The Patience of Maigret

Maigret is rebooted on ITV. Forget the Singing Detective. Michael Gambon is the French Detective.

Granada threw money into this production just like the BBC had 30 years earlier.

There is more location shooting this time and these are two hour movies including advert breaks.

The first story is to establish just how dogged Maigret can be. There have been over 70 jewellery heists stretching back a number of years in Paris.

Maigret suspects reformed criminal Manuel Palmari who is now wheelchair bound. Palmari protests his innocence and Maigret has no proof. He thinks that Palmari gets criminal up from the south of France to carry out the thefts.

Later Palmari is found dead. It is murder and Maigret suspects that maybe his younger mistress Aline (Cheryl Campbell) is somehow involved.

Having seen the BBC repeats of Maigret from the early 1960s. I noted how some of the stories could not deal with the complexities of Georges Simenon's novels.

No issues here. This lavish production was adapted by Alan Plater. No stranger in taking money from television companies to adapt novels so he can do his own original stories such as The Beiderbecke Affair.

Just a shame that the pace was glacial. Maigret methodically interrogates all the suspects in the apartment block where the dead man lived. It turns out that Aline owns it.

By the end my patience was wearing thin.

This series regularly gets repeated on UK TV, the ITV3 or ITV4 channels. Only 12 done by Gambon, with 2 different Madame Maigrets, as the two sets of 6 were done a couple of years apart, the later set found the actress unavailable, which was a stroke of luck as they asked the delicious Barbara Flynn to become his wife, adding a cheeky irreverence to the usually subservient, if long-suffering wife.

I must correct the usually pretty accurate Prismark, whose review says "threw money into this production, just like the BBC had 30 years earlier" (the Rupert Davies version). This is palpable nonsense, as though the BBC ones were a cult hit back then, those shows were clearly done on the extreme cheap, shaky sets like Crossroads, and some actors (especially in the early ones) who could barely avoid bumping into the furniture!

This version was expertly done, Budapest subbing for Paris, a good set of actors for Maigret's team, and some good writers and directors. Prismark is also wrong, the shows were not all 2 hours long, this one WAS, but the rest came in at about an hour and 20 minutes, which is about right (longer than the the Davies ones, but nothing like as long as the Atkinson shows, which had lots of padding and dragged on for 2 hours!).