Frances de la Tour still sparkles like a diamond, 50 years after Rising Damp
Why does Frances de la Tour not have a damehood? It can’t be that she was a Leftie firebrand in her youth — waving the red flag for the Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
So was Dame Vanessa Redgrave, and that didn’t stop her collecting her gong from the palace. In fact, swathes of theatreland were members of the WRP in the 1970s. It was practically obligatory.
Perhaps Miss DLT prefers to turn down honours. But that can’t prevent her from being anointed a bona fide national treasure. She sparkles like a wellcut diamond in the setting of Professor T (ITV1), as the self-absorbed mother of Ben Miller’s prissy criminologist, Jasper Tempest.
She can turn a short scene into the centrepiece of the show, just as she did half a century ago in Rising Damp against Leonard Rossiter, that most formidable of comic actors.
As Professor T returned, she was painting a series of 12 portraits of her Chihuahua Kafka in costume, for a zodiac calendar — with a mane as Leo, with horns as Capricorn, and so on.
Later, in a brief vignette with Juliet Stevenson, she picked up a book by Czech novelist Franz Kafka and compared her pooch to the cover photo. ‘Same eyes, same ears,’ she declared. ‘Could almost make you believe in reincarnation.’ Miss Stevenson is a remarkable actress and experienced scene-stealer herself, but she knew better than to try and compete with that.
There’s plenty of room for showing off in Professor T because the central character is so understated. he’s fastidious, incisive, sarcastic, anxious, pedantic and insolent — but somehow much less than the sum of his parts.
The problem is that Miller plays him too well, as an introvert who detests attention. Before long, we want to look at anyone but him.
Walking or standing still, he keeps his hands clamped to his sides, avoiding eye contact. This quickly wore thin when he was helping police solve murders from his study at Cambridge University, so the writers have found a way to prise him out of his comfort zone — by sending him to prison.
his crime is a spurious one: firing a gun in a police station and refusing to explain himself (to avoid incriminating an ex-girlfriend, played by Juliet Aubrey).
But the effect is exactly what’s needed. Now, instead of hiding from the world, he’s forced to confront it.
The other cons intimidate and bully him — and that’s before they find out he’s a police adviser. Worse, he’s assigned to laundry duties and, with his phobia of germs, he has to handle the dirty clothes with makeshift tongs.
Prison is the perfect place for a man who makes his living studying criminals. Soon, he’s helping an inmate on a murder charge, and identifying the real killer during visiting hour.
The seesawing between detectives on the outside interviewing suspects, and the hero on the inside solving crimes, needs better balance. But a spell in the nick will do Professor T a power of good.