Detectives, silly accents and how Marr murdered Poirot!
ANDReW MARR is used to guests looking daggers at him. As he eviscerates another politician with lethally polite questions on Sunday mornings, no doubt some have wanted to kill him.
But it must be a first for an interviewee to confess: ‘As we sit here, I’ve been wondering why I might want to murder you.’
Marr laughed nervously, but his nemesis, novelist Anthony Horowitz, didn’t crack a smile as he spoke hypothetically about the motives for murder in fiction.
Horowitz knows about murder. As well as writing the latest Sherlock Holmes stories, he created wartime sleuth Superintendent Foyle.
And he certainly had a clear idea, on Sleuths, Spies & Sorcerers: Andrew Marr’s Paperback Heroes (BBC4), of why he would want to bump off a leading political commentator.
Perhaps, he mused, the presenter had uncovered something incriminating during his research, and needed to be silenced. Perhaps, with Marr out of the way, Horowitz would have a chance of his own Sunday telly slot. or perhaps he was planning to run off with Mrs Marr.
Beads of perspiration began to form on the upper slopes of Andrew’s shiny head. This wasn’t quite how he expected the fireside chat to go.
But Horowitz omitted to mention the most compelling reason for shooting, bludgeoning or otherwise disposing of the sweaty host — as retribution for repeatedly doing dodgy accents. To be fair, Marr’s cultured burr wasn’t too bad, as he imagined how Arthur Conan Doyle would speak. Both were born in Scotland, after all. And while Andy’s comedy Highlands accent was cheesy, it was not exactly criminal.
His imitation of Hercule Poirot was appalling, however. He sounded like Inspector Clouseau after a night on the Napoleon brandy. even worse was the Transatlantic voice he did for english crime-writer Raymond Chandler, creator of Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe.
But nothing was sillier than his attempt at a hard-boiled American style, in homage to Dashiell Hammett’s tough Thirties investigator known as the Continental op. Marr did a farcical redneck accent, as if he were over-acting in The Dukes of Hazzard.
This would have been a failure if he’d been reading a bedtime story to a four-year-old. As part of a serious attempt to analysis the appeal of detective stories, it was just woeful.
That was a shame, because someone — probably director/producer Sebastian Barfield — had put a lot of thought and effort in. The first half was apparently set in a country house, the kind where there’s a body in the library by breakfast.
A smirking butler hovered silently at Marr’s elbow in every shot, while a housemaid glared sulkily, and guests muttered ‘Rhubarb’ in the background as they doused their whiskies in soda. upstairs, a corpse was sprawled across a four-poster bed.
The research was good: Marr talked knowledgeably about John Dickson Carr’s archetypal detective Dr Gideon Fell, and he knew how to pronounce Dame Ngaio Marsh (it’s ‘Nyoh’). But if the script really called for so many accents, they should have got Rory Bremner.
A very different take on crime was supplied by SAS: Who Dares Wins (C4). At first glance this was a formulaic, macho game show, with 25 recruits attempting to survive nine days in the rainforest of equador while former special forces instructors forced them to crawl for miles through mud. But the show took a unique turn as it was revealed some of the amateur squaddies were former convicts, trying to turn their lives around.
Military-style interrogations, which began with the victim blindfolded, took a ruthlessly direct route to uncover their past.
one man was a former drug dealer who was made to admit he didn’t know how many lives he had helped to wreck. Another had grown up an orphan in West Africa, and became a bank robber after moving to Britain.
There was no doubting how tough this exercise was, nor how it challenged the men to do something they could be proud of. This was a short, sharp shock that meant something.