Dalgliesh: The Black Tower
As you all know I am in the habit of reading round commentary and reviews online before blogging about a show, and I saw an absolutely hysterical review about this show which meant that it simply had to have a blog post even though it may not strictly be cult. The review said that the characters are the most thoroughly umpleasant people you could ever wish to meet, and the writer queried whether it was even possible to get that many unpleasant people together, but then he said he didn't live in England, so he doesn't know. Oh, we do unpleasant. The food is merely a sort of unpleasant amuse bouche before you meet the people. That's the other reason we had an empire: it was to get away from here and get some sun. The full series is five episodes, but I'm only going to do one blog post for reasons which will appear below.
The Black Tower (1985) is part of the ITV series of adaptations of PD James novels (1983 to 1998) and is one of the ones starring Roy Marsden as Dalgliesh. It adapts James's 1975 novel of the same name.
The plot is essentiallly that Dalgliesh gets asked to investigate the events in a very unusual nursing home. It is run on quasi-religious grounds by Wilfred Anstey who himself experienced a miraculous cure and devoted his life to this. The events are essentially murderous and so we have wheelchairs with their users hurtling off cliffs, climbing ropes partly cut through, an epidemic of poison pen letters and of course the entire cast all hate each other really. Thus far it probably sounds like any Golden Age mystery set in an enclosed setting where the characters start getting murdered and the detective has to work out what's happening.
However (and this is pertinent to both the book and the adaptation) this isn't one of your one-dimensional mysteries by Miss Christie (don't send me hate mail please). P D James's books are never straight detective stories and she has a fine eye for the human elements involved in the story. A nursing home of course gives us lots of potential for strong emotions, jealousy, frustration, the difficulties of ageing and illness, and indeed these all come out. James is also incredibly good at putting sex into her plots in a nuanced way which helps the plot. The reason I think this point is so important is that both the book and this adaptation are criticised for being rather slow and not getting to the action quickly enough.
I think that that is to miss the point here. I mentioned the crit that the entire cast are all thoroughly unpleasant, and I think the slowness of the mystery is deliberate. The fact that it takes the whole of the first episode before it gets to the first murder is to give us time to experience the dreadful, contained, slow feeling of being ill, in care, and not in control. That is the real genius of this show: we genuinely feel how much we would hate Toynton Grange if we were actually resident there. The slowness of exposition also gives us a fine insight into the dynamics among the residents which gives us something to get our teeth into when trying to work out who is doing the murders.
One of the most important elements of the show is the very difficult one of the religious aspect. Because Anstey's miraculous healing was religious he has given the home a religious...I want to say veneer, but we are clearly invited to think about how deep the veneer goes for the various characters. None of the characters is RC but nonetheless they all go on pilgrimage to Lourdes. Perhaps most bizarrely the staff of the Grange wear brown Franciscan-style habits as their uniform. James cleverly sets this up in a way which means the reader/viewer can understand it however they wish depending on their own religious understanding. This is some quality writing here, and there is none of the experience that so often happens when TV shows try to depict religion, that you see grating things wrong with it. Instead the religious practice here is one which can't possibly be real, and that's the point. This approach is so brilliant that I wish TV shows would use it more often.
I think there is one element of the plot which may be seen differently now from the 1970s and 1980s: I think the events of the succeeding years have persuaded more people that religion and religious people are not always what they seem to be. Perhaps the 21st century viewer may give much less credence to the religious aspect of the home and be more inclined to see it as fake. This was always of course a possible way to interpret Anstey's motives, so it wouldn't be a view which was impossible forty years ago. Certainly I think the central revelation that what Anstey is doing in the tower in the afternoons is not meditation as such but amusing himself with his collection of jazz magazines, will certainly not come as a shock nowadays.
James's heavy investment in character and motivation means that this show avoids a straightforward device of having characters who are clearly moral and immoral. The nuanced understanding of the characters' emotions and lives means that this show is gripping, and avoids the disappointment for the viewer of setting up heroes only to knock them down again.
I've been wracking my brain trying to find a criticism of this show and I really don't have one, except that unless you're used to TV of the past it would seem too slow to you.
I highly recommend this excellent drama.
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