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Post by beverley61 on Nov 5, 2021 20:23:31 GMT
Perhaps they started with one that could be filmed in one outdoor setting or expansive studio due to covid. They've had to make allsorts of adaptions this last 2 years.
It's quite easy to have an actor at one end of the bed to the other or in chairs like an interview scenario.
They could even film those scenes separately. I think they've done that in some cases. I've noticed one actor driving and the other in the back seat in a few things on TV and always with a window open
I've no doubt they'll be a documentary about all of this at some point.
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Post by Miranda on Nov 5, 2021 20:43:00 GMT
That would make sense.
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Post by beverley61 on Nov 5, 2021 22:20:07 GMT
I think they must have had restrictions. There was rarely more than two people in a room and the nurses common room was huge and everyone was sitting still and feet apart.
There were no comfy chairs or sofas with people sitting next to each other and nobody with their feet up.
I had to laugh when one nurse said she wanted a cigarette and was told no - nurses common rooms were a sea of tobacco fog in those days. It wasn't until the 90s that they stopped them smoking in them and we even had a Medics Bar on the top floor until about 2000. Ostensibly you could get a jacket potato or a toasties and crisps but you could also have a pint and a cigarette. Even in 99, you could smoke in your own office if you didn't share it with anyone else. My point being someone in that room would have a cigarette she could have anyway.
Then the sex scene was in a car, in the woods with the windows open and apart from when they were talking afterwards, we only saw individual people behind fogged up windows.
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Post by Miranda on Nov 5, 2021 23:16:09 GMT
I went off this a bit in the second episode. Mainly due to the sargeant. There's no way he'd get away with behaving like that to a superior officer. I don't think he once said 'sir'. And it meant I couldn't take him seriously as a character so I kept getting pulled out of the story.
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Post by geometryman on Nov 5, 2021 23:58:16 GMT
I also didn't take to the DS at all.
I got very confused as to which of the nursing staff had which names, especially when they were being discussed in their absence. For my benefit, there should have been clearly readable name tags hovering over each of them when on screen!
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Post by Miranda on Nov 6, 2021 0:14:47 GMT
It didn't help that I kept mixing up Dalgliesh with Roderick Alleyn! Completely different authors. When he said his wife was dead, I thought 'Troy's dead?! Since when?' And 'Where's Brer Fox? Who's this fella?'
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Post by beverley61 on Nov 6, 2021 9:19:31 GMT
I've not read the books but as soon as they mentioned nurses and the war I knew it had to be one of the older nurses. So that was suspects narrowed down to three very quickly. Then two as only one was genuinely bereft.
So which one? The most attractive one, it had to be. Mind you she'd lost her accent well which was strange. German's I've known rarely lose it completely.
Would've been better if one was Austrian and the other was Swiss or something.
It lost it's way and there was no real tension at all.
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Post by technicolour on Nov 6, 2021 10:31:29 GMT
Too compressed I'm afraid. The Roy Marsden one was better and the book certainly more intricate. But I shall certainly try next weeks.
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Post by sootycat on Nov 6, 2021 12:30:39 GMT
The Roy Marsden was better I agree. Thought Dalgliesh's sidekick was a waste of space.
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Post by pearl06 on Nov 6, 2021 12:36:14 GMT
The sergeant was an odd character, almost out of time. The scene in the car seemed irrelevant and didn't add anything to the story.
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Post by Miranda on Nov 6, 2021 12:43:11 GMT
I think that was just an excuse for some exposition. Through it we found out that the Consultant is a predator. But that came as no surprise to me and didn't seem to go anywhere anyway.
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Post by vicky on Nov 6, 2021 12:56:30 GMT
I worked on the assumption that the one who was too nice to be true was the culprit .... and I was right!
On the subject of medics smoking: I was taking part in a Facebook discussion the other day on a group devoted to a place where I used to live and the name of the (very well liked) local GP from many years ago came up. Someone said their abiding memory of him was that he always had a cigarette on the go in his surgery. I'd forgotten that but it was true!
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Post by beverley61 on Nov 6, 2021 16:40:12 GMT
Yes all the stuff about the surgeon being a womaniser was a very bad red herring. I'm sure they had local anaesthetic then but we were supposed to be so suspicious of the doctor that Dalgliesh wouldn't let him inject him.
I never suspected him for a minute - perhaps you do in the book?
Might have been more interesting if he'd been the one protecting the Nazi nurse, indeed if he'd been the one who helped her escape.
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Post by marion on Nov 6, 2021 16:51:04 GMT
I really enjoyed it, except for the Sergeant. I cannot believe for one moment Dalgliesh would put up with someone like him. I cannot remember his Sergeants in the books being so unpleasant, let alone so lippy with the boss.
I didn’t think it was the fact the nurse wanted to smoke, it was the fact she wanted to leave the room where they had been told to stay in order to get the cigarettes.
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Post by goodhelenstar on Nov 6, 2021 18:40:54 GMT
I agree with everything that's been said about the DS. I also agree the abridgement into two episodes meant we lost a lot of the original story.
The DS's name in the books is John Massingham. He was played by John Vine in the Roy Marsden version and was a plodder, reliable but not possessed of any great insight which was the preserve of Dalgliesh. Typical DS according to the writers of detective fiction. In later books the sidekick was a woman, Kate Miskin, so I wonder if we'll meet her in this version.
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