Maigret in Montmartre, review: a predictable outing for Rowan Atkinson's poker-faced sleuth
Maigret in Montmartre (ITV) was Rowan Atkinson’s fourth outing as the Gallic sleuth, and if it wasn’t one of the best programmes of the Christmas period it was at least one of the best scheduled.
This 90-minute period potboiler was, in some ways, the perfect companion on a woozy Christmas Eve when the presents are under the tree and a mystery that’s all wrapped up neatly by the end is just the thing to send you off to bed feeling narratively nourished. Maigret was presented with two murders (in Montmartre); one victim was a showgirl, the other a morphine-addled countess. His task was to find what linked them together and ultimately whodunit.
The outcome wasn’t predictable but the process was. After the clues presented themselves, Maigret mused, smoked, had an epiphany and eventually got his man. Although you could say writer Guy Andrews is somewhat hamstrung by having Simenon’s hugely popular but formulaic novels as his source material, this is still a very conventional detective series. Jeopardy comes in the form of shady men in trilbys and trenchcoats, filmed from behind, and is signified by swelling strings. The action follows Maigret and no one else.
What makes tonight’s episode so suitable for a Christmas Eve, however, it that it all played out against an exquisitely lit Parisian backdrop which brought 1955 alive – the sort of thing that is a pleasure to have on your TV screen, even if you aren’t paying it much attention.
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The show has been a success in the ratings, so I must be one of the few who still finds it hard to rid my mind of Atkinson in the Barclaycard adverts or playing Johnny English. In those he was a berk trying to be taken seriously, while here he’s a genius who demands to be taken seriously. Atkinson’s face is still his greatest asset, but it’s hard to disconnect the myriad contortions he used to put it through in the name of comedy from what he does with it now, which is barely move it at all.
An additional problem was the old chestnut of how to do foreign stories in English. Incredibly, in this fourth Atkinson Maigret there were still some characters speaking ze French in ze corny accent, while others were firmly in the “cor blimey guvnor” camp. Given that the production values on Maigret as a whole are so splendid, with so much care obviously having been taken to get the details right, this inconsistency is a curious oversight. At the very least, you can’t help but think that Maigret himself would have spotted it.
