BY STEWART SLATER
The 1970’s version of Death on the Nile is one of my favourite comfort films. There is something infectious about the good time Peter Ustinov and David Niven are so obviously having while Angela Lansbury is never less than joyous as she chews the scenery and much of the cast in her portrayal of Salome Otterbourne, the fictional Jilly Cooper of the 1920’s.
But that is about as far as I go with Agatha Christie. The books have always left me a bit cold, while the reverence with which the David Suchet Poirot treated its source material always struck me as faintly ridiculous for what are, at heart, crossword puzzles with corpses.
It was, thus, with no great excitement that I settled down to watch the Beeb’s flagship production of Murder Is Easy over Christmas. Having never read the book, I had no expectations, no dog in this particular fight. All I wanted was to be entertained.
As you may be aware, the Beeb has, in its wisdom, decided to “update” the source material. In the original, the main character is British, a former policeman in India, who, having returned to Blighty, decides to investigate some suspected murders in the countryside (basically, George Orwell becomes the hero of Midsomer Murders). In the new version, he is a Nigerian. In the novel, crimes solved, he heads off to marry the helpmeet he has met on the case; in the TV programme, they separate as he returns home to fight for independence.
It was presumably in an attempt to render this plot twist plausible that Christie’s 1939 became the BBC’s early 1950’s. But, as various people have said, everything is connected to everything else. One change can help the adapter make one point they want about the modern world, but raise questions over others. The complaints by the poorer villagers about two tier medical provision offered by the local doctor (yay, NHS!) might have made sense pre-war, but by the time the TV series was set, the national religion was well established. Equally, the “German Race Science” (boo, racism!) of which the GP was so fond might have seemed plausible in the 1930’s but had rather fallen out of fashion over the subsequent decade.
The arriviste lord whose war profiteering (boo, dodgy PPE contracts!) bought him his title seems oddly keen to tell everyone exactly how he had made his money, despite the social opprobrium it would, no doubt, have brought him in real life (Gracie Fields never quite recovered her popularity, having been seen to have done the wrong thing by moving to America – albeit for defensible reasons – during the conflict). He also has a fondness for African Art (boo, cultural looting!) at a time when anyone seeking, like him, to buy status would be knee deep in Old Masters (the first Western auction of African Art took place in the 1970’s).
Drama is, as luvvies never cease to tell us, about the suspension of disbelief and changes which do not interrupt that can be interesting. The first couple of series of Sherlock (before the adapters were seduced by their own cleverness and invented a new character) worked because they took the original stories and asked what would need to change for them to appear plausible in today’s world. Thus, Watson writes a blog, not stories for a newspaper (it is slightly depressing that he could remain the injured veteran of a colonial misadventure in Afghanistan). Holmes’ enthusiasm for cutting-edge forensics would be hard to pull off in a flat given the kit now required, so a scientist had to be invented. But, having rendered Sherlock believable for today’s world, the adapters stopped and let the story unfold as before.
They could do this because they were not trying to say anything. They were playing a parlour game just as Conan Doyle and Christie had before them and the parlour game was interesting enough in itself.
By contrast, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre did have things to say – the NHS is good, racism is bad, similar insights of similar profundity – and was so keen to say them that she frequently jolted the viewer back into disbelief as the thought, “Really? I’m not sure about that” floated across protesting synapses whenever verisimilitude was sacrificed to allow an IMPORTANT MESSAGE to be shoe-horned in. The Sherlock stories were treated as an end in themselves, Murder Is Easy became a vehicle for 2020’s right-think, fashionable nostrum piled on fashionable nostrum, like a glutton’s plate at a Christmas lunch with similar consequences for digestibility.
At one level this is unimportant, two hours wasted on a drama is far from a crisis, but it is emblematic of a wider trend, an inability to allow the trivial to remain trivial. A detective story is a diversion, nothing more. It is a way of idly passing some time or, if you wish to exercise the little grey cells, a problem with which one can wrestle, Sudoku with words. Neither Conan Doyle nor Christie were trying to say anything insightful about the human condition (indeed, one of the former’s reasons for killing off his most popular character was that he thought he had important things to say, and Holmes was an inappropriate mouthpiece for them). Entertaining was enough for them.
By contrast, the Beeb’s flagship Christmas offering had to mean something. It had to have a message. It could not just leave its viewers entertained, it had to leave them improved. Like taking the knee before a football match, it had to add another brick to the progressive New Jerusalem.
Propaganda can be art – Leni Riefenstahl’s films are acknowledged masterpieces, we still read Rome’s Golden Age poets though they had taken Augustus’ sestertius – but it has to be done well. Murder Is Easy was not. Its message was both banal – Britain’s attitudes to race in the 1950’s were not as enlightened as today’s, well I never! – and too obvious to be ignored so it failed both as propaganda (few EDL members are likely to watch it and become converts to open borders) and as entertainment.
In this it is not alone. Much of today’s cultural product is dully didactic, designed to display its creator’s fidelity to the current mores rather than entertain, to allow them to see themselves as thinkers of important thoughts, and writers of important words. But too often, aiming for the stars, they fail to hit even the moon.
In this, they do both themselves and their audience a disservice. For we need to be entertained, to switch off and enter a world where nothing matters, where we can just follow a story as we did when children. The two billion copies Agatha Christie has sold attest to that. Nor is there any lack of nobility in giving the people what they want – Victor Hugo and Emile Zola may be buried in the Pantheon, but so is Alexandre Dumas, 19th century France’s answer to Dan Brown. Conan Doyle is read just as much, if not more than Dostoyevsky.
At the end of the day, a little humility is needed. A book which has survived long enough to be adapted is likely to be a good book. A good book is, by definition, hard to improve. Better to produce a good, entertaining adaptation of a good work than a bad, boring adaptation of a good work. For all the sophomoric glee that the thought of tweaking the nose of the gammons might provoke, our cultural overlords would do well to remember the old medical mantra, “First, do no harm”.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.