Checklist

Things I accomplished this past week:

1. Went jogging twice, yesterday and today. Maybe again tomorrow!
2. Sent my taxes to my CPA. I need to talk to her about selling some of that valuable Apple stock I own.
3. Went to a farewell party for a couple of friends who are moving back east.
4. Experienced some upheaval at work which will probably ultimately be a good thing, and if nothing else reinforces the fact that I'm valued. But it may be a bumpy couple of months.
5. Handed off the fourth of five items I sold on eBay recently.
6. Enjoyed the 70-degree sunny weather by grilling dinner tonight.
7. Catalogued and filed all the comic books I've bought in the past five months. Ended up with another big stack of comics I need to sell. Sigh.
8. Decided not to renew my subscription to the Comics Buyer's Guide, which I've been buying for 20 years. I hate their new format; the used to be a nice weekly newspaper, and now they're a trendy and redundant monthly magazine.
9. Received an eBay-purchased copy of Marvel Masterworks vol 24, reprinting X-Men #111-121. I'm happy because only 400 copies of this particular edition were printed. I paid a bit for it, but an auction for another copy of this edition went for $20 more, so it worked out.
10. Bought two new pillows. And also a bamboo cutting board. Such luxury!

I discovered that the Mountain View Library has videotapes of four of the five Lord Peter Wimsey TV adaptations starring Ian Carmichael, which were made in the early 1970s. So on Friday I took out The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and Debbi and I ordered pizza and watched it.

The eerie thing about this BBC presentation is that it contains no music other than the opening/closing theme, and the occasional moment when Wimsey is playing the piano. Its budget also shows through, as it's too obviously staged on a series of simple sets, underscored on the rare occasions when they actually do have on-location outdoors footage. And the acting tends to be a bit over-the-top. But once I got past all of that it was actually fairly enjoyable.

The story would have fallen completely flat if Carmichael hadn't been any good as Wimsey. In fact he captures the serious side of Wimsey quite well, while his lighter side is mostly shown through his turns of phrase. The biggest drawback is that Carmichael doesn't look at all like I envision Wimsey. In the 1920s Wimsey was in his 30s, but Carmichael seems ten or even twenty years older, with thick gray hair. I envision Wimsey with thinning blonde hair, and rather more foppish. So Carmichael was something of a mixed bag, but I playing him as a more purely heroic figure makes some sense for a TV series like this.

(I'm not sure who I'd pick to play Wimsey. Peter Davison has already played Albert Campion - who is practically a parody of Wimsey - and I picture Wimsey as having a more imposing physique than Davison, not to mention that Davison is rather too old at this point as well. Hmm.) The video holds fairly true to Dorothy Sayers' original, weaving through the twists in the story pretty well - but then, the video is 3 hours long, so there's plenty of time. The video does a good job portraying Wimsey as being part of high society while having a number of connections outside of it. His somewhat obsessive nature also shows through beneath his sense of propriety, though unfortunately Wimsey's unorthodox and whimsical side isn't really given much screen time.

Overall I was a little disappointed in the video, though it was entertaining on the whole. I felt like they never really nailed the spirit of the novel, which is a shame because Wimsey's character has such potential in the video medium. But the video lacked the dynamic feel of the early and middle Wimsey books. I'll likely watch the rest of the adaptations, though, if only because two of the better books in the series are among them, including my favorite, Murder Must Advertise.