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4 hours ago
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‘Tis the season, just, for your annual Agatha Christie. In recent years, the adaptations have been infused with the grief and instability of the postwar backdrop against which they all exist, and been given rich, dark, adult inflections by Sarah Phelps for the BBC.
The latest, however, is for Netflix by Chris Chibnall and we are back in the world of period costume, clipped vowels and dialogue infused with nothing but plot, designed to get the puzzle pieces recited into the right position for the next bit then the next bit then the solve – this time at the end of three very hour-long episodes.
We open with Iain Glen getting gored to death by a bull in Ronda, 1920. A note with a clock printed on it is delivered to him just before evisceration – because this is Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials and clocks are bloody everywhere.
We then cut to a party in a grand house being held by northern industrialists, the Cootes, who have rented the house from Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter) because she has class but no cash and they have cash but no class. You get the idea. If you don’t, there’s a scene where Lady Coote cheats at bridge, so we all know where we stand. But I do have to say this: if you’re going to have posh people snotting all over others, you should make sure they’re not spouting grammatical errors everywhere, unless it’s deliberate and ironically intended. If not, you need to know that it’s “the difference between you and me” not “the difference between you and I” and assorted other points. Is this the smallest hill I will die on? Yes.
The daughter of the house, Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is having a pretty good time at the party. Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), the best friend of her late brother, killed in the war (“Life is far too short. We’ve all learned that the hard way”), asks her to dinner and makes it clear he plans to propose. Unfortunately, he is found dead in his bed the next morning, apparently after a sleeping draught overdose. But he was a notoriously sound sleeper, who never had need of a sleeping draught! That fact was so well known that his two prankster pals had hidden eight alarm clocks (or dials) around the room to wake him up that morning. But why are they now all on the mantlepiece? And why is one of them missing (making seven)? And why is the missing one later found broken on the lawn?
After a butterfingered working-class policeman breaks everything he touches at the potential crime scene, Bundle decides to investigate the matter herself. The Cootes leave in a rush, only stopping to make one of the servants cry and for Sir Oswald to gesture at the Caterham pile and announce “I can access this world whenever I flourish my chequebook. They say you can’t buy class but it’s the cheapest, most readily available purchase in all of England!” I know it’s early days but if I hear a more monkey-typed speech this year I’ll be surprised, and horrified.
By this stage of proceedings, I realise this is Agatha Christie by way of Enid Blyton, made for an international market that thinks Downton Abbey is real and that Paddington Bear is holding the queen’s hand in heaven. Otherwise it was commissioned to teach complainers about remakes a lesson. “Alright – you’ll learn the hard way why some of Agatha’s back catalogue remains undeveloped and next time we give you another Poirot, you’ll take your Belgian lumps and like it.”
On we go, through the motions, somehow watching a production more dated than a Joan Hickson Marple would be, as Bundle looks at telltale stains on furniture and interviews crying maids, anonymous notes arrive, letters mentioning “seven dials” but not what it means are discovered, trips to London are undertaken, the identity of Iain Glen is revealed and the prankster helping her (the entirely wasted Nabhaan Rizwan) is shot (“You’ve been shot!” cries Bundle as she cradles the dying man who is presumably both aware of this fact and unlikely to want to be reminded). At last Martin Freeman arrives as real detective Supt Battle. As Battle brings order to the investigation, so Freeman brings some credibility to the televisual proceedings, pulling the thing together and up by virtue of his presence and an instinctive feel for how wholeheartedly and firmly these things need to be played. It’s a relief, but whether it’s enough to get you through all three uninspired, pedestrian hours of a supposed espionage thriller is up to you. Retro without flair and full of modern concerns about everyone’s emotional wellbeing is a mix that doesn’t work for me.
