Season 4 - Murder Must Advertise/The Nine Tailors (1974-1975)
No, your eyes aren't deceiving you, this is the second Lord Peter Wimsey post in a week. I made a vow to myself to not repeat shows for Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece, much as I did for its predecessor, Fifty Years a Masterpiece, but sometimes it's unavoidable, especially as later seasons of Masterpiece Theatre have fewer shows and one season had only a single show. Yes, I'm looking at you season thirty-seven. If it had been I good show I might have forgiven you, but The Amazing Mrs Pritchard is not good. Over thirty years earlier season three of Masterpiece Theatre had six shows while season four had five. With my self-imposed vow to not repeat a review that omitted Country Matters, The Edwardians, and Upstairs, Downstairs from consideration. Which left Lord Peter Wimsey, The Man Who Was Hunting Himself, and Vienna 1900. Thanks to YouTube I have actually found a lot of supposedly lost media this past year but The Man Who Was Hunting Himself and Vienna 1900 weren't among them when I previously checked. So I decided to take a novel approach so you wouldn't get the same post twice in a week. That approach was to watch the two mysteries featured in season three and then write my review before I started the two mysteries featured in season four. And voila! Two entirely new and unique reviews. Of course if I do a celebration for the sixtieth and the two aforementioned shows haven't made an appearance by then I have a feeling I'll be repeating myself... But I do at least try to refresh it and say thankee for indulging me. PS I'm totally planning on doing Sixty Years a Masterpiece. I might already be writing posts for it. So this season adapts Lord Peter's most famous case, "Murder Must Advertise," and I have to say, this is the Dorothy L. Sayers I know and loath. The racial slurs and infodumps are all here. Why no, I do not want to learn every single employee in the advertising agency in the first five minutes while they're all talking over each other simultaneously because I will forget who they all are, oh, and you're now doing it with the bell ringers in "The Nine Tailors?" I do not want to know the name of every single bell ringer, as well as the name, number, and tone of their bell. Because there is no way I will remember this information as they all look like identical old white men. And yes, she did this to me in Gaudy Night too. Which I haven't forgiven her for. I actually started a cast list while reading that book to try to avoid confusion. At least in a visual medium I can remember some of the faces. You know, the one young bell ringer, the one that reminds me of Richard Griffiths, that sort of thing. Because if there's one thing that these adaptations get right about Dorothy L. Sayers, beyond the racial slurs and infodumps, they are confusing as hell. One crime deals with breaking up a drug smuggling ring which I literally couldn't care less about all while Lord Peter is rather annoying darting around town dressed up as a harlequin with a penny whistle while the other is so badly plotted I have no idea when the mystery took place. I think it started right before the outbreak of WWI and then leaped forward to the middle of thirties, but with everyone still oddly talking about the Spanish Flu. Which led me down a rabbit hole about when there were other flu outbreaks, and needless to say, if you're having to do extracurricular research just to enjoy a show perhaps the show should have been giving you more information. I mean, they could have just put the date on the screen! Sigh. That obviously would have been too easy. I just really feel bad for Ian Carmichael. He really is a great Lord Peter. Too bad the source material isn't the greatest. And I know that sounds like blasphemy to some, but it's exactly how I feel.
Dorothy L. Sayers was a singular and unique character, whose singular and unique creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, has not only been awarded a place in the pantheon of great fictional crime solvers, but has also secured a place in the heart of many a romantic for his wooing of his lady love, Harriet Vane. Sayers led an interesting life that tended to buck convention. She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford University and she even had an illigetimate child she passed off as her nephew, all in the roaring twenties. 
