Blackadder goes to the crossroads

Yesterday evening, for the first time in my case for many months, I watched a bit of ITV1, that is to say the first half of Rowan Atkinson doing Maigret in a version of  'La Nuit du Carrefour', a story I read in the summer of last year. See references 1 and 2 for some vocabulary references.

Rowan Atkinson does well enough in a wooden sort of way - having told his usually mobile face to calm down - but the rest of the story has been heavily sexed up for the audiences of today - with much of the detail and incident in the first hour having been bolted on to the story as written by Simenon back in 1930 or so. Perhaps he is out of copyright and his literary executors no longer have any control over what is done in his name.

Including the anachronism of a Jewish diamond dealer from Antwerp having a concentration camp tattoo on his lower forearm.

What we saw had been well enough made with lots of period detail - a proper costume drama with 1930 being near enough to 1950 from where we are now - but it all seemed terribly busy. Rather tiring for the older brain. The Gambon version from 25 years ago suits me rather better - with the added advantage of having had the advertising breaks stripped out.

PS 1: as it happens, I have only just finished reading the book of the second episode of the series, 'Maigret et son Mort', screened last year. I think I vaguely knew about the series but did not, at that time, get around to it. No doubt DVDs will turn up cheap in a year or so - assuming that Netflix and its likes have not driven DVDs out of the market. A service to which we have yet to subscribe.

PS 2: reference 2 seems to have fallen down the crack between the end of June and the beginning of July 2016. It exists and can be found by search, but is not to be seen in the tree structured listings on the right hand side of the display window, with the result that I had to guess its file name. In this case easy enough, but guessing does not always work. A rare failing in the blogger software.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/transhumance.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/gut-rot.html.