On the Third Day of Christmas the BBC gives us … one of the least congenial Agatha Christie adaptations I can think of.
I have nothing, obviously, against murder at Christmas, though in Murder is Easy there is something of an embarrassment of riches. It’s the way, yet again, that contemporary preoccupations are foisted onto a period piece where they are simply not at home.
It’s not that the novel is good enough to get worked up about. It’s not, frankly, one of the great lady’s best, though she does prove, yet again, that spinster ladies are a force to be reckoned with.
And even for those of us who are up for festive homicide, there are rather too many in this story – I lost count after four – for us to care especially about the victims. Personally I stopped caring after the maid who swallowed hat paint instead of cough linctus.
Still, the beginning is promising. It would take a hard heart not to be entertained by an elderly lady called Miss Pinkerton – here, a daffy Penelope Wilton – unburdening herself on a train to a sympathetic young retired policeman, Luke Fitzwilliam, just back from India, about the number of murders in her little village. She’s off to Scotland Yard to tell them. Except, you know what? She doesn’t get there.
But before we even get to that point, this production, adapted from the novel by Siân Ejiwunmi-Le Berre goes off-piste with a very odd (for Agatha Christie) prelude showing a young black man – David Jonsson as a very comely Luke Fitzwilliam – running through a forest, pursued by unseen forces. And whereas the original detective is former Indian service, this Luke is Nigerian and is taking himself off to London to work for a bigwig baronet in Whitehall.
But you don’t think the production is going to leave it at that, do you? Oh no. No sooner does Luke find his cousin at a West African Education Centre, he’s in for a roasting from his cousin’s wife for working for a Colonial Butcher and, for good measure she declares Luke is self-colonised and collaborating with the oppressors.
No wonder the poor man takes himself off to Miss Pinkerton’s village in deepest shiredom to investigate her serial killer theory. And if it seems far fetched for him to try to pass himself off as a cultural anthropologist investigating links between death practice in the shires and Nigeria, you can blame Agatha Christie.
Inevitably, Luke encounters all the petty prejudices you might have expected from the locals – not least Lord Whitfield (Tom Riley hamming it up for all he’s worth), a boy from the village made good through war profiteering.
It's not just colonialism that Ejiwunmi-Le Berre is gunning for with this adaptation. Nope. It’s the wicked lord, who’s out to grind the faces of the poor by using his ill gotten gains to set up a new model town.
The rustics resent it, and so does the tiresome vicar, Humbleby (Mark Bonnar) who lambasts Lord Whitfield over dinner for not spending the money on affordable housing, thereby ventriloquising Angela Rayner.
The trouble with this village – and the fault is the author’s – is that there are just too many potential serial killers in it. One is Mathew Baynton (Horrible Histories) as Dr Thomas who signals his horrible nature by showing Fitzwilliam his little volume on Racial Selection; the quest for the Master Race.
It's hard to take the novel seriously, and it’s impossible to take this silly, self-aggrandising, preposterous adaptation at its own estimation. Give it a miss. Look, at this time of year, there are charades to be played, pudding to eat up, relations to entertain; don’t shun any opportunity not to watch this. Murder may be Easy; watching it is the hard part.
