Oliver's Travels
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Oliver's Travels
1996 (US), 1995 (UK)
What's a 6-Letter
Word for Detective?
from The New York Times, 29 September
1996
by Mel Gussow
Alan Bates's Oliver,
anagrammatician
and puzzle solver.
The title character in Oliver's
Travels, a new four-part BBC mini-series on "Mystery,"
is a compulsive solver of crossword puzzles and an expert anagrammatician.
Words are his preoccupation. He is even more intelectual than
Morse or Dalgliesh. An academic turned sleuth, Oliver journeys
through England on the trail of a murderer, drawing clues from
the daily crossword.
 The series seems made to order for Alan Bates.
He was not, however, the original choice of the author, Alan
Plater. He dedicated the novel on which the series is based to
his childhood friend, Tom Courteney, and wanted him to play the
character. The BBC insisted on Mr Bates, as it turns out, with
cause. With his quick wit and air of absent-mindedness, he is
related to many of the actor's other characters: writers, artists,
teachers.
These roles include Simon Hench in Simon
Gray's Otherwise Engaged and the title character in Mr
Gray's Butley, and, on television, the surrogate for John
Mortimer in A Voyage Round my Father, and Guy Burgess
in An Englishman Abroad, by Alan Bennett.
When it is suggested that there is a common
thread through these characters, beginning with their choice
of profession, Mr Bates looks abashed. "Yes, I suppose there
is," he said. "I seem to be drawn to things that are
not straight down the line. Oliver is offbeat." Oliver is
a master of tergiversation, changing his mind in midsentence
and rambling away on tangents. He is a born wanderer, mentally
and geographically, and something similar might be said about
Mr Bates.
Go for the thing
that touches you most
 He regards
his career as "maverick" because "it has to do
with what comes along at the moment." "Occasionally
I do things against my inner voice," he said, "but
you really should go for the thing that touches you most even
if you don't quite know why it does."
In contrast to many of his peers Mr Bates
has moved reflexively among the media, building a body of work
in each field while maintaining his independence and unpredictability.
Theater remains his preference. This summer he acted in two plays
in England, Simply Disconnected, a sequel, 25 years after,
to Otherwise Engaged, and Fortune's Fool, an adaptation
of a Turgenev play. Featured in both is the actor's son, Benedick.
Mr Bates toured them in anticipaton of moving one or both to
London and perhaps later to Broadway.
He was on the road with Simply Disconnected
in Malvern. Leaving the theater after the matinee, he was surrounded
by fans who had seen him in the play and remembered him from
other performances as far back as Women in Love (1969)
and as recent as Oliver's Travels, which was presented
on British television last year.
Crumpets would
be great
 In a nearby
cafe, he searched the menu. "What's a melon boat?"
he asked the waitress, who answered: "A boat of melon. I
think there might be a cherry in it." Then she announced
that the kitchen was closed from 3 to 5 p.m. and that she was
serving only crumpets, toasted tea cakes and hot croissants.
"Oh, crumpets would be great," said the ever amenable
Mr Bates. "You've got crumpets?" The waitress said
no, and, crestfallen, the actor changed his order: "Tea,
tea cake, toasted please. If we're here at 5, I might order a
melon boat."
The dialogue was beginning to sound like
a scene from Oliver's Travels, which blends humor with
whimsy. In this mischievous comic caper, Oliver, a lecturer in
comparative religion, is "made redundant" by his university
and casually embarks on a trip across England to find his favorite
crossword puzzle maker, who goes by the name of Aristotle. Stumbling
on a murder, Oliver is carried away by his curiosity. He is joined
by an inquisitive policewoman (Sinead Cusack), and, naturally, romance follows
the mystery.
An incessant player with language, Oliver
says the anagram for his name is the french word voiler,
meaning to cloak, veil or conceal. That just about sums up the
character, who reveals little about himself while insistently
probing others. Even when he is on the run, he always seems to
be preparing the next day's lecture notes, or instructing Ms
Cusack in some arcane subject.
As the plot thickens,
the souffle lightens
"It's a nice original piece,"
Mr Bates said. "I liked it when I read it and I liked doing
it. It's quite ingenious, with a thriller running through it.
The thriller is tied into the crossword. It's quirky, but it's
also got a philosophy and a love of history and place, a real
sense of the past." It is the historical aspect of the series
that he found especially appealing.
In searching for the identity of the killer,
Mr Bates and Ms Cusack travel as far north as the Orkney Islands,
with stops at Hadrian's Wall and Eilean Donan Castle at the Kyle
of Lochalsh. Oliver did not pass through Derbyshire, where
Mr Bates lives (and where he was born 62 years ago). He said
one of the best things about Oliver -- and about acting
-- was the travel: "It was a great odyssey. I'm ashamed
to say that we went to places in my own country that I've never
been to before."
On the road to the Orkneys, there is enough local color to fill
a Rough Guide. In the supporting cast are a wise old gravestone
cutter (Peter Vaughan, who was the grandfather in The Choir),
a ubiquitous stranger (Bill Patterson) and the devious Baron
Kite (Miles Anderson) head of the Farquhar Group, named for the
restoration playwright George Farquhar, whose play The Recruiting
Officer provides the series with a motif. As the plot thickens,
the souffle lightens. Mr Plater has described his work as "low-key
comedy, charred at the edges with melancholy," and that
is precisely the tone that is captured.
Nut-and-mushroom
fritters
 With an
evening performance coming up, Mr Bates also had the character
of Simon Hench on his mind. In the new play, Simon's emotions
are still otherwise engaged. He is, the actor said, "a man
in reclusion." As in the earlier Gray play, people keep
coming to him to solve their problems. He prefers not to. "You
can't lead someone else's life for them," said Mr Bates.
"You can only be an observer and a listener."
Is there any connection to Oliver? In the
beginning, Oliver is such a noncommittal character. He thought
for a moment, then said, "Oliver's past is barely referred
to -- something about a wife who left him at a football match.
He's just letting the world be. I know people like that. They've
got a strength in the fact that they can survive alone. By simply
not pushing life and forcing events, he ends up with the right
person," meaning Ms Cusack's character. "She happens
to be rather an attractive policewoman."
Asked how he played such interiorized characters,
he said, "I'm not really sure because I don't know how you
act in the first place." The director of Simply Disconnected
[Richard Wilson] offered him some helpful advice. "He said,
'No acting, let the characters come over you, don't reach to
them.'" Mr Bates said. When Mr Bates acts, the character
becomes him. "I think actors are privileged," he said.
"Acting feeds you."
Realizing that it was after 5, he ordered
a melon boat (without the cherry) and nut-and-mushroom fritters.
When the food arrived, he ate it with evident relish. "If
you ever come here again," he said, "I recommend the
fritters." The actor spoke with enthusiasm, as Oliver does
when he solves a difficult crossword, or a murder mystery.
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