Death at the Opera

Mrs Bradley returns to the her Finishing School to attend a performance of The Mikado, midway through the performance is stopped as one of the performers, deputy head hopeful Miss Ferris is found dead,but was it natural causes or murder?

As with the previous episode it is visually delightful, exquisite costumes, coupled with strong production values make it a great watch. Rigg is superb once again, admittedly she's not the character in the novels, but her interpretation is excellent nonetheless. Some nice humour, Rigg and Dudgeon seemingly enjoyed working together.

It's a good story, not my favourite, but it looks into a subject that for the time was taboo. Good performances from David Tennant and Annabelle Apsion, Roy Barowclough is hilarious.

Lightly entertaining.

The great hole of TeeVee programming. What a curse. What a curse.

It has to be filled. It used to be -- in the old days -- that public TeeVee would show nothing rather than try to attract the masses. Then one thing and another, mostly Washington politics, and they end up in this deal with the BBC, cofunding mystery series that followed the old Warner Brothers model. I mean this quite literally. In the 1960s, Warner Brothers TeeVee produced a family of westerns that has been copied in detail so far as the manner of stamping out copies, varying only a few things.

In this case, the patter means you have to have the old "faces and places" values. The music and wardrobe in this one is accurate, more or less. In spite of how the source books were written you need comedy and endearing characters. And TeeVee audiences are lazy. So they don't want to follow clues and actually try to solve the mystery.

They just want to be surprised at the end, the more preposterous, the better.

Rigg has aged very badly in terms of her appearance, but her voice is still magnificent.

This first episode, and the one after, at least had some artistic ambitions: it is a play that starts with a play during which the first murder occurs. To embellish the fold, our detective speaks directly to the audience from time to time, overlapping her role as announcer for similar entries in the game.

Everything about this is dreadful though, and I think the producers knew after this one that the series would be killed.

The most annoying thing about these TeeVee shows is the very strict rules on blocking and framing. You only are allowed three shots: close (always precisely the same distance), three quarter bodies (all group shots are this way) and the long shot where all the physical action takes place. All scrunched for the narrow screen so the thing always looks staged.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

The title is odd, since there is no murder or anything else taking place at the opera. In fact, this being a star vehicle for Diana Rigg, the murder mystery is irrelevant. Rigg plays Mrs. Bradley, a celebrity private eye, who does her detecting in opulent 1920s settings. She's a wealthy widow with a chauffeur-driven Rolls who wears a different stunning costume and hat in every scene. Also odd, the 61-year-old Rigg is wearing a hairstyle that Louise Brooks wore when she was 22, but according to Rigg, this dark bob was necessary to provide the proper background for the hats and bejeweled headbands.

Another oddity is her youngish chauffeur, whose role is ambiguous. Unlike Dr. Watson, George is an employee, not a friend or colleague and his role serves no purpose other than to be the means by which Mrs. B imparts information to the viewer. Also, the hints that his relationship with the stylish but elderly Mrs. B is romantic is slightly repellent.

Rigg is an actress I like, a lot, but as Mrs. B, her smug faces and rolling of eyes and little winks to the audience fail to have the effect the script writers intended, which supposedly was to endear her to us by having her snicker up her fox furs at bourgeois respectability. Her liberal attitudes - not especially unusual in the early 20th century among the upper class, according to biographies of Idina Sackville etal - are today the common attitudes of the middle and lower classes and the cultivated raciness of Mrs. B in the 1920s is no longer daring or eccentric.

Only 4 episodes in this series were filmed, indicating a lack of interest on the part of the BBC audience. Unfortunately for Mrs. B, in order to interest today's audience she would have to take off her clothes and crawl under the bed covers with George. Wonder why the producers didn't think of this.

Diana Rigg proves she's still got it in these wonderful and atmospheric mysteries. Her Adela Bradley is an eccentric woman of strength and character, an accomplished author and expert on psychoanalysis and criminology during a time when women of her class were content to sit around and look pretty. After divorcing her "boring" husband, she travels about with her trusty driver and indulges her interests and curiosities, prying into the darker side of human nature. Rigg is wonderful in the role; few women could pull off that severe bob and yet still look so inviting. It's hard to imagine a better actress for the part.

In this episode, she investigates a murder at the posh finishing school she herself attended decades before. Someone, it seems, has killed the art teacher during a performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan play. Adela sets out to solve the case, but more murders follow and there's a subplot involving jewel theft and illicit love. A cast of colourful characters (look for David Tennant) and absolutely beautiful 30's-era set design and automobiles makes this a treat on every level. It's too bad this series didn't last. It fits right in there with the much more successful Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries.