Once a person from the USA watches British mysteries, all other mysteries pale in comparison. The acting is superb and not cheesy like in America. Thank you!
I subscribe to Britbox and many of the productions are middling, basically nothing to get excited about. These shows are nearly 40 years ago and if you look at 1970's shows like Columbo in the US, you'll see that they compare favorably. DL Sayers is a masterful writer, so the material alone elevates it. What I will say in comparing many productions in the UK versus the US, is that the US is more oriented on the physicality of the actors vs the outstanding talent of the actors. I watched a UK production on King Charles ll, and the actress who played Barbara Villiers, his beautiful 19-year old mistress, was portrayed by a woman in her early 40's of not extraordinary beauty. Regardless of how talented an actor is, their appearance has to make sense in the role.
@@mtngrl5859 A lot of my British mystery watching has come from reading mystery books written by British authors before 1960. I just love the old stuff like Morse, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, etc. The acting and the books are superb!
one of my most favourite series! I am so happy to have found it! I think I have watched it 30 times and it is still heartwarming and entertaining! The old brit crimes will always stay the best!💗
I watched these shows with my old dad back in the 80's - we loved them - trying, unsuccessfully, to solve the riddles. Huge thank you for making them available - feel dad is a little closer in spirit.
MsDormy: It's lovely you can relive wonderful memories of your dad thanks to this series :-) I can imagine how you feel. My dad died almost a year ago. I'd like to feel he's close to me in spirit too.
Interesting someone just liked this old comment on the 7th year anniversary of my own father’s death. Things have improved but it’s still a heartache, every day. Great dads really are something. They bring so much joy to everyone. Lol I’m a mom, nothing against moms! But in my own life, just personally, I have a difficult mother, and my dad was the sweetest most loving person, so reliable, so there, always. So. Hug your loved ones y’all.
Thank you SO much for sharing all these marvellous episodes. What a gorgeous ‘30s experience. Walters and Petherbridge are brilliantly cast. DL sayers is by far my favourite Golden Age author, and of all her novels, I think ‘Gaudy Night’ is my desert island book. ‘Strong Poison’ was the first DLS I ever read, and it transported me to a new world of truly great writing and terrific plots. (It also made me fall in love with Peter Wimsey, forever!) These TV productions are such a pleasure; thank you again.
I have just discovered this series& it’s absolutely my cup of tea!!! I never even heard of Lord Peter Wimsey until many years ago watching an episode of “Frazier”! in which Niles dressed up as the character at a masquerade party!!😊
There are 4 books with Harriet, 4 if you include a collection of short stories. They only do the first 3 in this series. The 4th is Busman’s Honeymoon, and the short stories is The Tallboys. The 4th novel is very good. The pre Harriet stories are also enjoyable.
I saw this series years ago when it first appeared on our screens and am more than willing to watch it again. It is superb, brilliant in every way and the actors are tailor-made for their parts. Thank you for posting, a delightful treat on a rainy, cold November day.
First time watching and realizing what an interesting writer Sayers was. This particular series is so stunningly filmed and art directed. Each frame...brilliant, creating the mood...like so many British television mysteries of this (production) period. And it's dawning on me that Wimsey's characterization at least in these first 2 episodes, is jammed with Camp and double-entendre. A pleasure to watch.
@@patriciajrs46 'Camp' means verging on the homosexual, and Wimsey was anything but homosexual. In an earlier age he might have been dismissed as a fop, or a dandy, but this man is all male, as a male cat is all male.
I'm a sucker for an intelligently written detective story....the Wimsey tales are a tad unlikely, but they're certainly intelligently written...and the characters are far more fully investigated than those of, for example Christie...frankly I love them...and Harriet Vane is a particularly fascinating character...
I just realized - the cook also played "Nursie" in the Elizabethan chapters of "Black Adder"! And I believe that the " preacher" played the exterminator, Mr. Balstrode" on an episode of "The Good Life" (i.e. "Good Neighbors.") Oh, I do love playing " spot the actress\actor!"
Lord Peter was born in 1890, so 39 or so at the time. Bunter is slightly older and, as has been noted, served with Lord Peter during the War. His master clearly suffers from what we now call PTSD, like so many of his generation.
