Murder She Wrote: Sing a Song of Murder

Recently I asked Mike Doran on a comment on this blog whether Angela Lansbury sounds British or American to American ears. He rightly mentioned various accents, but then said that most Americans have long forgotten that she isn't American born and bred, which answered the question which was actually in my head. Of course it is in the nature of the thespian to conjure something which isn't there, into the minds of the audience. That said, it's always difficult to reproduce something you haven't seen. At the weekend my God mother and I were in a National Trust property and the guide was making the point that the bizarre colours on much old china are simply explained by the fact that the artist had either never seen what he was supposed to represent, or else he had only seen a monochrome picture.is
These ramblings on accent and the difficulty of reproducing something you haven't seen are actually by way of an introduction to this episode of Murder She Wrote, in fact the original conversation was partly prompted by my wondering why the other characters kept referring to a British character in another episode of Murder She Wrote, since I couldn't spot one. It turned out one of the actors was talking in his best British accent which I had missed completely!
Anyway, let's get the actual show out of the way first. I have started watching Murder She Wrote for the first time since I saw episodes on TV as a child. I like this show enormously. There is a sense in which it stays safely with the Golden Age canon of detective fiction, firmly and without breaking any of the rules. If you want to watch Murder She Wrote as a strict detective puzzle, you can, and you won't find new information hastily introduced or anything like that. The series is a remarkable translation of the inter-war cosy murder story to the TV screen.
One of the things which the cosy murder mystery was famous for was that it would set the murder in an apparently safe community - such as Miss Marple's village - and turn the social conventions on their head by having a murder in the vicarage, or wherever. On the whole, the earlier series of Murder She Wrote stick to this formula with Jessica Fletcher investigating things in Cabot Cove. Even when it strays further afield a traditional cosy setting is created.
And that is where this episode starts to go horribly off the rails. Let's start with the slight problem that Angela Lansbury is playing two characters, one of them a flamboyantly outrageous theatrical. Probably in any other genre of TV you can camp this up and make it work, but in a detective story my own feeling is that if you get two characters who are obviously the same person it sets up the expectation that one of them will be the murderer, or they're in cahoots, or something along those lines. Obviously it couldn't possibly be Jessica Fletcher, so it sets up the expectation that her cousin will be the baddie, a very bad mistake in a murder mystery.
Which brings me nicely to the question of expectations and unreality. This Murder She Wrote achieved the big draw of having Patrick Macnee on the payroll. I genuinely don't want to bitch about the show but I can only guess that his finances weren't looking too good at this point in his life, forcing him to take this role. It's wrong, wrong, wrong. Macnee's quality of course makes up for the fact that he is cast wildly out of character, and in fact he makes a convincing job of his character. It's the character that's not right.
Which brings me nicely to the accents and here my reason for thinking about reproducing something you've never seen, will become apparent. The difficulty is this: just as Mike Doran commented about different American accents, obviously we have a number of different accents as well, with connotations of both place of origin and class. I'm afraid whoever has devised the accents here has picked up on stereotypes of Northern people and working class people from films of the past. Suffice to say that to native ears *none* of the accents sounds real, not even coming from British actors - they all sound as if they are caricaturing people. At this pont we have actors pretending to speak with accents which are themselves based on caricatures from the cinema! They would have been better hiring British jobbing actors and just getting them to speak normally - surely much simpler.
I realise I have omitted to mention that while it is difficult to reproduce something you've never seen, it is also rather difficult when you are the subject of what is being reproduced, because it forces you to see how others see you, and that is always a painful experience! Most of this episode is set on location in London, but it is very much a London created by someone who had never been there and I love the way it shows how its creator saw it. So many things are subtly wrong - you can see the big landmarks from everywhere (giving the impression that London is a tiny village). I love the scene in Scotland Yard, where a very obviously American telephone sound is heard. That said I think the best bit is the street scene which illustrates this post - that is just not in the British Isles. That sort of light is the sort of light you leave Britain to find! And *three* Minis in such close proximity? Once again it is like a caricature.
I feel rather bad at this point because I feel as if I'm really having a go at this show. The fact that it is appearing here at all of course indicates that I don't think it is a dead loss, and it is precisely the fact that it is like a moving caricature and so bad that makes me like this show. Yes it's a complete fake, the accents are just all wrong, the scenery is hilarious, several big name actors have demeaned themselves by appearing in it, and it even manages to break a cardinal rule of detective fiction, but these things are the reason it's good. My advice for watching this show is treat it as if it's a comedy. Seriously. This Murder She Wrote is so bad it passes all the way over into being good, if you watch it with a view to a laugh. It's difficult to find real comedy this ridiculous, so it should be enjoyed when you find it.