Netflix’s share price has collapsed and a major factor, people are saying, is its relentless pushing of agendas. I think I have the solution. Perhaps it should follow the BritBox model and instead of making dramas it feels that audiences ought to like – e.g. the very creepy-sounding He’s Expecting, a Japanese series about a man who gets pregnant – it should instead capitalise on our growing yearning for a lost age of chocolate-box innocence and relative normality.
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is a good example. Written and directed by Hugh Laurie, it’s the kind of Agatha Christie adaptation they don’t make any more: fairly light on discordant, anachronistic diversity casting and shoehorned lesbianism, rich in affectionate period detail, agreeable motor cars and crafty old publicans played by Paul Whitehouse dispensing warm ale.
Perhaps, instead of making dramas it feels people ought to like, Netflix should follow the BritBox model
The star of the show is Lucy Boynton as perky aristocratic sleuth Lady Frankie Derwent. And I’m not just saying that because her dad Graham used to send me on splendid freebies like the one to Africa’s most remote safari lodge on the Namibia/Angola border in his days as the Telegraph’s travel editor. No, I like her because she’s natural, captivating, believable – and a gentle reproof to the hammier elements in the cast, such as Laurie’s old Cambridge Footlights mucker Emma Thompson, who these days seems capable only of playing exaggerated versions of her luvvie self.
This one opens on a Welsh links course. Bobby Jones (Will Poulter), a former Royal Navy lieutenant, is out caddying for the village doctor when he hears a terrible scream. A man in a cream suit stuffed with clues (photographs; a fish key ring) has tumbled off a cliff and his last and only words are the series’ gnomic title.
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