textbook with separate and carefully labelled chapters (Crippen. Christie. etc) and a narrative story.
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And to maintain the sense of continuous progress, she is seldom still. Not content with just mentioning how Christie took long solitary walks to work out dialogue, she tells us this while marching over hill and dale. You just know that if a train is somehow relevant, she’ll get on one, steam if possible, to watch the moving countryside while the engine toots and powers into a tunnel.
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It makes watching her simple, easy and instructive.
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Christie took four years to write her first novel, ‘The mysterious affair at Styles.’ which set the classic murder mystery template for the period. Country house, small circle of possible suspects, maps, clues, a fragment of a will, a grand summing up and - most importantly - a new type of detective, the antithesis of Sherlock Holms: a fussy little Belgium called Hercule Poirot.
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Personally, I never saw his appeal. I always preferred Miss Marple. When the TV adaptations came, David Suchet became Poirot and was him for about a zillion years. But Marple changed as frequently as cans of soup.
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Worsley interviewed P. D. James and asked ‘why do women make such good crime novelists?’ Which, as leading questions go, is a corker, and for an instant I felt like sending her a strong email: ‘Really Worsley, you can do better than that. Hurumph! Bah! Humbug!’ But of course I didn’t. There’s enough electronic vitriol floating about without me adding needlessly to it.
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But - ever on the move - Worsley toddles along to be initiated into ‘the detection club’ which had candles, solemn oaths and a skull called Eric. She had to promise to stick to a set of crime writing rules which sounded much like the ‘rules’ Andrew Marr had unearthed when he ploughed the same field. But - as Worsley isn’t a crime writer, she couldn’t do the whole thing and it all quickly collapsed into giggles, which was rather nice, particularly when she found out ‘Eric’ was probably female.
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But some good points were made about how Christie and her ilk treated murder as an intellectual puzzle. It was probably no coincidence ‘the golden age’ was also the time crossword puzzles, chess and mystery games became popular.
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Another seamless Worsley transition then occurred (she really is good at these) as one of the founders of ‘the detective club’ was Dorothy L Sayers, so within seconds we have slid into a short back story of this writer, who we are plonkingly told ‘had a very big brain’ and ‘isn’t just the best of the golden age of detective story writers, she’s a great novelist, full stop.’
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Well, with that recommendation, I immediately looked in my local library for a Sayers novel. But it appears they’re thin on the ground in my particular area. Well, ‘thin’ is overstating the case: there were none available. Mind you, since the pandemic I’ve not actually visited my local library, but get out ebooks instead. Much easier at 10:20 in the evening and if you spill coffee, no soggy pages.
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We are shown a drawing of her dashing, aristocratic hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. Monocle, slight sneer, teeth! A strong contender for upper-class twit of the year. But we are told this is just a veneer. Underneath it all he’s a war-damaged individual who wakes screaming in the night. OK. I can go along with that. And if I ever get to read a Sayers novel, I’ll let you know what I think.
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After the Sayers/Whimsey puff job, Worsley hightails it to Liverpool to talk about another real life murder that got the good folks of 1931 avidly reading their newspapers. The case of William Herbert Wallace, a chess playing insurance agent with a moustache.
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Wallace had a tortuous alibi involving telephone calls, a mystery man and a non-existent address. Worsley catches a tram to illustrate this. The music darkens. On returning home, Wallace finds his wife bludgeoned to death in the parlour.
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On the flimsy basis of his lack of emotion, no other suspects and his small round Crippen-like glasses, Wallace was arrested, tried and convicted.
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But - in a final twist - he was acquitted by the court of appeal, and sold his story as ‘the man they did not hang.’ (Woo!)
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Worsley is now summing up. Sitting amid standard Agatha Christie characters (the young thing, the colonel, a vicar and a maid with a white mob cap) she said that in the literature of this ‘golden age’ of crime fiction, murder had been sanitised and trivialised. There was no mention of fascism or the great depression, or anything unpleasant. But in reality, murder then - as now - was driven mainly by poverty, alcohol or abusive relationships. Indeed, she makes a compelling case for referring to the novels of Christie and Sayers as ‘snobbery with violence.’
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This is Lucy Worsley at her best. She’s powerfully summed up all that has gone before and constructed an argument that should have then finished the program.
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But she’s got about 10 minutes left so - in a section that looks remarkably like padding - she moves on to the 1930s and the rise of crime films, concentrating on Alfred Hitchcock.
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To me, it looks exactly as if she’s found some unshown off-cuts from a previous documentary, possibly about the influence of film leading up to WW2, and just shovelled it in.
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After all, she only really covered two writers (Christie and Sayers) in any depth. Where were Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey? And that’s just the women. Also, about 15 minutes was spent on the real life cases of Crippen and Wallace. Crippen I can just about understand, but Wallace? I smell filler.
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(sigh)
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As you can probably tell, I’m usually a great fan of Lucy Worsley. I like her chirpiness and intellectual rigour. She explains things clearly, puts forward compelling arguments and is not averse to donning an outfit or two.
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But ‘A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley (The Golden Age)’ doesn’t do her justice and ultimately looks like a rush job. Maybe I should not watch with such high hopes.
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After all, dashed expectation is the mother of all negative reviews.
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And that misquote from Antonio Banderas concludes the reviews for this episode of ‘I Review Freeview.’
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Next time I will review:
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It Should Happen to You (1954) on Film4, Tuesday September 3, 11:00am and
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Home and Away (S 37 E 133) on 5* Wednesday September 4, 6:00pm and Home and Away (S 37 E 134) on 5* Wednesday September 4, 6:30pm
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OK, so there’s a comedy film from 1954 because somewhere in the back of my head bells are ringing, so maybe I’ve seen it and loved it or seen it and hated it or - more likely - I’m confusing it with something else entirely. And - Gawd help me - two episodes of a soap opera I’ve heard of but never seen. Both next week, as I’m away for the weekend on a family bash.
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Don’t forget, let me know about star ratings. As ever, contact me via email to contact@IReviewFreeview.com or through the website IReviewFreeview.com where you can also click on the page ‘What’s up next.’ to see what programs I’ll be reviewing next time.
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Thank you for listening, and goodbye for now.