I saw some episodes when they were originally broadcast and vaguely remembered them being disappointing but times are hard these days in the search for mystery drama that I haven't seen a dozen times before so I thought I would revisit this one on the grounds that, whatever my memory, anything with Patricia Hodge can't be totally bad.
Miss Hodge is indeed a delight, as ever; not just for looking and sounding heavenly (even when wearing some of the more frightful 80s fashions - it's the frills and ruffs I can't stand) but because she does have true star acting ability that commands attention without any apparent effort.
But that is it on the plus side.
To say the plots are weak is over generous; simplistic, trite, and sometimes barely a plot is more like it. There is an almost total lack of momentum to the stories and an overall feel of watching a school play written and directed by 11-year-olds but acted by an embarrassed and bored staff.
The patently minuscule budget doesn't help but many a low budget project has produced much better than this.
I suspect the root cause is that Antonia Fraser is a lousy writer but so well connected that nobody dared do a radical adaptation of the books to turn them into something decent.
