#THE LADIES NO 1 DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES#

Genre Audiobooks Buy No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency Vol. Meanwhile, Mma Ramotswe discovers an unknown relative and a family mystery and reluctantly agrees to stand for election to the local council.įeaturing joyful African music and a superb cast, these delightful, warm-hearted dramatisations star Janice Acquah as Mma Ramotswe, with Nadine Marshall as Mma Makutsi, Joseph Marcell as Mr JLB Matekoni, Steve Toussaint as Mr Polopetsi and Sarah Niles as Mma Potokwani. In the second two-parter, The House of Unexpected Sisters and The Colours of All the Cattle, the Agency investigates a saleswoman's claims of unfair dismissal. They must also extricate Mr Polopetsi from a dodgy business scheme and try to solve the problem of Fanwell's stray dog - all while waiting for the rain to come. The first two-part story, The Fat Cattle Club and Precious and Grace, sees Mma Ramotswe and her dauntless co-director tasked by a Canadian lady, Susan Peters, to find her childhood home and her old nursemaid, Rosie.

The pilot, while offering ample opportunity for the director to indulge in painting the grand, international tableaus that characterized his operatic feature epics, also exposes his tendency toward easy retreat into no-impact treacle when confronted with a culture not easily penetrated, even by an enthusiastic tourist.The fifth and final collection of BBC Radio 4 dramatisations, adapted by Alexander McCall Smith from his own best-selling books.īotswana's best - and only - lady detective, Precious Ramotswe, returns for one last time to solve some surprising and challenging cases, aided as ever by the invaluable Mma Makutsi (and copious cups of red bush tea.). Unable to return for further episodes, of course, is Minghella, who died last year and ends his career on this low note. Matekoni (Lucian Msamati) are equally subtle creations, as are the philandering husbands, boo-hooing wives, strong-arming gangsters, and witch doctors that pop in and out of the feature-length pilot (directed by the late Anthony Minghella) at a rapid clip, leaving little-to-no impression in their wake.Īlthough the fluffy, comic imbroglios, tentative flowerings of romance, and one-shot-deal cases that form the pilot clearly point the series’s way forward, one of Ramotswe’s investigations, into a presumed kid-snatching, edges into nervier territory and suggests a plan to balance the episodic pap with occasional threads that examine Africa’s myriad big-picture problems from the vantage point of one of its success-story nations. Flamboyantly gay hairdresser BK (Desmond Dube) and lovesick-over-Precious mechanic Mr. Rose, talented performer though she is, can do little with this role other than rehash the wheezy cliché of an über-nerd rendered humorless by a display of excessive pride over a minor accomplishment. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency-the implied joke being that it’s number one by default-and hires hot, bespectacled dork and champion typist Mma Makutsi (Anika Noni Rose) as a secretary. Luxuriating in tea-sipping, lazy-afternoon provincialism, as main character Precious Ramotswe (R&B singer Jill Scott) does throughout, is perfectly fine, but less than fine is the irritating lack of interest she demonstrates in gadgetry, covert surveillance, and other tools of her supposedly chosen profession, to the point that, were she ever to meet other detectives, she’d likely find that she has little in common with them.Ĭashing in on an inheritance of cows after her father’s death, Ramotswe pours everything she has into creating the No. In attempting to honor McCall Smith’s lavish descriptions of the book’s locale, Botswana, Ladies’ starts strong in selling us on its bush-life bona fides (cows and cars sharing space, impromptu a cappella singing), but quickly fails in its most important job-rendering, in a believable and/or entertaining way, the titular agency, a startup sleuthing firm staffed only by two and housed in a dilapidated post office without phone service, let alone any other technology that might be of use to a working detective.

#THE LADIES NO 1 DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES#

1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, a sub-Saharan-flavored spin on Murder, She Wrote adapted from the popular book series by Zimbabwe-born Alexander McCall Smith. The African veldt was never so picturesque nor its inhabitants so one-dimensional as in The No.

The ladies no 1 detective agency