I finished my Banacek marathon yesterday. It’s a shame there weren’t more episodes, but Peppard reportedly turned down a third season to avoid having to give his ex-wife a large cut of his proceeds from the show. The premise is an interesting riff on the “locked room” mystery. Especially good are the ones where the caper takes place in front of numerous witnesses, like the one where the rocket engine disappears during a five-second blackout or the one where $1 million in cash vanishes from a locked display case on a crowded casino floor. It must have given the writers fits to have to come up with such devious plots on a regular basis, though.
For a change of pace, I watched two recent Doctor Who episodes last night, the second part of the Sontaran series and the one that follows that. Here’s a mild casting spoiler for the latter.
I’m still reading The Reapers by John Connolly. There seems to be an awful lot of setup to this novel. I’m through three chapters and still don’t get the feeling that the book has started. Chapter three is a dozen pages building up to the first glimpse of Charlie Parker. Excellent writing, but I’m a bit dubious on the plotting strategy.
I returned to the novel this morning, after a two-week hiatus to get a short story written. I still have another story to write in the coming weeks, but I’m still cogitating on that one. I’ve done a fair amount of research and I can visualize the opening scene, but I’m not sure where it will go after that yet.
There is an old Polish proverb that says, “Though the hippopotamus has no stinger on his tail, the wise man would rather be sat on by a bee.”
How many of those “old Polish Proverbs” do you suppose Peppard made up on the spot?
The funny thing about them is that they seemed like they almost meant something appropriate to the situation, but not quite.
There were definitely some spontaneous moments in the series. In the scene where Peppard, Christine Belford and Linda Evans were up on the catwalk in the episode about the stolen rocket engine, Peppard scares Belford from behind and giggles like a little boy at her reaction.
I noticed that he often checks other actors’ reactions (usually while holding a cigar) when he should be looking at the camera. That’s what gave the show an element of “real” for me among all the carefully plotted (almost contrived in some instances) sequences so they could get those outrageous mystery solutions.
That and his “God, I’m *so* much cooler than you” attitude that only Peppard and Asimov could pull off and not be jerks.
Not only cool, but apparently irresistable to anything in a dress. And anethema to anyone working for an insurance company. There was no middle ground.