"The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries" Death at the Opera (2000)

User Rating:

6.1/10   

Director:

James Hawes

Writers:

Gladys Mitchell (novel) and
Simon Booker (writer)

TV Series:

"The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries" (2000)

Original Air Date:

16 January 2000 (Season 1, Episode 1)

Genre:

Thriller | Mystery

Plot:

Visiting her alma mater, Hadleigh Heights, to give an address, Mrs. Bradley finds herself investigating the death of Miss Ferris...

Cast

Annabelle Apsion	...	Mona Bunting
Roy Barraclough	...	Mr. Simms
Elaine Claxton	...	Miss Ferris
Peter Davison	...	Inspector Henry Christmas
Monique De Villiers	...	Clementine Dingwall Main
Neil Dudgeon	...	George Moody
Amy Marston	...	Agnes Delamere
Carli Norris	...	Prunella 'Plum' Fisher
Ken Oxtoby	...	Mr. Jenner
Diana Rigg	...	Mrs. Adela Bradley
David Tennant	...	Max Valentine
Susan Wooldridge	...	Mrs. Simms

Trivia:

Peter Davison (Inspector Henry Christmas) and David Tennant (Max Valentine) are both well known for playing the Doctor in "Doctor Who". Davison played the Fifth Doctor in "Doctor Who" (1963) from 1981 to 1984 while Tennant has played the Tenth Doctor in "Doctor Who" (2005) since June 2005.

Disaster

The great hole of TeeVee programming. What a curse. What a curse.

It has to be filled. It used to be -- in the old days -- that public TeeVee would show nothing rather than try to attract the masses. Then one thing and another, mostly Washington politics, and they end up in this deal with the BBC, cofunding mystery series following the old Warner Brothers model. I mean this quite literally. In the 1960s, Warner Brothers TeeVee produced a family of westerns that has been copied in detail so far as the manner of stamping out copies, varying only a few things.

You have to have the old "faces and places" values. The music and wardrobe in this one is accurate, more or less. In spite of how the source books were written you need comedy and endearing characters. And TeeVee audiences are lazy. So they don't want to follow clues and actually try to solve the mystery.

They just want to be surprised at the end, the more preposterous, the better.

Rigg has aged very badly in terms of her appearance, but her voice is still magnificent.

This first episode, and the one after, at least had some artistic ambitions: it is a play that starts with a play during which the first murder occurs. To embellish the fold, our detective speaks directly to the audience from time to time, overlapping her role as announcer for similar entries in the game.

Everything about this is dreadful though, and I think the producers knew after this one that the series would be killed.

The most annoying thing about these TeeVee shows is the very strict rules on blocking and framing. You only are allowed three shots: close (always precisely the same distance), three quarter bodies (all group shots are this way) and the long shot where all the physical action takes place. All scrunched for the narrow screen so the thing always looks staged.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.