Walliams solves a mystery even Agatha Christie couldn’t crack

Even a criminal genius can’t get it right all the time. Agatha Christie, creator of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, was never sure what to do with her junior sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.

They were besotted Bright Young Things when they first appeared in 1924. A few years later, they were adventurers for hire, solving crimes in the style of fictional detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Poirot himself.

In World War II, they reappeared as a middle-aged, married couple with three children. And at the end of the Sixties, they made two final appearances, as young-at-heart pensioners with a Manchester terrier called Hannibal, based on Christie’s beloved dog, Treacle.

Dame Agatha was far more fond of her lovebirds than she was of the impossible Monsieur Poirot. But she could never make her readers enjoy Tommy and Tuppence as she did — the characters always came across as too sweet and insipid, without the bile and bite of the best detectives.

David Walliams and Jessica Raine in Partners In Crime (BBC1) stripped out the tweeness and gave us grownup lovers we could believe in.

Tuppence was smart, bored, frustrated, twice as intelligent as her husband and maddened by his amiable optimism.

Tommy was slow, decent, protective and easily confused: by the time he had stumbled through one sentence, his wife had already thought of five sarcastic replies.

Apart from their son, who was already at boarding school, they had nothing in common. Yet they were desperately in love — he waited on her like a slave, and she looked at him constantly as though she was waiting to be swept off her feet.

Some marriages are made in heaven. This one, we sensed, was made in bed.

There were no sex scenes, of course — nothing more than the innuendo and flirting that Walliams is incapable of suppressing in any role. But these were two superb performances that took a flimsy tale of cloak-anddagger espionage and transformed it into exciting drama.

The decision to set the story, the first of two three-part adventures, in the Fifties was slightly odd. It looked sumptuous, as the couple dashed around in their Morris Traveller van or bickered on steam trains.

And there was a glorious computergenerated shot of London’s skyline as it was in 1952, with St Paul’s the tallest building. The advantage of computer graphics is that there was also no smog.

But the plot didn’t feel post-war. It was too silly and innocent, rooted in an era when a successful spy needed nothing more than a patriotic heart and a strong right hook.

These were Twenties characters having a jolly good adventure, and the Cold War storyline seemed out of place.

Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley were having trouble with their eras, too, in Dancing Through The Blitz: Blackpool’s Big Band Story (BBC2). Despite the title, the show spent as much time discussing the Thirties as the Forties.

Really, it was a straightforward history of big band j azz from ragtime to Ronnie Scott’s, and the nasty business of that world war in the middle was more or less a coincidence.

Such quibbles were not going to keep Dr Lucy out of her dressing-up box.

She presented every link in a different costume: as a flapper in beads and spangles; as a Royal Air Force girl in a WAAF’s uniform; as a Spitfire pilot with goggles and silk scarf; in a cocktail dress; and even in a sparkly ballgown with long blonde tresses l i ke Hollywood star veronica Lake.

She couldn’t resist showing us the fake stockings trick either, drawing seams up the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil fixed to a gadget made from a screwdriver and a bicycle clip.

Dr Lucy, in short, was having the time of her life. Her joy was complete when co- presenter Jools Holland invited her onstage with his big band to duet with him at the piano on a Count Basie classic.

She only had one note to play, but she struck it with aplomb.

All that fun was infectious. My two left feet were tapping like mad.