Watching it again it feels like only yesterday that I became slightly obsessed with these episodes when they were first shown on tv. I bought the books and read them to sate my thirst. The leads were very good in the parts and it brings back very happy memories.
Thanks for some happy memories. I am reading Sayer's books in order now and this is a very good TV version. The two leads are very well matched and authentic to me. Remember this story was written in the 1920's and take the medical knowledge of the time into account. We are wise after the events these days and you have to know a bit about the period to enjoy the books.
What a beautiful voice Sir Peter has. Is there nothing he cannot do? wow..singing a song a little different from our Wash in the Blood of the Lamb. and OH what a sermon afterwards. Love the interaction between Harriet and Sir Peter.. what would he do without Bunker? That man could butler for me oo yes.. he is nice to look at for sure.
@Lydia Malone: I know exactly what you mean. Only with me it's the other way about. I watched this series with Harriet Walter first, then I saw her only a few years ago as Honoria Bulstrode, headmistress of Meadowbank School, in Agatha Christie's 'Cat among the pigeons'. I simply didn't recognise her. She had aged a lot by then.
Aren't all those old cars superb! Gorgeous :-) But I can't help thinking that driving a car must have been very cold back in those days. They all seem to be open-top and there were no car heaters either ... :-(
No power steering either ... so "tough luck for women" ... because the only solution they had was giant steering wheels, which makes "large movements" necessary. But then again ... this gave a lot of people jobs as chauffeurs / taxi drivers.
Absolutely lovin' this trip down memory lane, and so forth.. But one simply must point out.. The chappie playin' Bunter, is none other than the chap who also played 'Flashman the bully' in 'Tom Brown's School Days'.. Oh my goodness, mi old ticker did jump slightly what.. Just gettin' used to a new Lord Peter, after havin' watched Ian Carmichael, but one's battlin' on don'tcha know.. What a crackin' way to pass an hour or two.. Top ho @clandestienfilm, jolly good show.. My very best wishes to you, from Wales..
That would have been really fab, though maybe hard to televise, as it’s so clearly a stage play at heart, underneath its being a novel. But just the start, with the Oxford wedding, Bunter’s musings, the duchess’s happy letters, Harriet in her cloth of gold costume, the arrival drama at Tallboys...oh, I can read that over and over again! I’d have loved to see it reproduced in this series, a rare enterprise that really does get the source material dead right.
@@hannamccarthyh Unfortunately a company in Hollywood bought the film rights and botched a very flawed version which was nothing like the book , preventing others from doing better.
So far so good, looking forward to Part II and Part III. Unlike too many of the BBC productions featuring the works of these older English writers and acted by English thespians, this one is easily followed as the annunciation is easier to follow, somehow.
@calihartley2010 "Negro!" hahahahaha! There were black people in Britain in those days, you know. Read Sayers' "Gaudy Night" you idiot. One of the characters refers to African students at Oxford. Do a little reading. . .or rather a LOT of reading.
They are the first steps of the current destruction of society though ... where feminism told women that the relationship between man and woman should be a COMPETITION instead of a SYMBIOSIS.
Mari Christian: so do I, they're absolutely great, such individualists and doing their own thing. But this was still the 1920s, before the great crash in USA and the subsequent Great Depression which affected the whole world. Unfortunately the 1930s were a boring, utterly bourgeois decade (like the 1950s), so Bohemianism had to take a back seat :-(
I just discovered, that I've been watching all those Lord Peter Wimsey series exactly the wrong way around...😂😅I fell somehow in "Gaudy Night", found it interesting, then I watched "Have his carcase" en only now I've started with "Strong Poison" which turned out to be the mystery where Lord Peter first sets eyes on Harriet Vane. In all the other episodes, I just thought the flashbacks that starts every episode, were kind off a long time ago, to give Harriet Vanes character a background. So silly to watch the moment they met after watching everything...I also thought this was the case when Peter keeps asking Harriet to marry him trough all the episodes. Sort of 'running gag'. But no! Coup de foudre! Love at first sight!!❤😮😂
First time viewer,just got through with first episode, looking forward to next one Love the show will watch more , I'm going to look for the audio's too
30:40... _Having warned him off the Megatherium before the band began to play..._ Such a great line that I think must refer back to the Titanic. Does anybody know? And did Sayres come up with it herself -- or was it part of the American / English idiom back then, the Titanic having sank 18 years earlier before the novel was published?
