sovay: (I Claudius)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2011-10-08 10:45 am

It depends whose side you're on, doesn't it?

I had no idea George Baker was known for a series of television mysteries. I always thought of him as Tiberius or the New Number Two. Ave atque vale.

I am spending most of today with my grandfather. Tonight after break-fast, for my erev birthday, my family is taking me to Twelfth Night.

[identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com 2011-10-08 04:43 pm (UTC)(link)
They filmed the Ruth Rendell mysteries in my home town. Inspector Wexford's house had been the doctor's surgery when I was very little, and for a few years my father (who spent his sixties and seventies as a masseur and healer) was rubbing George Baker's oiled back on a regular basis. I do not believe, though, that he ever used a strigil.

[identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com 2011-10-09 05:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Did you ever watch them?

I did, though not in a must-see way. Read a couple too, and enjoyed them, but I've preferred the books she writes as Barbara Vine.

As is so often the case, the interest lay largely in the relationship between the two main detectives. Wexford and the prissy Inspector Burden weren't as magnetic a combo (at least on television) as Dalziel and Pascoe or Taggart and Jardine, though their relationship more on those lines than that of Morse and Lewis. Wexford was earthier than his assistant in other words, but earthy as in rich soil freshly turned by the plough, rather than earthy as in farting in the police van or head-butting the chief suspect.