THE PALE HORSE
Season 1 BBC First (*119) Sunday 7 June 20:00
Episode 1 (drama)
The BBC’s adaptations of mystery writer Agatha Christie’s thrillers (written between 1920 and 1975) serve a balanced feast between glorious costume, twisty plot and macabre murders. But it’s her touch of the strange that keeps us coming back. “It’s where you take a really ordinary domestic setting and you put something into it that is so genuinely horrifying that it makes your blood go cold,” says The Pale Horse adaptation writer Sarah Phelps.
To that end, the first episode of this new series, based on the 1961 novel of the same name, kicks off not only with ancient rural witchcraft symbols and a list of names of people who soon start dropping like flies, but with a wackadoodle harvest festival. Sarah adds that “I was fooling about online and I was looking at all these rituals surrounding bread and harvest. I’m really interested in the nastier rituals around sowing, ploughing and harvest. I was thinking about how you could weave those darker practices and rituals into the story. I was looking at people wearing masks made of straw. Absolutely terrifying!”