Maigret

When I was at the BBC in the 1990's I asked the library in Windmill Road to send up the episodes they had for viewing prior to a possible Video release. They said they had very few surviving episodes but sent what they had including a Christmas special. As I watched all the quality of this series was relived. Now that The Age of Kings has been retrieved and released on DVD this series would have been next on my wish list. It was superb, captured the atmosphere of Simenon's Paris perfectly with its Citroen Tractions, cobbled streets and bistros. The title sequence with Rupert Davies striking a match on a wall to light his pipe to the music of Ron Grainer was superb. Half the UK population flocked home to see it each week.

I've just seen the first of this long 'lost' (not shown anyway) series, which was hugely popular when it appeared in the 60s, and is just being revived by the UK's Talking Pictures channel (old films and TV).

So, January 2022, but I see the review just posted by 'Sir-Oblong' (?!) makes no allowances for the usual production standards of that distant era. Maybe he hasn't seen perhaps 'Z Cars' - much loved but with similar creaky scenery!! Or the infamous Crossroads, with wobbly sets and even more wobbly acting, of necessity as doing many shows in an extreme hurry, on a tiny budget! Of course the Gambon series looks better, they had a vastly better budget, and the technical advances greatly helped with the picture quality. That series had shows that ran for longer (90 mins or 2 hours, from fading memory) so the stories could be developed in a better way, but the Davies version was actually shot in Paris (for the externals) so has that extra benefit.

The criticism about "claustrophobic sets" is also strange, the Gambon & Atkinson series both had some small sets, reflecting the stories as Simenon wrote them (a small room is a small room, a small bar is a small bar!). Their later date of production meant they looked rather better, having had more time and money spent! NB The Gambon series was 2 runs of 6 shows, and I think Atkinson stopped after just 3 (a relief for those fans pained at his lack of resemblance to the written Maigret). I look forward to more of the Davies reruns!

Added some weeks later:- And having mentioned the (inaccurate) Fiztbong-Obolongs critical review, I've now seen far more episodes, and the supporting acting was greatly improved as we get into series 3. His criticism of Helen Shingler is especially daft, as she plays Madame Maigret just as directed, and what a wife would have been back then, especially of a leading policeman. The review by Richard Hull is far more accurate about the Simenon books, and how the atmosphere and detection methods are layered, and pretty hard to replicate on screen - especially in these original one hour shows.

Well, that's according to my memories, anyway. I was an avid Simenon reader at the time - I think I've read nearly every Maigret story - and I totally loved this series. Simenon's Maigret stories are very difficult for directors and actors to adequately capture because he builds up an atmosphere using all the senses, not just the visual and aural. He also develops the atmosphere gradually - Maigret's or someone else' health, the drinks and food he consumes, Maigret's ponderings on the crime or the criminal, the weather. That atmosphere is also tied in with the specific psychological aspects of each case - Simenon was fairly obsessed with exploring the psychodynamics of pathological behaviour, and very much in the style of psychoanalytic descriptions and explanations. I don't recall seeing any other adaptation of the Maigret novels that came as close as this series. I wish it were available.

I have waited over 50 years for what I believed to be the definitive Maigret only to be very disappointed.

Not all is bad. Over 52 episodes there is of course some variation in quality. Generally, the standard of acting, direction, and scripting improves as the series progreses but there is plenty of room for it to do so. Line fluffs, bumping into scenery, claustrophobic sets, ham acting, and aimless direction were all common occurrences in taped studio drama of the 60s but here the depths are really plumbed, especially in the earlier episodes and given the supposed prestige nature of the project this really is not excusable in the degree exhibited.

Davies does a largely excellent job in the central character, being everything he should be as a star detective and as Maigret in particular: relaxed, likeable, thoughtful, avuncular. But too often he has to carry things when surrounded by seeming amateurs (many of whom had been on the professional stage for 30 years or more but patently had no clue as to how to act on TV) and wading through a leaden script in a grim, depressing set.

Of the three regular supporting roles, Ewen Solon as Lucas is the only one to offer a standard of performance that actually does support Davies; Helen Shingler as Madam Maigret and Neville Jason as Lapointe are as dull and monochrome as the sets.

All these deficiencies might have been offset had the stories been better but here we come to the root of the problem which is Simenon. I can't claim to have read all the stories but the ones I have read are all very similar and the famed depiction of low life psychoanalyzed by the thoughtful Maigret palls quite quickly. It seems that the BBC were so in thrall to Simenon that they dared not knock his limited creations into a shape suitable for television and so were stuck with thin gruel in the plot department and tried to make up for it by portraying the atmosphere of the stories - a near impossible task even with today's technology but suicidally ambitious for 1961.

Why then was it so popular? Because: the reputation of the author and character was such that people wanted to believe that the TV version was better than it really was; despite the dramatic failings around him, Davies did make an attractive central figure; the idea of a who dunnit set in Paris was exotic to millions of people who had never been abroad; and there was little choice on TV at the time.

The simple fact is that the Michael Gambon version is infinitely better; it's a tragedy that he made so few episodes.

Nowadays TV drama is mostly the same as cinema drama, just with a smaller budget, and apart from news and current affairs, TV stations just play pre-recorded items. How different it was when this series was made. I'm not sure if the programmes went out live, but even if they didn't, they were made "as if" live, since editing early video tape was extremely difficult and expensive. So what you get with these shows is similar to what you get when you go to a live theatre performance: a company of actors working together in real time to present a story. Fabulous! And, yes, there are going to be the odd little errors, just as in the theatre. The only difference from live theatre is that, in this series, we have the addition of wonderfully evocative filmed sequences made in Paris in an era when it looked extremely Parisian. It's exciting. I don't mind at all about the small and rather cheap sets.