Hetty Wainthropp Investigates Complete Second Series
October 2005 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

This three-disc box set of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates is the complete second series by the BBC, with veteran Patricia Routledge in her role as a stout, aging, bossy housewife-turned-detective. Four of its six episodes originally aired on PBS in the summer of 2001. We fans are always ready for more. There can never be too much Routledge, once you are tuned into her genius. Better known for her comic role, Hyacinth Bucket, in the BBC series Keeping Up Appearances, Patricia Routledge demonstrates her range in the easy switch she makes between two very different characters.

Just as the actor David Suchet has become Poirot for viewers, so Routledge exemplifies writer David Cook’s Hetty Wainthropp. But the sleuthing that his Hetty does seems a deliberate parody of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. As elegant and refined as Poirot is, so lowborn and blunt is Hetty. While Poirot and his sophisticated assistant Hastings ride through the countryside in expensive cars, Hetty and her teenage partner Geoffrey (Dominic Monaghan, Lord of the Rings) get around together on a borrowed motor scooter. Poirot’s secretary, the able and reserved Miss Lemon, takes his messages in a tidy office in his sumptuous home. Hetty’s pensioner husband Robert (Derek Benfield, Rumpole of the Bailey) scrambles for the phone from the breakfast table. In fact, Hetty occasionally makes denigrating references to Poirot. In the episode called "Lost Chords," she prefers using intuition, she says, to the "little gray cells" Poirot is so proud of. She dislikes his grisly crimes and is glad that so many of her cases are solved without even calling the police. In another episode, "Woman of the Year," Hetty gets ready to accept an award wearing her new bargain-basement pink high heels and takes an "I see London, I see France" tumble, head over heels, down their narrow front stairs. Such indignities do not happen to Poirot! Yet Hetty’s acumen -- and her willingness to take on various, sometimes preposterous disguises -- mean that she always gets her culprit. And she makes you laugh out loud too.

The plots are sometimes a little muddy but will come clear if you take the time to see an episode a second time. And sometimes the actors, out of a stable of BBC regulars, need a firmer director’s hand; they walk through their roles. But the groove that the three lead characters have found among themselves is completely engaging: the redundant pensioner alternately exasperated by and admiring of his wife; the young man they have taken in, eager and naïve; and the indomitable, overbearing, adorable Hetty.

There are no important extras on this DVD set, only production notes and filmographies. The sound is adequate, although the dialogue is often hard to catch. Yet the cornet that carries Hetty’s theme, ably played by Phil McCann, is always crisp, punctuating key moments in the plot, sometimes to comic effect. Color in the cinematography is also adequate, although in contrast to the Poirot series, the production values are low. There are no lush interiors or interesting camera angles or tea parties on sweeping English lawns. Much of the action takes place in the crowded little Wainthropp manse. And that is where the charm lies.

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