john_amend_all

Miss Marple goes to stay at a London hotel she remembers from her youth. At first she is delighted that nothing there seems to have changed in decades, but she quickly comes to realise that a great deal of effort is being put into this illusion of changelessness. Something is being concealed: what, and why?

At Bertram's Hotel can't have been an easy book to adapt. There are two more or less separate plots: Miss Marple stays at the hotel and finds herself observing the complicated family life of Bess Sedgwick (a reference to Bess of Hardwick?) and her estranged daughter Elvira; while, at the same time, Chief Inspector Davy is investigating a crime syndicate with a penchant for disguising its members as respectable judges, admirals, archdeacons and so forth. It's not until over halfway through that the two investigations start to overlap, and the only murder in the story takes place even later.

The adaptation, like the other episodes so far, is set in the Fifties, almost certainly in 1955 or soon after. There's a little poke at the then-new ITV, when Elvira says she can't wait to watch it: "I hear it's ghastly."

On the other hand, the original book is set in Sixties London: To be precise, November 1964. The contemporary Doctor Who serial would have been The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Or, in-universe, Miss Marple might easily, on one of her walks in London, have encountered Polly.

Having decided on the mid-Fifties setting, the BBC then took considerable trouble to do an elaborate recreation of the period, with armies of costumed extras, lavishly decorated sets, and careful camera angles. They also had to make the distinction between Bertram's Hotel itself and its surroundings. To the characters, it's clear that the Hotel looks 40-odd years behind the times while Heathrow Airport and the Lyons tea house are bang up to date. To a viewer in 1987 (let alone 2011!) the distinction is not, perhaps, quite so obvious. I daresay after a few decades the hotel in The God Complex won't have quite the same feeling of temporal dissonance, either.

You don't know what's going to be in your room until you see it... and then you realise it could never have been anything else.

I was going to say that I didn't recognise any Doctor Who actors in this one. Then I put on my Full Circle DVD, and lo and behold, there's George Baker as Decider Login (a name which these days it's impossible to read without getting completely the wrong idea about how it's pronounced). Here, he plays Chief Inspector Davy, whose placid appearance and rustic accent conceal one of the more intelligent detectives in the series. IMDB also tells me that Preston Lockwood (Canon Pennyfeather) was in Snakedance, which I haven't seen. In the book, the Chief Inspector only shows up at the Hotel half-way through; here, he's already on the scene.

Though maybe he's just there for the muffins.

By now, the production team seem to have got a good handle on the pacing, managing to fit the book into two episodes without doing major violence to the plot or adding undue padding. Miss Marple bypasses one chapter by calling the Canon's housekeeper and telling her to report his disappearance, and some of Inspector Davy's independent investigations (which turn out to have no particular bearing on subsequent events) are pruned.

As in the original book, the revelation of the mastermind behind the conspiracy centred on the hotel is revealed in the last act, with no particular foreshadowing, and the Chief Inspector doesn't produce any evidence to support his statements. While the person in question has an obvious motive for the serial's one and only murder, there isn't really any evidence shown that connects them with the train-robbery side of the plot. I ended up assuming that this had been ferreted out by the Chief Inspector 'behind the scenes', since Miss Marple doesn't seem to be involved with that part.

One favourite moment: After an episode and a half of sedate drama, Miss Marple is calmly and quietly explaining why she is suspicious of one character: he reminds her of a philandering insurance salesman she once knew. "... In the case of Basil Twisk, there was a death." GUNSHOT. GUNSHOT. SCREAM.

This being a two-parter, there is a single cliffhanger. The elderly Canon Pennyfather returns to his hotel room, only to be confronted by an intruder, who advances on him, a table lamp in his (inevitably) black-gloved hand...

I say... what are you doing with that heavy table lamp?

Again, as with 'Sleeping Murder', there's more music than in the original batch. It includes a playful moment where, when Chief Inspector Davy is singing to himself (much to the annoyance of his subordinate), the incidental music joins in with the chorus. There's also one point where the music lies to us: at the beginning of the second episode, it insists that the maid tidying the Canon's bedroom is going to find something nasty, probably in the wardrobe. She doesn't.

I couldn't resist trying to spot modern buildings creeping into the corners of shots, but I didn't notice any. There were a couple of slip-ups, though. One's a trainspotter nitpick: the pattern on the seating in Miss Marple's railway carriage looks too recent to me. It's a blue/green check that only appeared in the mid-1960s.

Which would have been fine in the Sixties setting of the book, of course.

The other one makes Bess look like a graduate of the Dalek School of Surveillance. When Miss Marple overhears her conversation with the doorman, she's supposed to be concealed from view in a high-backed chair. The chair shown is neither high nor wide enough to do this.