I’m going to enjoy this ‘ordeal by iplayer’

As my sons grow older, there are ever fewer TV programmes that gather the entire family round a single screen. I pray for dramas so enthralling my offspring will abandon the dread vloggers of Youtube, but not so violent that the younger boy will have to be dispatched to bed.

So I was pleased as punch when I saw Ordeal by Innocence had finally been cleared for an Easter release. There’s nothing like a lavish Agatha Christie adaptation to sate every manner of televisual hunger. You’re guaranteed a starry cast, ravishing country estate backdrops, glorious costumes, fabulous motors, as well as sexual, class and family tension and – above all else – a mystery to solve.

My boys were delighted to see an overbearing matriarch have her comeuppance, and both turned to give me a sly, appraising look. We then watched rapt, with occasional bursts of irrepressible deduction. My husband thinks Bill Nighy did it, as “the guilty party’s always the most famous actor”. My sons are suspicious of all five remaining children (“Who else would kill a parent?”).

Meanwhile, I’m plumping for Matthew Goode’s wheelchair-bound RAF officer because a) I fancy the pants off him, and b) he delights a little too much in handing other people his portable urinal.

Episode one proved so addictive we wanted to speed towards that denouement, but – blow me – we couldn’t find the next instalment anywhere on the BBC iplayer.

“It must be there, Mummy, look harder!” implored my 13-year-old. This unexpected mystery was solved yesterday when I read the BBC had resolved to broadcast its murder mystery on an old-fashioned weekly basis, allowing for no binge-watching.

I’m inclined to think this “Ordeal By iplayer” is the cherry on the icing of the Christie cake. Those of us indulging in the old-fashioned practice of family viewing will be giving our children another noble and historic art: delayed gratification. A mystery deferred is a mystery enhanced.