The case of the impossible identity

There’s little doubt that YT are trying to kill off finding enjoyable films of some quality.  Time and again I think I’ve found one, only to find it’s either unembeddable or it’s a reading in audiobook form, or it’s substandard.

Just checked last Wednesday’s radio play and it’s gone, though Saturday’s film is still there.  The interesting thing about the “Teahouse” series was that it wasn’t even very good.  In fact, there was really something quite off about it as a series.  Sorry to bore readers when they were expecting a film or radio play this evening but there it is.

This post will discuss the last of the Teahouse series which I was going to run in this time slot. 

Quick plot recap - an old man who is, it seems, a hobo with a certain hygiene problem, sits day after day in a cafe, to the annoyance of the tea room owner.  The other character at the establishment is the waitress.  The old man is played by Bernard Hepton.

Now I can sympathise with rough sleepers [there but by the Grace …] so shan’t dwell on that part, but compounding this is he’s a nasty cove, psychologically messing with the mind of a young journo who comes to him.  Idea is that she’s on the way up, ambitious and so on and she’s heard from the constabulary that he’s a whiz at solving crimes from his seat in the tea room.  She brings cases to him and he gets to the nub but in doing so, he bullies her something awful.

The series was the idea of Baroness Orczy and I just wonder why she made the protagonists so unpleasant - I’m including Polly the journo in this.  She brings the case, he’s pleased to see her, but the instant he differs from her conclusion, she cuts up rough and doesn’t want to know.  Yet she should listen because he can actually cut to the chase and work out the killer.

If the characters were better written, if he weren’t so vile, it might have been a winner.  If Polly were not such a pain in the backside.  And complicating it further, she not just brought the cases but she was actually involved in them, she had a horse in the race each time.  It’s a good story format as an idea but ruined I’m afraid.  I might redo it myself with roughly the same cafe format but more tolerable characters. Start with a short story and see how it goes.

The last episode, which would have been this evening here, had a promising start and there will be spoilers now, solely on the grounds that it’s no longer accessible.

Plot was that Polly had not been there for weeks, the waitress had stepped into the vacuum but he didn’t like her, even though she offered to be the foil he could bounce ideas off.  She was a bit sassy, true, but overall a nice girl and I’d not have treated her like that.  For me, that’s not a bad plot device.

So, the inevitable moaning Polly does turn up and she’s been stepping out with the second son of a now deceased baron who is on the skids, mainly due to no part in the legacy but also to his own poor choices.  Why on earth Polly would bother with him stretches credulity she’s a smart up and comer.

Right, so a shyster lawyer has put it into the younger son’s head that he was swindled, that he’s actually due a half portion of the estate and he’s representing the younger son, i.e. ripping him off in a sting.  Younger bro meets up with older bro, a shyster himself, also in penury himself due to dodgy deals coming unstuck, he’d actually fired the shyster lawyer earlier.

Younger bro is then found dead, head bashed in, after the three had met up, the lawyer has now disappeared, Polly “knows” it was the older bro wh killed the younger.  The old man convinces her that it was actually the lawyer who’d killed him, as concluded by the police.  She can now take up her appointment in LA to a new role with closure on the case having been achieved.

However, as the OM then confides to the waitress, in fact it was younger bro who’d dun in the lawyer and disguised the body as his own.

Whaaaaa?  WT actual … it’s really sooo stoopid and it ruins a story which was already iffy and which needed a late boost.