I know! I remember him from Tom Brown and Hijack! I know he was the doctor in Poldrack, but that was my mother's show, not mine. So, it was so weird seeing him as Bunter in the new Lord Peter show (that's what I called it back then as I was used to the 70s show with Ian Carmichael)
I have loved this series since it first aired. Have rewatched several times. Acting, costumes etc. all brilliant. It’s only just struck me what a hopeless typist Miss Murcheston was. I’m sure she wouldn’t have got the job. (Only joking) Once PC’s became prevalent in work I taught myself to touch type, so I find colleagues who only use two fingers to type slightly puzzling. Lovely acting though, and that’s what counts.
Who plays 'Blindfold Bill' (the pick-lock expert)? I'm sure I've seen that face and heard that voice somewhere! Very good series! If MI5 and MI6 were staffed by people as intelligent as Wimsey and Bunter we'd have no problems with terrorists, Vladimir Putin etc etc!
Putin isnt the problem ... its the communists who have infiltrated Britain over decades and are now running universities, bureaucracies, police and also the media. You seem to be believing the latter too much.
I am really enjoying this series. It did take awhile to get used to E.P. being used to Ian Carmichael, but like Doctor who the actors change but its still same character.
My mind picture of Bunter from the books is of an older, more mature man. Having a problem fitting such a young Bunter into the role of caretaker that the "real" Bunter was.
Dindin Private i absolutely love “the *real* Bunter!” I once described the elves of Rivendell (the books, not the movies) as the real elves when asked if I was talking about Keebler elves. “No, the real elves; the ones in Rivendell.”
Her " loose morals" basically. She was being judged by refusing to be made " an honest woman" after living in sin with what they considered to be a " good , honest, gentleman" more than because of any real prove of guilt. They needed to blame someone for the murder and she didn't have a strong moral code in their eyes, so she had to be guilty. In the first episode the judge states this very clearly, for people back in those days it was unthinkable that a woman was offered marriage by her lover and had the audacity to refuse him, very few other than Lord Peter, his Miss Climpson , Peter's mother and her close friends understand really why she refused him.
I wonder, do the stories ever mention Ms. Vane's chauffer? Perhaps it's not important, but one questions her occupation and means with which to afford the understated, yet fancy clothes, and a chauffeured fancy car. Her books may have sold well. She doesn't appear to be the sort to work. I do like these adaptations of Sayers' novels.
In the 3rd novel w/her she states that due to an uptick of interest in her books, mainly because of the trial, she was able to afford a small car of her own. She still lived in a small flat. Although doing better she did not seem to make the money that Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Oliver made. Although Mrs. Oliver was older and had been writing for many more years so had more royalties. As to working, also in the 3rd novel she said that she would scrub floors rather badly, but wrote detective stories rather well. And she did not see why proper feelings should prevent her from doing her proper job. It was said in the book Strong Poison that her publisher was paying for her defense.
Oh come on ... the first thing to criticize would be the manner in which she put the paper into the machine ... completely tilted. The full 10-finger-system might not be adopted yet, because those older typewriters require more strength to use than modern ones and thus require movement of the hand. Thus using only two fingers (or rather two hands) is reasonable.
Had to be tilted to fit in those old uprights. Also you are correct. Touch typing was only invented by a person in Utah in 1888 (Wikipaedia) may've taken a while to get to a typing agency in London.
It’s so obvious that she couldn’t be the killer based on the time line. Arsenic depending on the dosage can very in time it takes in affect, not to mention their are many other suspects. Why not get a poison expert to determine the dosage, estimated time of the affect. They never mention if he had been poisoned over time. Huge plot holes.
Cathy moment coming up, very important, everyone take note! The senior solicitor, I think is MR Pond, the the actor who plays the role 🤔 that his acting role always playing serious Solicitors, 🙄, now you can follow him from time to time
Believe it is a British hymn called “Sweeping through the Gates”…found this short video of the song being sung ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-q3NhhkfO18A.html
