Not quite pictures of perfection

I wrote yesterday about Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels, which just knock me out with their brilliance. I’ve also been watching the BBC series based on them—not for inspiration so much as just a different way of looking at police procedurals.

Generally speaking, Aunty Beeb does a good job with this sort of thing, and I’m giving this one mixed reviews. They stopped using Hill’s novels as the basis for the shows mid-way through the third season (although they do resurrect one of them in Season 7—one with that toe-rag Franny Roote, ugh), and the stories kind of go all over the place after that. That’s disappointing, but—I suppose—not entirely surprising. It’s a high standard to try to maintain year after year, when you could be doing “Son of Big Brother Does Dagenham” or some such.

A lot depends on the actors filling the main roles, of course. Again, the BBC got some of it right.

Warren Clarke is perfect as Dalziel (although I’ve read that Hill didn’t think he was fat enough; I wonder who would have qualified?). I have seen him in other things, and I’m always blown away by his ability to subsume himself in the part. (He was right creepy in The Jewel in the Crown.) He certainly does a great job at the physical vulgarity described in the books, and he absolutely embodies Hill’s description of Dalziel’s “cetacean maw”.

Clarke has more hair than the Dalziel of the books, but I’ve noticed that film/TV producers are reluctant to portray balding men of pretty much any age in leading roles. (I’m thinking Ciarán Hinds as Caesar in Rome; he was not nearly as follicly-challenged as the real Caesar. But I won’t complain.)

Colin Buchanan plays Pascoe like he’s had a poker surgically implanted up his butt. Or maybe like he’s just taken a bite of sea-urchin-and-Brussels-sprouts casserole and is looking for a potted palm where he can unobtrusively spit it out. He comes off as a prissy, priggish prat. Other than that, though, he’s fine.

(In fairness, I’ve never seen Buchanan in anything else, so maybe he has a greater acting range than A to A-minus. But I’ve gone through six seasons of the series now, and he’s shown no signs of modifying that constant expression of pained sensibility. Or aftermath of sea urchins and Brussels sprouts.)

David Royle is way too good-looking to play Sergeant Wield. From the descriptions in the books, Wieldy has the sort of face that would not just stop a clock, it would stop Switzerland. I’d expected someone with the coruscating ugliness of a Jack Elam or a Warren Oates. Royle was kind of stunning in his non-ugliness, and it took a while for me to recalibrate.

Plus, in the novels Wield is absolutely impenetrable to everyone except Dalziel and, at the end of the series, to some extent to Pascoe. Royle does impassive quite well, but he has Frances McDormand’s ability to move an eyelid a couple of millimeters and shift the entire emotional content of the scene. So, he’s impassive though not impenetrable. But then I suppose that being completely impenetrable would defeat the purpose of, you know, acting.

Royle actually had the best line of the series. In Exit Lines, Wield and Pascoe are faced with the possibility that Dalziel may have committed vehicular homicide (or whatever it’s called in the UK) while drunk as a skunk. Here’s how they deal with the prospect:

Pascoe: “Let’s solve this case before he [Dalziel] sobers up.”

Wield: “That should give us a few weeks.”

Royle tossed it off with just the tiniest bit of resignation; it was delicious.

I understand that Wield doesn’t continue through the series. I hope they give him a Viking funeral, or have him win the lottery. Wieldy should not go gentle into that good night.

Susannah Corbett—the exophthalmic actor who portrays Ellie—certainly gets the eye-rolling stridency down. But once the producers stopped using the novels as the basis of the teleplays they wrote her and annoyingly fey daughter Rosie out of the storyline. I’ve not seen enough of the series to know what they’re doing with that, although I imagine it allows Pascoe to act on the lustful thoughts he has in the books. The producers are no doubt male.

Actually, I’m waiting for Season 7 to come to me via the Santa Clara County Library. That’s the latest season available at any of the six library systems to which I have access. That leaves Seasons 8-12 hanging in the wind. Frankly, I’m not wild about the quality of the post-Hill plots, so I don’t know whether it’s worth it to fork out for some streaming service where I could get them. (Alas, not even Amazon Prime has D&P on their “for-special-friends-of-Rick’s” watch-for-free list.)

Well, I won’t mourn the series the way I do Hill’s books. But I don’t begrudge it not living up to his standards. Not possible, sunshine.