Cover Her Face - Part 1

Bertie Carvel takes up directorial duties. Maybe as a sweetener for continuing as Dalgliesh.

Cover Her Face was dramatised once before for the ITV version. Here a few liberties are taken.

The action seems to have moved to the late 1970s. Punk is on the scene as well as the National Front.

Sally Jupp is a single mother working as a maid for the wealthy, Indian origin Mehta family in Essex.

The patriarch is seriously ill. Young Krishna Mehta is a hospital doctor but reluctant to get engaged to his girlfriend Lady Catherine Bowers.

When Sally is found dead, Dalgliesh is called in to investigate. It seems most of the family never wanted her to be the maid. No one knows here exactly Sally came from. She seemed to have no family.

It does transire that Krishna might have been in a relationship with Sally, making him a suspect.

It is a slow burn first episode. Very atmospheric. I just find the moodiness means that this Dalgliesh never fires on all cylinders.

I've given this a 7, but grudgingly. I do like Bertie Carver, but I hate what the writers have done to P. D. Jame's creation. They've made this a story about racism and although a topical subject, it's not what the author wrote about.

I much prefer the 1980's miniseries with Roy Marsden. This was a detailed look at relationships, not a contrived misuse of an author's work.

I wonder what Ms. James would have made of it and I then wonder if this would have been made if she were still alive. It seems that an author's death gives license to those writers who use her creations to push their own agendas. In my opinion, this is totally unethical.

I can guess why they decided to totally change the cast of characters, but it is not for the better. Swapping out the upper class English family for a wealthy Indian family does allow for some issues of racism to be broached but it feels like an unnecessary imposition. Having just read the novel, I found the changes very distracting. The actual murderer in the book gets barely a mention here and is swapped out for a different killer. And Bertie did not seem his usual compassionate sensitive Dalgliesh. We have been anxiously awaiting this third season and to have this dud as 1/3 of it is a disappointment.

Krishna Mehta refuses to be pushed into a lucrative marriage with Lady Catherine Bowers, his affections lay elsewhere, with the maid, Sally Jupp. The night after a family party, in which Krishna refused to propose to Catherine, Sally is found dead.

The first of the Dalgliesh novels, and for my money it's perhaps the best of them, written way back in the 1960's, it's a great story.

Id it wasn't for the name Sally Jupp, you could be forgiven for having zero clue what this story was, it is massively altered, but I for one liked the changes, they didn't detract.

Previously adapted, of course with Roy Marsden, not a version I particularly cared for, I have to say that, and this, aren't a patch on the book.

It's very nicely produced once again, it looks great, I loved the music, it definitely has something of a vintage feel about it, it's certainly packed with atmosphere.

It definitely feels like we're into the 1980's now, who doesn't love a punk!

I'm not sure I'd say this as one of the better adaptations, but it's still heaps better than most of what's on the box right now.

7/10.