Rumpy-pumpy, four-letter rants — they’ve sexed up Agatha again!
Once again, Agatha christie was getting sexed up and steamy for christmas. But after the nudity of last year’s, the Beeb promised Witness For The Prosecution (BBc1) would be different.
They weren’t kidding. Instead of Poldark’s Aidan Turner topless in a bath towel, as he was in And Then There Were none last December, this time we got Toby Jones coughing his lungs out while he bounced on Hayley carmichael in a decrepit iron bedstead.
Brilliant actor, Toby Jones. We’ve seen him electrify The Secret Agent, as the venal spy Verloc, and capital, playing a greedy banker, as well as being boring Lance in the best sitcom for years, Detectorists.
But more to the point in this instance, he’s the voice of Dobby the House elf in the Harry Potter movies and, at 5ft 5in with a head like a baked potato, there’s more than a passing resemblance.
Add a convincing tubercular cough, and he’d win any poll for the actor you’d least like to see doing costume drama rumpy-pumpy, especially on Boxing Day when we’re already queasy from turkey leftovers and stale sherry.
Witness For The Prosecution is not one of Miss christie’s classics. It started as a short story and film, before becoming a stage play, and it’s plain to see why — unlike her greatest, The Mousetrap — it didn’t run on the West end for decades.
It lacks the devious complexity of her best work. There are too few
MEMOIRS OF THE NIGHT: Bob Monkhouse’s last-ever stand-up gig, in 2003, captured in The Last Stand (BBC4), opened with a stream of gags, then took a left turn into enthralling memories of Peter Sellers and Benny Hill. Why has this film stayed unseen in the vaults for so long?
characters and their motives are too straightforward. And although the murder involves a millionaire socialite, bashed to death with a statuette in her chelsea townhouse, most of the story takes place in the seedier milieu of east end music halls, prison waiting rooms, slum lodgings and suburban tenement flats.
Realism is not Dame Agatha’s forte. We want imaginary snobs and aristos, not ordinary people. As soon as she starts trying to make her characters authentic, we stop believing in them.
To cover this up, the production was steeped in clammy fog, which seemed to leave a film of grease over the camera lenses. The pictures were blurred and yellowy. It was like trying to watch without your glasses.
Kim cattrall, as a predatory American widow with a penchant for illiterate toy boys, made a deserving victim. everything else felt forced, from the dream sequence at the start — murder suspect Leonard Vole (Billy Howle) suffering nightmares about the Somme — to Andrea Riseborough as the heartless chorus girl, singing a cheap romantic ditty with a face like a professional mourner.
Most awkward was David Haig’s four-letter-word outburst at the Old Bailey. Maybe Qcs swear like navvies in the marble halls of criminal courts these days, but I am sure they didn’t in the Twenties.
It’s enough to make you ponder christmas abroad next year, which is what wildlife cameraman Gordon Buchanan has done. The film-maker and presenter, who shot those eye-popping nighttime sequences of leopards hunting in the parks of Mumbai for David Attenborough’s Planet earth II, is on his travels.
When I interviewed him last month, he told me he was flying to a South Pacific island, to live with a prehistoric tribe that worships shark gods.
To keep us entertained, he’s left us with a pair of excellent documentaries — Life In The Snow, which airs on BBc1 on Thursday, and Elephant Family And Me (BBc2).
He spent weeks living in the Tsavo national park in Kenya, side by side with a group of elephants raised by human hands and released into the wild, following poacher attacks that killed their mothers.
The extraordinary dedication of elephant nurses like Benjamin Kyalo of the David Sheldrick Trust means that, despite the decimation of the herds by ivory hunters, we are learning more about these beautiful beasts.
Gordon brought back astonishing footage, and if you enjoyed last night’s episode don’t miss the second part tonight. It features a newborn calf and her mother. I guarantee you’ve never seen anything quite like it.