Poirot

Producers are getting jittery again. Large-scale shows look risky when a single infection can postpone an entire show. Hence Poirot and More in the West End. This is a conversation piece in which David Suchet talks about his career as Agatha Christie’s most celebrated nosy parker. Not much technical rehearsal is needed and Suchet relies on the support of a single performer, Geoffrey Wansell, who feeds him easy-peasy questions. Scrapping the production would hardly cost the earth. The pair are old friends but they seem to be at war in the costume department. Suchet looks like a Blair clone in a dark blue blazer and a white, open-necked shirt. Wansell’s

Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s decision to dedicate 85 minutes of primetime Easter Monday television to a books-related documentary was never likely to result in a steely Leavisite engagement with literature. Nor, of course, should it. Even so, it was hard to avoid a dowager-like shudder when, for example, one contributor declared that Agatha Christie ‘will never be surpassed as the world’s greatest novelist’ — especially when the contributor was that well-known literary critic Lesley Joseph. Or when Danny John-Jules suggested that a murder is ‘the last thing you’d expect’ in a book set on