This adaptation was just as sentimental and patronising as the original novel
The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency BBC1
It's horrible and sad, that Anthony Minghella should have died so young, and it makes reviewing his final film, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (23 March, 9pm), a pretty miserable business. I would love to be able to write fondly of the warmth, hope and general sunniness that he left us in his adaptation (co-written with Richard Curtis) of Alexander McCall Smith's novel about a curvaceous Botswanan private detective. But although he certainly did deliver all of the above, I'm afraid that this particular bank-holiday treat still left me unseasonably cold, just as I always suspected it would.
I'd struggled to get along with McCall Smith's bewilderingly successful book, finding it too twee and too uneventful, and as Minghella's film stayed so true to its cloying spirit, I struggled to get along with it, too. Dear God, it was slow. No bodies, every "mystery" so easily solved: beside this stuff, Miss Marple looks positively noir.
Fans, of course, will have adored it. Minghella, a superb writer and director, was also something of a sentimentalist in his work and thus the perfect man for this particular job. While others might have approached McCall Smith's stories with a certain amount of caution - there are those, and I am among them, who suspect that his version of Africa is ever so slightly patronising, not to say stereotyped - Minghella seems to have fallen for them hook, line and sinker. On the upside, this meant that his film felt Hollywood expensive and was filled with keenly coaxed performances, notably that of the singer Jill Scott as our kind and luscious heroine, Ma Precious Ramotswe. On the downside, however, it merely repeated the dubious and emollient clichés of the novel: in this beautiful African country (cue shots of giraffes and postcard sunsets) human beings are good, hard-working, moral and smiley, and they all talk in a cute Botswanan English that renders even the simplest of sentences tickle-ishly amusing. The baddies are few and far between and easily dealt with: all it takes is a bit of Ramotswe tenacity, and for her battered and ever-faithful Datsun pick-up to be in good working order (cue a cloud of dust and cheerful African music).
Eeww. Mind you, given that it was Easter weekend and I was just back from an arduous work trip to another far-off and dusty country, I could probably have stuck all this condescension if only something had actually happened. But it did not. Now I remember why I drove The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency to my local Salvation Army shop only three chapters in.
Precious, having sold the cows she inherited from her beloved father, set up her agency in a Gaborone post office building (comedy stern secretary; comedy typewriters with missing letters; comedy gay hairdresser next door) and waited for her first case to come in. Eventually, a woman pitched up with a story about how she felt the man claiming to be her long-lost father wasn't her daddy after all. Precious solved this by telling the impostor that his daughter had been involved in a terrible accident, and that he had to give half his blood to save her; he took fright and revealed his true identity.
And so it went on. Even the most difficult case - a boy had disappeared, and Precious feared he had been murdered by "bad people" who wanted to use his body parts for witchcraft - unravelled with all the ease of a loosely knitted jersey. One minute, she was duelling verbally with the dodgy owner of the bone of a human finger; the next, she was speeding across the plains in the aforementioned Datsun to rescue the lost child. The boy's fingers, needless to say, were still intact on her arrival. Precious celebrated the closing of this case with a glass of fruit juice, which made a change from redbush tea, but was not exactly wild.
Oh well. I suppose all this loveliness and neatness is at least better for the soul of the nation than series such as the very gross Messiah and the even grosser Trial and Retribution. But it is not what Minghella will be remembered for, nor should it be.
Pick of the week
Casualty 1907
Starts 30 March, 9pm, BBC1
Holby goes Edwardian, when pain relief was not quite what it is now.
Brian Keenan: Back to Beirut
31 March, 7pm, BBC2
The former hostage and his wife return to Lebanon.
Poppy Shakespeare
31 March, 9pm, Channel 4
Based on Clare Allan's novel about friendship in a psychiatric hospital.
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