One thing leads to another. An episode of Still Game had Jack and Victor getting up to antics in a car that Victor had bought at an impromptu auction. Those antics were accompanied by a cheerful ditty, which, to Linda, seemed familiar and to me, with a Ron Goodwin album in my collection (and how many teenagers could make that claim!), was known as Miss Marple. We delved and discovered that it was the Margaret Rutherford series that was blessed with this rhythmic, syncopated theme.
Some days later a parcel arrived – yes, the dearly beloved had bought herself the set. If I truly loved her I would have bought them for her but, in my defence, she has a huge DVD collection of that kind of thing. I’m surprised she didn’t already have it. There’s nothing she likes better than a good murder! Maybe several murders…
So last night we sat down to watch the first – ‘Murder, She Said’. It is an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s ‘4:50 from Paddington’. There were some dead bodies and I seem to recall that someone was apprehended due to some determined amateur sleuthing by the indomitable spinster. But it was filmed in 1961 and there was some interesting footage of railways, naturally. And it being 1961, there were steam engines aplenty. It might be just me (it probably is) but I find it deeply annoying whenever a period drama has a railway scene. The express from London is generally portrayed by a tank engine trundling down some elongated, single-track siding, with a handful of coaches and doing no more than 25mph! So imagine my delight to find that the opening scenes were actually filmed at Paddington, in monochrome, and with real steam locomotives.
In a somewhat obstructed view (by film credits) is a side tank that has come in bunker-first at platform 1. Some platforms over is a Hawkesworth pannier tank, 9410. This has delivered the rake of coaches that will form the eponymous service, calling at Ealing Broadway, Hanwell, Hayes, West Drayton, Langley, Taplow, Milchester and Brackhampton. Miss Marple makes a purchase at a stall (a book?) and is then ably assisted to her seat by a very helpful porter who even stows her luggage in the overhead rack. How standards have slipped. The train starts to move… and immediately we switch to a departure shot that is most definitely not Paddington. The boiler is very Stanier-esque. The valve gear is Walschaerts. And nowhere to be seen is the overall Paddington canopy, so beautifully crafted by Messrs Brunel and Wyatt. My guess is that we have jumped across to Euston. The next scene is of a passenger train passing over some water troughs. My immediate reaction was ‘Goring!’ This would be natural given the announcement made over the station Tannoy. But on reflection, it didn’t look like Goring; not only that but Goring is west of Reading and my assumption is that Milchester and Brackhampton are pseudonyms for Maidenhead and Reading respectively. However, there are troughs at Bushey on the Euston line, the locos still have a Midland feel about them, and one looks suspiciously like a BR standard tank.
Then we come to the murder scene. Our sleuth is on the stopping train; this is overtaken by an express service on the down main. As the loco passes her window we see a GWR loco with Collett cab and we glimpse just the top half of the cabside number plate – it can only be 1666. A pannier tank, not an express locomotive, carried that number! For the overtaking manoeuvre to happen there must be four tracks. Whether we are heading west as per the deluded station announcer or heading north on a completely different line both locations work. Later, having been dismissed by the law-enforcement authorities as an over-imaginative busybody, Marple and her accomplice Stringer are seen lineside searching for a body and there are certainly four tracks in that scene.
Unfortunately, for the victim at least, all the coaching stock is of the corridor type. Private compartments where dastardly deeds abounded!
The manor house where the body was eventually located was beside the railway line, at the foot of an embankment, and every so often a train passes, usually hauled by a Castle/King type locomotive. That would be appropriate given the stated direction of travel, and for the presumed location of Ackenthorpe Manor. For filming purposes, the manor is an amalgamate of locations welded together from Taplow, Denham and Elstree and a railway embankment at Gerrard’s Cross (only two tracks here but we don’t get to see). Interestingly, a diesel locomotive passes and it is quite easy to identify it as a Western Region diesel hydraulic with two three-axle bogies. There were only five locos that fit that description - Class 41 ‘Warships’. This one is D603 ‘Conquest’, built by the North British Locomotive Co. in Glasgow in 1958.
As for Goodwin’s theme, in B flat major and 4/4 time, it is far too cheerful to accompany such skulduggery as murder. He must have been thinking of a completely different programme when he wrote it; hadn't read the script; Benny and Harry Hill go to Bognor Regis with a much more bodacious Miss Marple - racy, lithe, buxom, chaste, chased. The orchestration is given over to strings and high woodwind and strongly features a harpsichord. It’s an enjoyable piece of flimsy-whimsy-fluff. It would have been good for Still Game but Frank Chacksfield's Cuban Boy got that one. Once again, it might just be me!
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