Dirk Gently (2010) & The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2011)

Two TV adaptations of popular books, both very different source material and different results. I was drawn to Dirk Gently (which now serves as a pilot episode as a series has since been commissioned) as it is based on a Douglas Adams book (that I haven't read) and starred Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd - and it turned out Doreen 'Mrs Warboys' Mantle and Helen 'Emily off Friends' Baxendale where in it too. So a cracking cast and pedigree, it's reassuring that the end result was such fun and left me wanting more. 

It's a rather whimsical tale of Dirk, a holisitic detective - which basically means he tries to find connections in seemingly unconnected events, and he doesn't believe anything that happens is unconnected to the current mystery, which in this case involved a missing cat... and then took in time travel and a missing millionaire. The story was typically Adams-based left-field stuff that required suspension of disbelief and surrender to the sheer joy of it all. Mangan appeared perfectly cast in the role, he's quickly becoming an actor who draws me to programmes, as he paints over a white board to use again, or hypnotises his friend MacDuff into investing in his agency. The whole confection and the resolution of the mystery was so wonderfully surreal I can't wait to see the series. 

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, based on a recent bestseller (again, that I haven't read) about the fictionalised account of a true story, was a completely different entity. A one off tale set in the mid 1800s, it tells of Mr Whicher, a detective sent from London to a sleepy country village to investigate the murder of a young child in a country house. Paddy Considine played the titular Mr Whicher with a good dose of suspicion but otherwise didn't leave a great impression, though I feel this was the fault of the script not the actor. It was an interesting story, and Mr Whicher fairly quickly alights on the deceased's step-sister as the killer and proceeds to try and prove how and why she did it. There are no twists and turns or unmaskings of the real suspect - it's made clear she did it, with assistance from her brother who gets away with it - and so that makes a change, although I'm not sure for the better. I was expecting a twist or something particularly dramatic but the whole thing was rather quiet. I liked the film but I found it a bit too straight-forward, although there was interest to be had in seeing the methods of a nineteenth century detective and the legal system.