Agatha Christie's Marple
Geraldine McEwan Stars in A Revamped Detective Series
A very new take on Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories, featuring an all-star cast: Simon Callow, Richard E. Grant, Dawn French, Catherine Tate...
Geraldine McEwan stars in Agatha Christie’s Marple, the newest incarnation on the small screen of the spinster detective. Where previous adaptations of the Miss Marple books were content to leave her as a fluffy, kindly old lady from a country village, Agatha Christie’s Marple has other ideas.
A Whole New World
The landscape of Agatha Christie’s novels has been changed and updated for this series, in what amounts to revisionism: jazz, lesbianism and home-made Gin play a far larger apart in Agatha Christie’s Marple than anyone can remember from the books. And Miss Marple appears to have annexed several cases, such as Ordeal By Innocence and By The Pricking of My Thumbs, which did not originally belong to her. Some of the murders also appear to have been done by different people this time round.
Camping Up the 30s
Such wholesale changes to a much-loved and well-known character like Miss Marple are not going to pass without protest. The series has attracted controversy from long-time fans of Agatha Christie, on the grounds that the works of the “Queen of Crime” were fine as they were, without needing to be “sexed up” to make good television. On the other hand, there’s a touch of camp in the sheer abandon with which the screenwriters have chopped and changed the old stories, which suggests they’re less than absolutely serious about the whole business. The recent version of Betram’s Hotel not only made the charming old English hotel into a haven for Nazis escaping to South America, it involved Miss Marple wandering into a jam session led by Louis Armstrong. They cannot, surely, be quite serious.
Casting Success
Serious or not, the show has secured an array of British acting stars; Simon Callow, Dawn French, Mel Smith, Richard E. Grant and Robert Powell are only a handful of the extraordinary number of famous names who appear in various whodunnit guises. Now on its third series, Agatha Christie’s Marple must be attracting sufficient ratings to justify itself – and they can’t all be watching to complain about how it’s not the same as it used to be.
Admittedly it comes as a bit of a shock to meet Agatha Christie’s detective duo Tommy and Tuppence Beresford again, and discover that in the intervening years, Tommy’s become a bit of a chauvinist in the Foreign Office, and Tuppence has developed a drink problem, but there is one obvious benefit to all these changes to the plots. The smug types who’ve read the books can’t spoil the show by shouting out whodunnit, since the chances are they’ll be wrong...
