Case closed ... this cluesmith was the first Great Detective
Enter the Great Detective: Sergeant Cuff, the morose crimebuster whose genius for deduction set the template for an entire literary genre. He arrived at the scene in The Moonstone (BBC1) as the mystery really got going.
the first episode of this afternoon costume drama on Monday was a disappointing muddle, all false starts and laboured explanations. the first job of a dramatist is to cut through the tangle, and that didn’t happen: the plot threads resembled a bowl of spaghetti.
the original 1865 novel by Wilkie Collins is ludicrously complex — constructed from various diaries, letters and narratives supplied by key witnesses in the case of a stolen Indian diamond. When it was first filmed, in the thirties, Hollywood publicists billed it as ‘the greatest detective story ever written’. Maybe, but it is definitely one of the most convoluted.
the second episode, yesterday, was a big improvement. the appearance of Sergeant Cuff (John thomson, fresh from Cold Feet) put the facts in order and the clues in focus.
Cuff is one of those policemen who likes to list his observations and explain their significance to an admiring audience — which includes us, the viewers.
Cuff was gathering the suspects in the drawing room and laying out his theories when Hercule Poirot was still a Belgian schoolboy. He was also the first detective to be dragged out of retirement to solve an old case — a precedent that no CID officer or private eye has ever been able to escape. Old sleuths never die, they just make sequels.
In his prime, Cuff was able to solve a murder just by studying a spot of ink on a tablecloth. now he’s chafing to get back to his cottage and his roses. But he can’t, till he discovers what became of that diamond.
the bumbling authorities suspect three Indian travelling jugglers of stealing it, even though they have a watertight alibi. Cuff was the first to set the convention that the Great Detective must make fools of the uniformed coppers.
All these laws of fiction are still in force to this day — watch the retired French cluesmith Julien Baptiste in BBC1’s thriller the Missing tonight and you’ll realise that Wilkie Collins started so much that he deserves a mention in the credits.
not everything about the Moonstone has aged so well, though. the dialogue is rather flowery, with lashings of ‘mayhaps’ and ‘over yonders’ and ‘felicitations on your natal day’. And the heroine, rachel Verinder (terenia edwards), is given to fits of the vapours when faced with awkward questions — a dodge that has looked awkwardly affected for a century.
to make up for this, the photography is beautiful. the characters are constantly filmed with sunlit windows behind them, giving the production a grainy look that is dreamlike in quality. It’s worth catching an episode, just for this.
Another Great Detective, or at least a fair-to-middling one, supplied the voiceover for The Choir: Gareth’s Best In Britain (BBC2). Stephen tompkinson, who plays the eponymous DCI Banks, kept up the running commentary as amateur choral societies laid into pop standards like Only You and Somewhere Only We Know.
He was a strange choice, because these songs are staples of tV talent contests, and the bovine Inspector Banks has just one quirk — a passion for indie rock. You wouldn’t catch him dead watching X Factor or, for that matter, the Choir. that made his voice a distraction. Choirmaster Gareth Malone raced around northern Britain, from the Cairngorms to the Yorkshire Dales, and was feted with tea and cakes wherever he went.
the ladies of these groups certainly do adore his boyish style. ‘I can’t believe I cuddled him,’ gasped one Durham mum. ‘Oh my God, I actually touched him.’
that popularity protects him when he hands out criticism, though he usually does this by muting his praise rather than actually saying anything harsh. ‘Wow,’ he told one lot drily, ‘that’s a loud noise.’
For a man who loves music, he has a deplorable taste in songs. the winning choir were asked to perform a rather insipid Billy Joel number called She’s Always A Woman. What’s wrong with a hymn?