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ROSEMARY & THYME’S THE SCENT OF MYSTERY CURRENTLY AIRING ON ITV
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Midsomer Murders’, the new series sees
the wise-cracking pair up to their eyes once again in corpses amid the blooms.
As well as Italy and France, the more domestic locations for their unconventional probing include manor houses, villages, a TV garden and even a boys’ public school dotted around the Home Counties.
There are three directors on the new series – the returning Brian Farnham as well as R&T first-timers, Simon Langton
and the rather appropriate- ly-named Gwennan Sage. Like Farnham, Langton, BAFTA-winning veteran of classic TV such as Smiley’s People, Pride & Prejudice and Mother Love, is in charge of four episodes, including ‘The Gongoozlers’.
Langton is only too “aware of the perameters” coming into a fairly estab- lished set-up like R&T. “As a director, certain aspects of your creative input are obvi- ously diminished because so much of it has been set – such as the crew, art depart- ment and so on. So you just have to accept that; it’s the natural hazard of coming into a long-running series.
“I happen to know Brian
Eastman very well because
we did six hours of Jeeves
And Wooster together. I
know how he works and
what his priorities are, so I
trust him. He’s a tough
taskmaster and expects a
lot but what I like about
him is that there’s enormous atten- tion to detail in the pre-production stage which is great because you then really know what’s going on.
“Once we start filming he never really comes on set – well, hardly at all – unlike some producers who want to be by your side throughout the whole filming process. There comes a time when as director you want to focus just on what’s in front of you.”
By and large, it’s almost exactly the same crew as on series one so one of the key members that Langton has ‘inherit- ed” is director of photography, Paul Englefield, who first got the call from Eastman for series two not long after R&T had finished airing last autumn.
For Englefield, who had got his mainstream drama break on R&T, the challenge to now take on all nine hours was irresistible, not to say flat- tering, especially when there’s a ten- dency for cameramen to ‘leapfrog’ on multi-episode series.
“The fact that there’s been essen- tially the same group of people involved has certainly made for an eas- ier working environment. Pam Ferris
Fight Club; say, put a green filter on and oil up Felicity,” he laughs.
“Doing it for 100 days, you do sort of get a certain confidence. Lighting is about many things but it’s mostly logi- cal. I tend to light in a naturalistic way which means letting it come through windows. That results in a reasonable soft English light – which may be kinder to our actors, too.”
In the end it’s very much about the two main actors. Says
Englefield: “The scripts refer to gardening but the gardens are really just backgrounds to the murder stories. Centrally, it’s about Pam and Felicity. Their relationship, and their sense of humour, has really developed in this series.”
Langton thinks he may already have seen a couple of episodes in series one when he was asked to join the team. He was busier at the time trying to set up a feature film – still pending - about the late, great tenor Mario Lanza. So Eastman sent him tapes of all six shows.
“The one thing that stood out for me more than any- thing was a remarkable kind of symbiosis between Pam and Felicity. You are bound to get different standards of material but whatever the material was like they had this ability to somehow tran- scend it and make it better.
“It’s wonderful to watch actors who have that sense of timing. They could almost repeat the tele-
phone book and make it funny, droll or sad. That’s a rare quality and very much what attracted me to the project.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Rosemary & Thyme, currently airing on ITV, was predominantly originated on 16mm Fujicolor F-64D 8622 and F-250D 8662 Motion Picture Negative
was saying to me how it reduces the stress level. The series started with a period when it had to find it’s way; now we have a much clearer idea of what defines Rosemary & Thyme.”
It has been “a big learning curve” for Englefield in a number of ways. “There’s the amount of organisation you have to do to prepare yourself for a story. Never having coped before with nine consecutive hours of drama was something which had to be taken on board – especially when you don’t always get sufficient time for recces.
“You also learn that, lighting-wise, what you might have used successful- ly before may be totally inappropriate here. You can’t really make R&T like
Photo main: Pam Ferris as ex-policewoman Laura Thyme and Felicity Kendal as biology lecturer Rosemary Boxer in the first Rosemary & Thyme series; Above: Felicity Kendal
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