Dorothy Sayers' Whimsey novels - do you know the (1980s) TV adaptations?

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

I wasn't sure where to put this thread, but it feels as if it'd be more at home here that the TV threads. I love Dorothy Sayers. MN introduced me to her. I wish they'd do another adaptation, but the 1980s ones are surprisingly good.

The wonderful sconerhymeswithgone showed me the existence of these on youtube. (The link is to Gaudy Night, because that's what I'm watching, but there are lots of earlier ones).

What do you think? I liked the casting, but I have quibbles. And the ending to Gaudy Night is a travesty, right?

It's still so much how a lot of people see female homosexuality, though, isn't it?

Yes I don't think my grandmother is homophobic, it's just that "lesbian" was not a word that would ever have been used by someone like her

X-post - yes, I think there is a huge amount of bafflement which comes from ingrained assumptions

I didn't mean to imply she was!

My granny would have been the same - in fact, she'd barely be able to discuss any kind of sex without euphemisms.

But I think there is also quite a tendency to think that lesbians are women who dislike men, rather than women who like men fine but prefer sex with women.

Sorry, this is way off topic!

Me too, Irene , reinforced by Eiluned being a bit stroppy with peter (I can carry the kettle, thanks)

No sorry I didn't think you were implyig that eiyher, i was just continuin fromy previous post about why she couldn't say the word lesbian

it's a curious thing, like a doublr-negative, isn't it?

Earlier I marked my place on this thread with a throwaway comment, intending to come back - and didn't. But reading other people's comments at four in the morning reminded me of something I had been meaning to do.

I've just spent an hour, finally, reading Dorothy L. Sayers' essay The Lost Tools of Learning

www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html

I'm grateful to this thread for prompting me to read it at a time when I could concentrate - in the past I just skimmed through it.

Gaudy Night was published in 1935, this essay in 1947. (The oppositional language of the introduction is understandably militaristic in its tone.) I've never thought of the novels as "innocent" - everything in them was predicated on Peter's experience of the first war. But I wonder how different they might have been, written ten or fifteen years later.

And, of course, I'm annoyed once again that DLS, who existed in the same intellectual sphere as C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, is almost never accorded the same reverence.

Love your name. ZFD!

Good point, zero, it is annoying.

I don't know what to make of that essay. But I'm glad I read it.

I can't find it online, but do you know her piece titled 'The Human-Not-Quite-Human'? It's long, but she's basically talking about how to imagine a situation of reverse sexism and how it indicates how sexist we are. It's good.

'Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness ... If from school and lecture-room, Press and pulpit, he heard the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice, bidding him remember his biological function. If he were vexed by continual advice how to add a rough male touch to his typing, how to be learned without losing his masculine appeal, how to combine chemical research with seduction, how to play bridge without incurring the suspicion of impotence.'

If she were alive today I hope she would have the perspicacity to write about race in the same way.

I'll look out for that essay. I'm guessing it's in the volume Are Women Human?

Yes, I think it is.

And yes, I think she would have. I think she'd also be shocked how little's come on, in terms of gender, though.

Oh goodness! Just finished the EP/HW Gaudy Night. Had forgotten how the scriptwriters eviscerated the book.

Perhaps I lied when I said it's the detail that makes the difference with DLS. More than anything it's probably the balance between Harriet's and Peter's points of view. The books would be so much less if we only knew what was going on in the mind of one or the other. The TV show kept that but lost everything else - including Peter's adorable nephew. No chess pieces, no dog collar, none of the stuff that takes ones breath away. And they made it look as if Harriet was a mere spectator and did none of the actual sleuthing or deduction.

There is a sympathetically drawn black character in Unnatural Death. Obviously I appreciate that one nice black character does not = author with total understanding of race issues! But it is unusual for 1920s English fiction where there are very few black characters indeed.

I am now all about the 1980s Gaudy Night and I haven't even seen it! (And not going to.)

I know, right?! It's so annoying.

I know not everyone agrees, but I think Harriet works it out just as quickly as Peter - she just feels conflicted and doesn't want to accept the possibility. The TV version makes it sound as if he does it all.

Also, I really don't get the point of the Bunter/Peter train journey into Nazi Germany. I know Peter is off doing mysterious things for the Foreign Office (though not in Germany!), but that felt totally clunky. It was as if the director thought, 'shit! Best make it clear this Important Male Character has Important Male Skills and doesn't just clear up mysteries for women'.

Yy Irene, and althougj both Freddie and the dowager duchess mention anti Semitic attitudes, neither seem to have them and Reuben Levy is also sympathetically reflected in the first book.

irene thanks for the explanation of the roses in the book. interesting that they have them in the first place!

I thought I had seen the TV version of Gaudy Night. This thread has made it clear that I haven't, because from what you have said, there is no way that I would have forgotten all those vital bits being gone

well having watched "have his carcase" i shall henceforth be getting dp's attention by calling "i say!"

he will love it

It's funny, I'm sure I watched the 80s Gaudy Night, but I don't remember the ending being wrong and them missing out bits - I must have wiped it from my memory!

Glad I found this thread and discovered that I'm not the only person who goes weak at the knees at Placetne Magistra!
I saw some of the 80s series when I was on sick leave back in the summer/autumn of 2013 and I watched a lot of daytime TV. I found the dramatisations very slow (and possibly done on the cheap). I can remember the Ian Carmichael adaptations but thought he was too old to play Peter (how old was he?)

I remember the end, because I recorded the audio on my cassette recorder to listen to over and over again, while imagining kidding Peter. I hadn't read the book at that point, so I wasn't outraged. I borrowed it from the library later that year. I can still remember the smell of the buttered muffins I ate while watching the TV programme at my grandmother's house, and the dusty polishy library smell.

"Do you share my passion for buttered muffins, Harriet?"

How about Helen McCrory for Harriet? Or Anna Chancellor? No bright ideas for Peter, though - all the blond-ish actors I can think of are wronger than a wrong thing.

lawrence fox? perhaps too young?

I thought about him, too. I don't think he's too young, but he is even taller than Cumberbatch.