The title is odd, since there is no murder or anything else taking place at the opera. In fact, this being a star vehicle for Diana Rigg, the murder mystery is irrelevant. Rigg plays Mrs. Bradley, a celebrity private eye, who does her detecting in opulent 1920s settings. She's a wealthy widow with a chauffeur-driven Rolls who wears a different stunning costume and hat in every scene. Also odd, the 61-year-old Rigg is wearing a hairstyle that Louise Brooks wore when she was 22, but according to Rigg, this dark bob was necessary to provide the proper background for the hats and bejeweled headbands.
Another oddity is her youngish chauffeur, whose role is ambiguous. Unlike Dr. Watson, George is an employee, not a friend or colleague and his role serves no purpose other than to be the means by which Mrs. B imparts information to the viewer. Also, the hints that his relationship with the stylish but elderly Mrs. B is romantic is slightly repellent.
Rigg is an actress I like, a lot, but as Mrs. B, her smug faces and rolling of eyes and little winks to the audience fail to have the effect the script writers intended, which supposedly was to endear her to us by having her snicker up her fox furs at bourgeois respectability. Her liberal attitudes - not especially unusual in the early 20th century among the upper class, according to biographies of Idina Sackville etal - are today the common attitudes of the middle and lower classes and the cultivated raciness of Mrs. B in the 1920s is no longer daring or eccentric.
Only 4 episodes in this series were filmed, indicating a lack of interest on the part of the BBC audience. Unfortunately for Mrs. B, in order to interest today's audience she would have to take off her clothes and crawl under the bed covers with George. Wonder why the producers didn't think of this.