"Actor: James Booker"

• Agatha Christie's Partners In Crime | DVD | (09/02/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  First broadcast in the early 1980s, Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime stars James Warwick and Francesca Annis as the husband-and-wife team of detectives Tommy and "Tuppence" Beresford. Together they zoom around 1920's England in a very posh car and solve all kinds of high-society crimes, from forgery at an exclusive nightclub to the mysterious disappearance of an Arctic explorer's fiancée. The show benefits from two charming lead performances and some wonderful period details--Annis seems to change her hat and her dress every 30 seconds--but it is at best only moderately entertaining. The years have not been kind to this type of mystery, in which murder is the equivalent of an especially tricky crossword puzzle, offering the amateur sleuths an opportunity to avoid boredom and have a terribly thrilling time. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple survive both in print and on film, because the central characters are interesting enough to make us forgive weak plotting and a lack of depth, but Tommy and Tuppence don't have the staying power of Christie's more famous creations. Their adventures are fun in small doses, and if you're in the mood for some witty repartee, but otherwise this series is little more than a quaint relic of a bygone age. --Simon Leake

• Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures | DVD | (06/09/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £9.99

  This light-hearted romp through Royal India presents a world of maharajas palaces imperiled art objects and the foreign collectors who will stop at nothing to possess them. Peggy Ashcroft and Larry Pine star as two rapacious art collectors who came to the decaying Art Deco palace of a young Maharaja (Victor Banerjee) to examine a legendary collection of Indian miniature paintings. While vying with each other to get the pictures away from the royal couple. Nicknamed Georgie and Bonnie as children by their Scottish governess they must also divine the true motives of the Indian curator of the collection (Saeed Jaffrey) who is in league with the Maharaja's beautiful sister (Aparna Sen) and may be working against them. Amidst the backdrop of lavish tourist entertainments Christmas parties fireworks and even an English ghost a desperate game of palace intrigue will determine the ultimate resting place of the priceless paintings.