It’s Agatha Christie-mas again!

After last year’s brilliant And Then There Were None, Kim Cattrall and Toby Jones star in The Witness For The Prosecution – adapted from a little-known short story by the whodunnit queen

Friends and family of the actor Toby Jones received a bizarre Christmas card from him in December 2010. It showed Toby, star of the sitcom Detectorists and the Hunger Games movies, having a knife plunged deep into his chest, the stark image tempered only by a backdrop of snow.

‘There was blood in the picture too, but at least that looked sort of festive,’ laughs Toby. ‘I played Samuel Ratchett in ITV’s version of Murder On The Orient Express that year, and his fate was to be stabbed on board the train by various people. David Morrissey, Barbara Hershey, Eileen Atkins... I ended up being stabbed by most of the actors’ union Equity! So I used the still photograph as my Christmas card.’

The dark whodunnit, starring David Suchet as detective Hercule Poirot, was a huge success for ITV that year and proved that Christmas dramas written by the great Agatha Christie don’t need to be all country house drawing rooms and crossword puzzle clues. Her brilliant but brutal And Then There Were None, starring Aidan Turner in his first TV role after Poldark, attracted an audience of nearly ten million last December, and this year the BBC have gone for another of Christie’s darker works, The Witness For The Prosecution, with Toby once more in a prominent role as dogged solicitor John Mayhew.

At the heart of the story is Leonard Vole, a First World

War veteran accused of murdering wealthy heiress Emily French, played by Sex And The City’s Kim Cattrall. It seems an open-and-shut case. He was the sole beneficiary of her will and was seen leaving her London home by Emily’s housekeeper around the time of the murder. A guilty verdict seems inevitable. Can Leonard’s solicitor

John Mayhew save him, and what part will the accused’s lover, singer Romaine, played by Andrea Riseborough, have in saving his bacon or sending him to the gallows?

‘It’s a story that may confound people’s expectations of an Agatha Christie story,’ says Toby. ‘Before the script arrived I associated her with clockwork plots involving a murder that, however crazed, always gave way to the restoration of order. Order isn’t necessarily restored in The Witness For The Prosecution, it’s something from a far darker age.’

The two-part drama is certainly dark. Although set in a plush part of central London in the 1920s, it was filmed in Liverpool, Lancashire and Manchester, the programme-makers digging deep to find locations that were suitably grim and atmospheric. Vole’s trial takes place in a disused courthouse in Liverpool, and the police cell where he’s held beforehand lies in the bowels of a former fire station in Manchester, a cold, damp place full of spooky echoes.

There are dashes of glamour though: the theatre in Walthamstow, east London, where Romaine performs in a variety show is actually the beautifully preserved Winter Gardens in Morecambe on the Lancashire coast. And Kim Cattrall was able to film in more salubrious surroundings than most of her fellow

cast members: the Liverpool set for her character’s London townhouse is the last word in elegance and style.

Kim was delighted to be filming in her home city, even if her character does come to a sticky end. ‘I moved to Canada when I was a baby but it was terrific to come back to where I was born and film here for the first time,’ says Kim, who’s best known for her role as the fun-loving Samantha Jones in Sex And The City. ‘And it was great to appear in an Agatha Christie too. I’ve been familiar with Agatha Christie stories most of my life. My mum always had her books in the house when I was growing up.’

It wouldn’t have taken Kim’s mother Gladys long to get through the original version of The Witness For The Prosecution. Christie wrote it as a short story just 23 pages long. ‘People were con-

Billy Howle as Leonard (above) and (top) Andrea Riseborough as Romaine cerned about me turning it into a TV drama, how I’d make it last for two hours on screen,’ says writer Sarah Phelps, who also adapted And Then There Were None. ‘I said, “What are you talking about? I’ve had to cut it down from three hours!” There was so much in the original story that could be developed, some throwaway comments and descriptions that made me think, “I can run with this.” Like the solicitor John Mayhew, with his cough and glasses. Why has he got this cough, and what are the consequences? Those questions are answered in our version.’

Toby Jones spends most of the first episode coughing while simultaneously trying to save Leonard’s skin. ‘He’s troubled physically and mentally,’ says Toby. ‘Mayhew is haunted by the war, for reasons that are revealed, and breaks down in tears when he sees Leonard’s lover Romaine perform on stage.’

Toby could draw on knowledge close at hand when it came to playing a legal eagle. ‘My wife’s a criminal defence barrister so I know the processes Mayhew would go through because she deals with solicitors all the time, and she’s given me guidance on a couple of technical questions.

‘But I’m not sure what she’ll make of the drama. Barristers are constantly surprised when they watch shows like legal drama Silk that they’re not like the real thing. They don’t seem to realise that TV can’t honour every conven- tion of the legal process. I’ve already run some stuff from The Witness For The Prosecution by my wife and she said, “OK, all right,” but with a slightly resigned air.’ Andrea Riseborough, best known for her role as Margaret Thatcher in TV movie The Long Road To Finchley, plays the enigmatic Romaine. We first see her hiding in a trench on the Western Front as Leonard takes cover from the fighting. It looks spookily authentic – but of course it wasn’t. ‘It was a ploughed field and a bit of smoke,’ admits director Julian Jarrold, ‘though hopefully it’s an epic opening shot.’

It cer tainly made an impression on Andrea. ‘My great-grandad died at the Somme and I found filming those scenes so moving. It was hard to see Billy Howle, who plays Leonard, out in no man’s land, frightened for his life.’

Much of the second episode takes place in court as Leonard’s fate is decided. It’s a chance for David Haig – best known as obnoxious DI Derek Grim in the Rowan Atkinson sitcom The Thin Blue Line and recently seen in Penny Dreadful – to shine as Vole’s barrister Sir Charles Carter. ‘Carter is written as this very vain man with a moustache of which he’s clearly very proud,’ says David. ‘His first scene is in a toilet where he’s discussing the case with the solicitor Mayhew, and I asked the props department to source a tiny little comb, so you see me brushing his moustache and eyebrows in a way that would speak volumes about his vanity.

‘That helped me get into the part, as did the amazing dark-wooded room in Liverpool where we filmed the courtroom scenes, the kind of place that lends itself to theatre and drama.

‘But because there were so many people in court – 100 extras and 14 regular members of cast – I had to keep repeating the lines to different sides of the court to capture different camera angles. I must have said the same 200 lines at least 40 times over the course of the five days we were filming there. That was pretty intense.’

Sarah Phelps, a former EastEnders scriptwriter, believes The Witness For The Prosecution will capture the public’s imagination in the way And Then There Were None did a year ago. ‘It’s brutal, sexual, thrilling and dangerous,’ she booms. ‘ I’ve had a ball adapting it and being a part of it.’

The Witness For The Prosecution is on BBC1 on Boxing Day at 9pm and on Tuesday 27 December at 9pm.