Gaudy Night
Yesterday morning Henry changed his guitar strings and practiced while I sewed a few new shopping bags, and then he and Dan disappeared to play videogames and I poked around at Netflix.
We suspended our Greencine account a few days ago so we could try Netflix because they offer quite a lot of things to stream instantly, which is, of course, very tempting. I found a BBC miniseries of Gaudy Night, one of my favorite Dorothy Sayers novels and one which I just finished reading for the fourth time (or so). I was pretty worried about watching it because I have such a clear idea of how Lord Peter and Harriet should look, and if the cast was bad it would be so bothersome, but I also knew the BBC would do a good job with costumes and sets and it would look really authentic, and since I have no idea at all of what Oxford looked like in the 30s, I wanted to at least give it a try.
In my opinion, Harriet Walter makes a very good Harriet Vane, and Edward Petherbridge is not a bad Lord Peter. Not quite right, but not terrible. They scrambled the plot but of course they had to compress a 500-page book into just a couple hours of TV, so oh well. They did keep a great many lines verbatim from the book. Anyway I watched about half yesterday and will finish up today when I’m done writing this.
Chloe came over in the afternoon and we knit and watched episode 2 of Wonders of the Solar System and did a bit of gardening, and then Bob came over too and we got started talking about 1970s disaster movies and discovered that Netflix had “Earthquake” for streaming, so we watched that all together. It was just dreadful but very entertaining to make fun of. Take off your pantyhose!
We hope they will come over tonight to watch Breaking Bad, woohoo! Breaking Bad is a close second after Mad Men for Best Thing on TV.