Pocket Full of Rye

[thisbluespirit]

I love hunting for books and videos in charity shops.  You never know what you might find.  Yesterday I found a very old (1985) Miss Marple with Peter Davison in it for 99p.  What could I do?

Spoilers (if you can call it that after 23 years and however long since the book was written)

Apart from being slightly stiff and slow production-wise (Doctor Who of the same period is so fast-moving and fresh in comparison to some of the other dramas from those times.  I have watched several old classics and it really is true.  Fans, stop with the 80s bashing.  Well, at least until after you've watched Miss Marple).

Anyway, I was a little nervous because I did remember that the murderer in A Pocketful of Rye was the charming, younger son.  Which had to be Peter, surely.  And I hate watching actors who played the Doctor play unpleasant roles.  I know.  I am truly sad, but there you go.  Still had to watch...

It was good fun, although it ought to come with a warning for the death scene at the end.  After an hour and a half of slow-moving, never showing anything much, we get a graphic view of the murderer's dead body.  Which is Peter, in case I haven't made that clear enough.  Eek.  (See, I said there'd be spoilers).   Or maybe it wasn't that bad - it was hard to tell from behind my hands. 

Like I said, you never know what you'll find in a charity shop.  It also had Rachel Bell (Priscilla P) and Annette Badland in (wasn't she Margaret Slitheen?).  But then you can't watch anything on British TV without spotting people who've appeared in Doctor Who, especially old things.  It's part of the fun.  Tom Wilkinson was almost Brigadier-ish (with a fake moustache?  I'm no judge of these things) as the inspector and it made a nice change to the recent let's-change-the-whole-plot take on things by current Marple and Poirot. 

Plus, I've had a long-standing fear of the BBC Miss Marple after watching some of it as a child, so I've tried to lay that ghost.  It's not Joan Hickson, really, only the music and the feeling that a frail old lady couldn't stop the murderer.  (I think I saw bits of A Caribbean Murder and Sleeping Murder - slow poisoning and people getting bumped off with Miss Marple unable to prevent it.  And she sprayed something in someone's eyes.  I'd rather have faced a Dalek.)

Anyway, since this is technically me being on holiday(ish) and the weather's so miserable, it was fun to have something new to watch.  With Peter Davison, fresh out of Doctor Who.  Even if he was a charming, no good murderer who got his comeuppance.

Comments

[john_amend_all]

I'll second the idea that Sleeping Murder was behind-the-sofa territory. Just the opening, with Gwenda being terrified out of her wits by perfectly innocent things like wallpaper, was bad enough.

My younger self found Nemesis the next most frightening after that, particularly in the episodic version. There's one cliffhanger, involving Shakespeare...

[thisbluespirit]

That was enough for me. I never watched any more. Just as well. I'd never have been able to read Agatha Christie! Oddly, bits of Poirot I saw never scared me like this. (Take this one - fine, now, but some of the shots of Miss Marple in the gloom? And the last death scene... I'd have been traumatised. Heh. Not that I had the sense to watch Doctor Who back then, but my parents would keep watching All Creatures, which I thought was only fun when Tristan was in it. I wonder how dull that really was? Going by Miss Marple, possibly terminally dull...)

Glad to hear it's not just me! People have laughed at me for having an unreasoning fear of Miss Marple.