"Actor: John Graham Davies"

• Hetty Wainthropp Investigates - Complete | DVD | (14/08/2017) from £27.15   |  Saving you £-2.16 (N/A%)   |  RRP £24.99

  Hetty Wainthropp, a sprightly, intelligent pensioner, wakes on her 60th birthday and decides to become a private investigator. Armed with just her handbag and lots of gritty northern common sense, she proves she can easily outwit the professionals. Although she walks, takes the bus or occasionally borrows a scooter to get to the crime scene, with sidekick Geoffrey a teenager she caught shoplifting husband Robert and her steely determination, how can she fail? This boxed set follows Hetty and her Wainthropp Detective Agency from its humble beginnings, charting its progress as it grows into a highly successful and thriving business.

• Hetty Wainthropp Investigates - Series 4 | DVD | (10/09/2007) from £8.99   |  Saving you £11.00 (122.36%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The complete fourth series of the BBC detective drama based on the novels by David Cook starring Patricia Routledge as Hetty Wainthrope. Armed with little more than her pocketbook and her prodigious common-sense Hetty has proven that she can easily match wits with the best of them - even if she has to take the bus to get to the scene of a crime. Episodes are: 'Something to Treasure' 'Family Values' 'Digging for Dirt' 'Mind Over Muscle' 'Blood Relations' and 'For Love Nor Money'.

• Hetty Wainthropp Investigates - Series 1 | DVD | (06/04/2009) from £13.89   |  Saving you £9.09 (83.39%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Mystery buffs will find Hetty Wainthropp to be delightful and uniquely entertaining company. Hetty has just turned 60, but she is not about to "ride serene into the evening tide," as her doting husband so poetically puts it. "I'm not 60 and I never will be," Hetty proclaims. "I'm not a senior citizen." Hetty wants to matter, so she gets a job at her local Lancashire post office. But that wouldn't make for much of a miniseries. Before you can say "cheeky monkey," she has involved herself in a deadly case of pension-fund fraud, and made a splash on the front pages as a "Super Gran Sleuth." The redoubtable Patricia Routledge, best known as Hyacinth Bucket on the beloved Keeping Up Appearances), does lovely work as Hetty, who first appeared in David Cook's 1986 novel, Missing Persons (Cook co-wrote the six first-season episodes contained here). Hetty is not as quaint as Miss Marple, nor her cases as seamy as Jane Tennison's Prime Suspect mysteries. She is a formidable character in her own right, opening her own private detective agency, and recruiting a 17-year-old shoplifter (Dominic Monaghan from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) to be her "devoted sidekick." A rogue cop, a roving arsonist, and other unsavory characters are no match for the woman who won't rest until things add up. As one police inspector grudgingly admits, "She's an extraordinary woman. She's no Miss Marple, but..." But, indeed. --Donald Liebenson