A cracking Christie caper
APART from repeats of the enjoyable Death In Paradise, there’s a dearth of rollicking good yarns on TV. I suspect they aren’t much discussed in places like the BBC these days. Turn up with a moody Nordic thriller and you’ll be patted on the back. Offer them something tense, raw and dystopian, or sweeping and historic, and they’ll bite your hand off.
Tumbleweed, however, blows through the rollicking good yarns department, or so I’d begun to think until I caught
PARTNERS IN CRIME ( Sunday, BBC1).
Agatha Christie was a lady who well understood the value of light and shade so, alongside the beefier adventures of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, she did a roaring trade in the slightly dafter capers of Tommy and Tuppence.
Mr and Mrs Beresford, as they were more properly known, were a married pair whose nose for intrigue frequently led them into peril.
People who write essays about Mr and Mrs B speculate that the stolid Tommy and the quick- witted Tuppence represent two sides of the great author herself, since they aged with her ( unlike Marple and Poirot) and were the heroes of the last tale she ever wrote.
There might be some truth in that claim because, like Christie, the Beresfords refused to settle for the boredom and comfort of upper middleclass British life.
This latest TV adaptation ( 11 mysteries were very nicely knocked out in the Eighties) had Tommy and Tuppence fussing good- naturedly on a boat train from Paris as whistles blew, steam hissed, and the agitated lady opposite vanished.
She left behind only a book with her name, or at least someone’s name, inside the front cover. Jane Finn.
With their only son off at school, and Tommy preoccupied with his doomed beekeeping venture, Tuppence followed a train of clues in search of Ms Finn, plunging herself into a plot that was, by turns, both twee and chilling.
The tone is everything in tales of this sort. On its own the story, involving vanishing ladies, clandestine bookies and spy networks operating in the bombed- out wastes of post- war London, could easily have come from Graham Greene. Add a few dotty uncles, David Walliams doing his best genial oaf impression, and a wacky school science master as a third accomplice, and you get something as light as a Victoria sponge yet with a toothsome filling.
It might be too early to say whether the latest TV incarnation of Tommy and Tuppence truly rollicks. It certainly looks like a good yarn.
My mum and dad, who lived through the Second World War and the austere years after it, feel very little nostalgia for that time. It sometimes feels as if the TV is forcing us to feel longing for an era many would rather forget, although there are compensations. Cue DANCING THROUGH THE BLITZ: BLACKPOOL’S BIG BAND STORY
( Saturday, BBC2).
It contained a lot of the usual hogwash about wartime spirit and claimed troops found respite from the war on Lancashire beaches. That would have been hard because they were all covered with barbed wire, but the wider point, about Blackpool becoming a huge transit camp, held water.
The sheer numbers of restless men in the seaside resort led to a flourishing dance- hall scene and a wave of top Big Band artistes to meet the demand.
The sounds ( all original and recreated for a special concert in the Empress Ballroom, and explained by the splendid Jools Holland) took centre stage, which made it possible to overlook the rather weedy history.
It was less hard to forget that Len Goodman’s Big Band Bonanza, shown in December, had covered much the same ground.
A bit of BBC nostalgia is fine but BBC amnesia is more worrying.