The Beiderbecke Affair (Acorn Media DVD reissue/British Mini-Series)
Picture: C
Sound: C+ Extras: D Episodes: B-
NOTE: This set was originally issued by Goldhil back in
2002 and has been out of print for a while.
Acorn Media is the company that has luckily reissued it and everything
about the new set is exactly the same as the old one, except for improved
packaging and only one soundtrack option.
Therefore, we repeat the same review with minor alterations.
One of three Mini-Series, The Beiderbecke Affair
(1983) crosses Comedy and a send-up of Drama with Mystery as a secondary
concern. That makes any investigation
here like one big MacGuffin, what Hitchcock describes as the thing everyone in
the story is after but the audience could care less about. That means the burden on the writing has to
be on the characters being entertaining and their situations equally so. As there has been a trilogy of these shows,
you could say they have been effective at the latter.
Of course, you might not like the leads at all, which then
would kill you being entertained by the show, but this is not bad and neither
are they. James Bolam is Trevor Chaplin,
a woodshop teacher and likes Jazz music, while he dates Jill (Barbara Flynn),
who wants to win a political seat and push her environmental agenda. They are an interesting pair and they seem to
attract quirkiness everywhere they turn, if not outright the world of The
Avengers. The episodes featured are:
1)
What I Don’t Understand Is This…
2)
Can Anyone Join In?
3)
We Call It The White Economy
4)
Um… I Know What You’re Thinking
5)
That Was A Very Funny Evening
6)
We Are On The Brink Of A New Era, If Only…
The trouble here begins when Trevor orders some vinyl Jazz
records, only not to get them, to have the woman he ordered them from disappear
and all this lead to police interference, government involvement and possible
murder. This puts the show enough into
the realm of the deconstructive detective cycle, but it is still primarily comic,
if not an outright slapstick piece. Politics
are an amusing sideline and this is very well cast and acted. I just found the Mystery side weaker than it
needed to be, sacrificed for the other aspects the show was working to pull
off. We’ll have to see if the other
productions are similar or not when we get to them.
The full frame 1.33 x 1 image quality is a bit soft and
average, lacking detail and being more color poor than it should be or was shot
to be. It is a good-looking show
otherwise. The Dolby Digital 5.1 from
the Goldhil version is dropped, leaving a Dolby 2.0 Mono track that does sound
better than the Goldhil version. There
are no extras. The Beiderbecke Affair
is an off-beat enough show that it is better than most of the pale shows like
it that followed, but you will have to see it for yourself to see if you really
like it.
- Nicholas Sheffo