Rowan

At some point following the notice at reference 1, we bought two DVD's full of Rowan Atkinson doing Maigret, and have now watched all four episodes, some of them more than once, and have got more used to Atkinson in the role.

A couple of night ago we did Maigret sets a trap, Maigret on the track of a serial killer of young women, a case which has been running too long, that is to say around six months. On this occasion, this episode worked well, held our attention and interest all the way through, in one sitting. Part of this being that the production team had clearly worked really hard on the period setting, which came off really well. More or less a costume drama. But also reminding one that there were lots of poor quarters, even in rich towns like Paris which had not been that bashed about during the war, in the years after the war.

Captured the tone and texture of the original rather well, and the only fault, and it may only be a fault to those viewers who read the story before the event rather than after the event, was the cramming in of a whole new story line into an all already very busy - not to say noisy - production style. A new story line about how the minister was angry and Maigret's boss (not really his boss in the Paris police organisation of the time, but that is perhaps a bit complicated for TV) is about to take him off the case, giving him just 24 hours to crack it (although he does cheat a bit by going sick). Furthermore, the boss in question, Coméliau, was much better cast in the Gambon version, as an older man, a representative of the old ruling classes, than this younger, stroppy and interfering one. That came much later in the life of the Maigret stories.

The rather tricky, more or less symbiotic, relationship between the police and the press was not much probed (on screen) at all: perhaps that would need an episode in its own right. And perhaps not that different to the relationship between the Royals and the press, or our politicians and the press. They all moan and groan, but they all need each other.

And that said and done, I do still recognise the complaints made at reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/12/atkinson-maigret.html.

Reference 2: Maigret tend un piège - Simenon - 1955. Volume XIX of the collected works.