DoctorStrabismus

Curiously enough when writing about a murder mystery, it was none other than Agatha Christie who first introduced me to the Karoo. In her novel 'The Man in the Brown Suit', set in the 1920s, the principal characters travel by train from Cape Town to what was then Rhodesia, via various places en-route. Early on in their journey they pass through the Karoo, which she describes as "A hot dusty desert of stones and rocks", but also as "Rather a wonderful sight. The great mountains all around, through which we turned and twisted and laboured ever steadily upwards." This is shown off to the full by great camerawork in the course of this production.

Agatha Christie's murder mystery centred upon about South African diamonds, but they are not the only gems from that nation. Based upon Series 1, this is another. We have thus far only watched those ten episodes, so those are what we are reviewing here, but beyond doubt worthy of a 10/10 score.

The characters are fully-fleshed, with plenty of complexity, and extremely well-acted without exception. They bring out the intensity of small town life, where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, sometimes before they have even done it. Here in Australia it is very similar, and even though we have never been to South Africa, the dynamics are so very familiar. There is the local 'Gazette', the small supermarket (the Ko-op), and the traditional butcher -'Slaghuis' in Afrikaans - whose back room serves as the Gazette's editorial office. The layer we don't have in Australia is that of the multiple languages in use, but we do have the racial issues between the indigenous population and those of European ancestry. 'Recipes' puts this right up front with the police chief being black, and two Afrikaaners reporting to him, the younger of whom is dating a girl of mixed race - I think 'Cape-coloured' is the usual description there. It's curious to see how this plays out in the post-Apartheid era. For the police and the young couple, they are genuinely colour-blind, but some of the Afrikaaners in town seem less so. We can relate this to the Australian experience.

And as the central figure to all this, we have Tannie Maria, a Scottish woman living in a remote farmhouse on the Karoo, which she has inherited from a relative. Back in Scotland she has a past, which we will find out more about in Series 2, but as the 'agony aunt' on the Gazette she solves everyone's problems by rustling up a spectacular recipe.

And that is the title. This gives the production a highly unusual, unorthodox and eclectic pace, something which we found very appealing. All these dramatic events are going on in the small town, and so Tannie Maria gets busy in her kitchen. This is her recipe for problem-solving. Oh look, it's a recipe for love and murder!

We look forward to Series 2.

Firstly let me say that although I have a number of Christie novels on my shelves, this is not one of them, and I have not read it. But other reviewers claim it is one of her best, so I will not doubt that, and that this production rips the original plot to pieces and puts an entirely inferior one in its place. Having now watched it right through, I would disincline to argue with that. It was pretty awful.

All that it proves to me is that TV dramas are getting progressively worse as we all move towards our doom through this abysmal century. I gave up on ones from the USA a long time ago, as I felt that watching lots of people waving guns and randomly shooting one another did not remotely classify as entertainment. So here we have a British one, and instead of shooting one another, the characters rattle around in a gloomy light-deprived old house just very occasionally talking to one another, but mostly striking poses in complete silence.

And although not a USA production, we did have not one but two people from that sad nation cast in leading roles as English people. One did have a convincing accent, the other simply didn't, and nor did he understand that in the English legal system you can't be both a solicitor and a barrister. But the scriptwriters had indeed cast him as both.

We had language that simply would NOT have been acceptable in an English country house in that era, we had a sex scene that was utterly ludicrous, and we had an unshaven detective inspector who would have been very rapidly told by his superiors to visit a barber right away.

So we had this sort of costume drama of people in the 1930s (I have read reviews here which say that the original was set in the 20s) talking in the 21st century vernacular and petty much behaving in a 21st century manner. The only real 1930s element was the stated fact that whoever was the guilty party would most likely face the hangman.

What on earth was it supposed to be all about?

2/10.