Maigret

I believe the Michael Gambon Maigret was shot in Budapest because Paris didn't look like Paris any more! There are no such problems here. This is the Paris of the books, and Rupert Davies is Maigret exactly as Simenon conceived him. It was this authenticity that made me buy it as soon as it came out.

Thus the scenery and atmosphere are perfect. The stories, inevitably, are variable, but I'd call them good to excellent. The acting is solid rather than anything better - clearly there were no funds for retakes and there is usually a fluffed line or two in every episode.

The weak spot is the technical quality. Episode One is an outlier, in that it is so poor it is difficult to watch. From Episode Two it is very much better, but still not great. But then, would it have been any better for the TV viewer of the time, watching a 405 line transmission on an 18 inch set?

Anyway I'm delighted to have bought this wonderful time capsule.

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.

Watching Maigret played by Rupert Davies when I should have been doing my homework is one of the reasons I did not so well at school. Others are, The Saint, Danger Man, Quatermass and the Pit, The Avengers, and so on. All the products of UK TV. But perhaps they were in fact produced by the Soviets to undermine the education of British kids like me. I have recovered but would really like the BBC to release the surviving Maigret episodes. They cant be doing any good stuck where they are.

Maigret showed me a France that excited my imagination and caused me to read every book that George Simenon ever wrote. I was not disappointed by Simenon. And Rupert Davies would have had a hard time convincing me that he was not genuinely French if we ever met. As for Ewen Solon, I could never see him as anything but Lucas in any subsequent appearances.

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.