Campion on film

First off - Brookshire's is a very nice grocery store. Not that farther for me to get to than the Sherman Kroger's. And their produce section is very nice - they are the FIRST place I had seen "small servings" (broken down partial heads) of cauliflower on sale fresh. No, I didn't buy any as I had an almost-full head in the fridge, but I can keep that in mind for the future.

And their beef is fantastic. I sprang for a couple of the "Brookshire's Best" (they actually sell different grades of meat - this is a novelty to me ) rib steaks and cooked one up Friday night. It was the best I'd had in a long, long time. They weren't cheap, but when you buy meat only infrequently it's probably worth buying the best if you can afford it.

I also have short ribs for early this coming week - they had some of the nicest looking short ribs I've seen in a while, so I'm going to do my old favorite oven-barbecued version of them, probably Tuesday evening.

They also carry the "Food Club" brand, which I remember from ages ago - that was the same "house" brand the Acme stores, back in Ohio, carried - oh, I'm sure the two chains aren't affiliated and that "Food Club" is just a distributor, but it kind of made me happy to see that name again.

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I realized after finishing reading "Flowers for the Judge," that I had the BBC production of it on dvd (a long time back, I earned a sizable Amazon gift certificate for some textbook reviewing, and I spent it on the Campion boxed sets. Both "whole" seasons (four stories each - you gotta love British television as it compares to US television)

One thing I will note, the Campion stories are probably a bit better on the page than filmed. The BBC adaptations are very faithful, which means the boring bits (that don't seem so boring when you read them) are left in - the first episode (I guess each story is as two episodes, so a "season" really is eight episodes) seemed mainly to be the inquest hearing, which doesn't make for great drama. (The second episode moved along much more smartly).

Part of it was that I wanted to see how Ritchie was portrayed. In the novel he is described as very awkward and he speaks extremely telegraphically, which led me to speculate if he could be somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum (though I think that was largely unknown in Allingham's day; I suspect a lot of people now who would be diagnosed with something like Asperger's or ADD or something would simply be described as "odd" or "simple").

In the BBC production, Ritchie still speaks with a certain economy of words, but he seems much more donnish than odd - in fact, I have had professors who did not seem that much different from Ritchie in speech and mannerisms. (Then again - mine is a profession known to attract the odd, the unworldly, and sometimes even those on the Asperger's spectrum).

There is also an event almost at the very end of the film, which I guess I blipped over in the book, which explains his precipitous departure and also makes him not the innocent that I had thought him to be - but I won't be any more spoilerish than that.

Miss Curley is much more of a battle-axe in the BBC production than I had imagined her to be in the novel. And Rigget is more slimy and weaselish than simply abject - it seems like he is talking about how evil he is as a way of getting out of trouble, rather than some kind of perverse joy in believing himself debased (which is the sense I got from the novel).

There are a couple minor changes in what was otherwise a very faithful (perhaps too faithful, in some places) retelling of the story - first, the "Frame" that Campion is sent on (a sort of elaborate red herring) is much more perilous than the one that happens in the book (And Lugg goes along, to mutter "Frames is evidence" dourly several times, as he observes his employer in Mortal Peril).  Second, the whole "disappearing cousin" thing (another member of the publishing firm who had disappeared some 20 years before the setting of the story) was written out. (As is the scene with Campion finding a "spangled frill" in Ritchie's apartment). The circus scene denoument is much the same, but it is set in Ireland rather than the south of France - probably more economical (and more convincing) for the BBC to film it that way.

Much of the fun of these stories, like most detective stories, are the recurring characters - here, it is Campion (played by Peter Davison) and Lugg, his manservant (played by Bryan Glover). Lugg is a "retired" (if not entirely reformed) criminal (mostly petty theft, if I remember correctly). And Campion, as I've mentioned before, in the context of the books he is someone operating under an alias, but is apparently somehow connected with, if not the Royal Family, certainly one of the uppermost aristocratic ones. (In the more-real world, he's kind of a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey). The stories are definitely more fanciful than some of the  other Golden Age mysteries (Campion seems to get beat up a lot without sustaining serious damage; there are the occasional moments of Deus ex Machina).

One of the things I like about many of the BBC productions is that the actors they use, to my eye, are more "ordinary" looking (as in: someone you would actually see on the street) than the very prettied-up sort of people you often see in Hollywood productions. (Scanning the biographies of the actors, I also note a number of the actors in this production did bits in the older series of Dr. Who. I wonder if their appearance was partly an effect of a former association with the "Fifth Doctor" - that is, Davison). Actually, a lot of the slightly older (this was filmed in 1989, so it's not terribly old, but it's also not very recent) BBC productions are a bit less polished than what Americans might be used to - and I kind of like that.

There's also lots of knitwear, as you might expect in a story set in 1930s Britain - in particular, a very nice cabled slipover that Campion wears in several scenes, and we also see a Fair Isle sweater vest that I think was in some other episodes.

(Okay, I must admit - even though he's close to 20 years my senior, I've had a little "thing" about Peter Davison, starting with when I used to watch him on "All Creatures Great and Small." He is not, perhaps, quite as ludicrous as Campion as Campion perhaps should be (I don't think he does the "vacuous" look as well as it might be done), but it's still fun to watch)


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ETA: and in the Ponyverse, there are brief glimpses of a Pony that just might be the Fifth Doctor (blue stallion with blond mane in a cut not unlike the haircut Davison had in that role). And so of course I have contemplated a Ponified Campion - his "flank insignia" (that is less twee than "cutie mark" and less crude than "butt symbol") would be a woodbine flower (That is, after all, a campion - and part of the source of his pseudonym). Not sure what Lugg in Pony form would have...seeing as he is a reformed burglar....I wonder, can cutie marks change? Is there some kind of underground tattooing movement for Ponies who don't like the destiny that, well, Destiny has dealt them? (Or perhaps Lugg's would be a polished tea-set, or something fitting his *real* role as a gentlepony's gentlepony, and he just THOUGHT, in his wasted youth, that it meant he was to "boost" those items.... Then again, there seems to be no crime in Ponyville, so I don't know.)

I also have to admit a moment of distraction in church this morning; the reading was from I Corinthians 1 about how foolishness was chosen to shame the wisdom of the world, and how weakness was chosen to shame the strength in the world....and I admit my mind briefly blipped to  Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy. But I brought myself back and concentrated after that. (But it is funny how I can keep seeing the long-term virtues of my culture showing up in those pastel cartoon ponies....)