Ageing grande-dame rattling around in a great mansion full of memories. And, coincidentally it seems, writing best-selling murder mysteries in the style of Jessica Fletcher, whose immortal detective series was just about to launch on its record-breaking run. Give or take a non-stop diet of brandy and cigarettes, Angela Lansbury could be giving us a preview of Jessica in one of her (regrettably few) 80-minute episodes, which allowed the scriptwriters so much more leeway than the standard 40-minute versions.
As with MSW, the other players are remarkably unremarkable, looking as though they're on loan from summer stock, except Laurence Olivier, on his last legs, but still showing signs of his once-tremendous calibre. He's playing an ex-lover of the Jessica character (Ann), arriving for her birthday-party, also attended by her daughter and son-in-law, who are taking a rather unsavoury interest in the contents of her will.
Ann enjoys pointing out the original Picassos and Matisses on the wall, claiming that these were portraits of herself ("I think Pablo got me spot-on, don't you?"), and firing-off instructions to her longsuffering Indian servant, who keeps delivering pearls of wisdom from the sub-continent, "In Ranjapur, we have a saying...", but is also a convicted burglar, whom Ann is hiding from the law. Madly bohemian, as they say.
We can't reveal much more, except that the plot of Ann's latest book manages to get intermingled with the current real-life events. Equipped with a lot of hi-tech surveillance gear, she succeeds in organising an ingenious little bugging operation with the neatest device I can remember. And a smoke-alarm, triggered by a fag-end in a waste-paper basket, is a running joke that becomes only a little repetitive.
