Peter Wimsey on the screen
Lately I’ve been working my way through the old TV adaptations of the Peter Wimsey mysteries, both the Ian Carmichael ones (most of the books that don’t have Harriet Vane, leaving out Whose Body? and Unnatural Death) and the Edward Petherbridge ones (most of the books that do have Harriet Vane, leaving out Busman’s Honeymoon).
The folklorist in me is generally fascinated to see adaptations and to compare different adaptations against one another. In this case the two sets of miniseries are working with different texts, but it’s still possible to compare them more broadly. Edward Petherbridge struck me as a touch too muted for how I imagine Peter’s dialogue and behavior, but he’s a vastly better physical match than Ian Carmichael. By contrast, I think Petherbridge’s Bunter (Richard Morant) seems far too young? He looks like he would have been about twelve in World War II, though Wikipedia tells me he was nearly forty at the time of filming. He also doesn’t quite manage Bunter’s self-effacing manner the way Glyn Houston does with Carmichael — and while I sort of like the character visibly having a mind of his own, it didn’t quite feel like Bunter to me.
(I do wonder if Petherbridge was incapable of horseback riding, or at least of bareback riding, since they gave that bit of Have His Carcase to Bunter instead of Peter. Or maybe they just wanted Bunter to have a chance to show off.)
There’s no doing comparisons on Harriet Vane, since she’s only in one set of the miniseries, but I liked her quite a bit. I would have liked to see those books get four episodes, though, the way the Carmichael ones generally did; three felt cramped, especially on Gaudy Night — not surprising, given that’s by far the longest of the novels. Mind you, I wonder what a modern adaptation could do with three episodes, since our approach to pacing is a good deal faster than it was in 1987. How much more of the story could you have fit in if not as much time was spent on a character coming into a room, setting down their things, walking across the room, etc?
I wasn’t watching these shows super closely; they were serving as background entertainment while I did things like sort papers for taxes, since I remember the plots well enough not to get lost if I wasn’t paying close attention. Between that and my less-than-perfect recall of said plots, though, I can’t say a great deal about the adaptations on that front — I welcome thoughts from those of you who have seen these! The only thing that truly jumped out at me as a flaw, because I had re-read that section not long before, was the very end of Gaudy Night. They shaved down Peter’s conversation with Harriet much too far, I think, transforming the culmination of their romance into merely “Harriet gets over her hangups.” Gone is Peter’s apology for his earlier behavior, where I can never help but wonder if it doubles as Sayers meta-textually exhibiting hindsight on her own authorial choices: it would not surprise me in the least if she wrote Strong Poison thinking she had a great setup, then got to Have His Carcase and realized she couldn’t steer them toward a HEA with the situation she’d created for them, then had to write Gaudy Night (in which Peter barely even appears) before she could untangle her own narrative knot. Maybe not; maybe she always planned for them to travel that long and thorny of a path. But Writer Brain can absolutely imagine her painting herself into a corner and then having to paint a way out. And if so, I don’t mind: it produced a much more interesting result than a more conventional romance — the latter being more what the adaptation gave us.
But like I said, thoughts welcomed from those of you who have watched any of these!
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