The British actress, Patricia Routledge, has been one of our family’s faves since we first saw her in Keeping Up Appearances. She’s best known for her role as snobby Hyacinth Buckett in the sitcom that aired in the early 1990s. But she also had a long stage career, especially in musical theater, and appeared in several movies. Hiram and I spied her recently in the Sidney Poitier hit, To Sir with Love.
During a recent visit to a neighboring town, we visited the local library which has an extensive collection of American and British television DVDs. We came home with the first season of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, which mystery buffs on this side of the big pond watched on the PBS Mystery series from 1995 to 1998. Who do you suppose plays Hetty, who on her sixtieth birthday decides she’s not with life and becomes a private investigator?
If you guessed Patricia Routledge you are, as the British say, spot on.
If Routledge played Hyacinth Buckett with a broad comedic brush 0 how else could she play such a character? – she portrayed Hetty with a finer, dramatic brush enhanced with frequent humorous strokes. Her relationship with her husband will make you chuckle, and her famous intuitions will leave you scratching your head. Her performances are a delight to watch.
Derek Benfield plays his role as Hetty’s grumpy, long suffering husband convincingly. You might recognize him from If her young assistant, Geoffrey Shawcroft, looks familiar to you, don’t be surprised. You’re seeing a much younger version, much taller of Dominic Monaghan. He was Merry, the tallest hobbit in the Lord of the Rings movies.
My only complaint about some of the episodes in the series is that they end rather abruptly, so abruptly that the mystery is sometimes solved in the sentence before the music rises and the final credits roll.
No matter how abrupt the endings, the series is worth watching. Patricia Routledge, who is still alive and kicking at age 81, is a national treasure you won’t want to miss.
