Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the start of Towards Zero, BBC1’s latest Agatha Christie adaptation, a man we later discovered to be a lawyer addressed the camera. ‘I like a good detective story,’ he told us. ‘But they begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder’ – which should instead ‘come at the end of a long chain of cause and effect’. Get Millie Black opened with a voice-over explaining that ‘This is just another story about Jamaica… But like all stories in this country, it’s a ghost story’. As it transpired, both programmes followed their own prescripts – but in one case, with distinctly mixed results.
A major selling point of Towards Zero was Anjelica Huston as Lady Tressilian, the bed-ridden matriarch of a large Devon pile in the 1930s. Naturally, it wasn’t long before she was joined by such house guests as a family black sheep from the colonies, a posh cad, a shady valet and two brittle women who signalled their raciness by sometimes wearing trousers.
These people did, however, have one thing in common: Lady T. disapproved of them all. The worthiest recipient of her unceasing froideur was probably her nephew Neville, who’d elected to arrive with his new wife Kay and his old one Audrey, whom he’d recently and bitterly divorced.
This decision proved an implausibility the programme never really got over. Meanwhile, Kay and Audrey spent much of the first episode apparently engaged in a competition as to who could wear more lipstick, and flashing little smiles of triumph whenever they received some of Neville’s strictly alternating attention.
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