Cool cad Rufus makes Christie mystery magic
THE PALE HORSE BBC1, last night ★★★★★
NExT time you run a brush over your barnet and come away with stray hairs, it might be more than just your age. You’ve probably been cursed by witches.
All the characters were moulting like stuffed cats with mange in Agatha Christie’s creepiest mystery, The Pale Horse (BBC1).
Posh bunny-girl Thomasina (Poppy Gilbert) left locks of her red curls all over the dressing room at the Soho dive where she waggled her spangles for the clientele.
Aunt Clemency (Sarah Woodward), as gung-ho an old girl as you’ll find in the pages of Dame Agatha, was shedding her tresses by the fistful, and so was the stark-mad Miss Davis (Madeleine Bowyer). Either they were using the wrong shampoo or, by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked was out to get them.
And get them it did. None survived the first episode of this two-parter, directed by Leonora Lonsdale and adapted by Sarah Phelps from one of the Queen of Crime’s least-known novels. The Pale Horse was published in 1961, as the writer was struggling to adapt to the modern world of pop groups and washing machines. No one kept servants any more, which was a problem for a genre in which the butler was everybody’s prime suspect.
You can tell what the author thought of pop music: it kills the first character on screen, Delphine (Georgina Campbell), when her radio falls into the bath while plugged into the mains. Delphine had just paid a visit to the village of Much Deeping to see three witches who told her the fates held nothing good for her.
The Pale Horse is a clever choice for TV, because the story will be a genuine mystery to most viewers. I’d far rather see this than Sir Kenneth Branagh’s remake of Death On The Nile, due out in cinemas this year but retreading a tale familiar to even Miss Christie’s casual fans.
The book is largely forgotten for a second reason: it doesn’t feature Poirot or Miss Marple. Even her secondtier sleuths, Ariadne Oliver, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, are absent. Instead, the investigator is an antiques dealer and ladies’ man called Mark Easterbrook. If you’re ever on Pointless and Alexander Armstrong asks you to name Miss Christie’s least-famous detective, there’s your prize-winning answer.
Rufus Sewell plays the seducer on the trail of a killer. He’s drawn in to the nasty business when he wakes up at dawn in his girlfriend Thomasina’s bedsit and discovers her dead.
MARK does what any well-bred cad does in the circumstances, and wipes the place clean of fingerprints before sneaking home to dump all his clothes down the rubbish chute. He explains this behaviour to wife Hermia (Kaya Scodelario) by claiming to have run over a cat, while motoring around London one morning. That would set any woman’s mind at rest. We saw how relaxed she was by the way she took a meat cleaver to the soft furnishings when her husband left.
Sewell’s difficulty is to make his character likable, when clearly a bounder. He manages it by being Rufus Sewell: saturnine, strong of jaw and piercing of eye.
Mark keeps his cool in almost every situation. Even the discovery of his name on a handwritten list of victims, most dead in unexplained circumstances, leaves him unruffled. He only lost his temper when confronted by Bertie Carvell as a hysterical shopkeeper whose name is also on the list.
Bertie’s role was small, but he was determined to make the most of it. So were his fake teeth, which protruded like a mouthful of dominoes. I think I last saw them worn by Dick Emery as that smirking vicar on his long-ago sketch show.
As his patience evaporated, Mark spotted a temperance badge on the man’s jacket. Throwing him out, he advised him to ‘start drinking heavily... but first, f*** off.’
Sarah Phelps has been criticised, both for sexing up Christie and filling scripts with foul language. This single obscenity was restrained by her standards.
Casting restraint aside, Mark decided to investigate the three witches of Much Deeping, who seemed to have some connection to every corpse. They sensed he was watching them.
Mark ran his anxious fingers through his hair. It came away in clumps. Black magic plays havoc with the hairline.