Easter triumph for traditional values

By BAZ BAMIGBOYE

Last updated at 07:59 14 March 2008


Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella called making The Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency 'a real labour of love, but lovely labour'.

Minghella's two-hour film, which receives its world premiere on BBC1 on Easter Monday, March 24, is a real TV treasure.

It is based on the best-selling novels written by Alexander McCall Smith about his fictional heroine Precious Ramotswe, or Mma Ramotswe as she's known: a 'traditionally built' African woman who establishes a detective agency in her homeland of Botswana.

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Detective work: Jill Scott and Lucian Msamati

On the case: Anika Noni Rose

She's played by soul star Jill Scott and, as Minghella told me, Jill emerges as a classy actress. Minghella summed up for me why the heroine works so well.

'Most of the violence in the stories is committed by animals, and what crimes there are tend to be solved over a cup of bush tea rather than with a fist or a gun. She's concerned less with the law than how to be good.'

The screenplay, by Minghella and Richard Curtis, I think vastly improves on the books which, though hugely popular, were never my particular cup of bush tea.

Minghella joked that he let Curtis write all the heavy stuff 'and I just wrote gags'. Well, however they divided their writing labours, the result is a script that has dialogue that dances across the screen with plenty of gentle humour.

'Is your husband missing, or did someone steal your cow?' is one line that amused me (I know .. . it doesn't take much).

Minghella and his team from Mirage, The Weinstein Company and BBC TV surrounded Ms Scott with some top-of-the-line co-stars led by Lucian Msamati as the lovesick Mr JLB Matekoni and the excellent Anika Noni Rose as secretary Grace Makutsi.

In August, filming will begin on 13 one-hour episodes, with the main leads returning and, I hope, the same A-list production values as in the version viewers will see on March 24.

• Minghella told me he has reunited with choreographer Jonathan Lunn, with whom he first collaborated 20 years ago, on a new piece called Self Assembly. It forms part of Reading Room, which Lunn's Dance Company performs at the Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall on June 5 and 6.

Anthony explained that Lunn's work hinges on the interplay between spoken and physical languages, and that Self Assembly imagines a relationship explained in the style of an IKEA instruction sheet!

Work by other writers, including Samuel Beckett, will also feature in Reading Room, and actors such as Juliet Stevenson, Miranda Richardson, Dexter Fletcher, Toby Jones, Rebecca Hall and Minghella himself will read the various texts.

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