Agatha and the Midnight Murders
CHANNEL 5, 9PM
Channel 5 hasn’t allowed the tiny detail of lacking the rights to Agatha Christie’s books stop them mining gold from history’s bestselling fiction writer. Their third in a series of made-up stories about Christie again casts her as the protagonist of a murder mystery. It’s set in the low-budget environs of a dingy hotel during the Blitz, to which a nearbankrupt Christie (Helen Baxendale) has come to make a deal with the devil – she’s penned a novel in which she kills off her most famous creation, Poirot, intending to sell it to a superfan for big bucks. To broker the deal, she’s brought along Travis Pickford (Blake Harrison), the black marketeer who appeared in a previous film. But an air raid forces everyone into the hotel’s cellar, where inevitable fisticuffs, recriminations and deaths that have nothing to do with German bombs ensue.
The plot is not as well-crafted as Christie’s famous whodunits but clever enough to keep you guessing, and Baxendale steals the show with a warm portrayal of a
middle-aged Christie on her uppers. The question is why Channel 5 didn’t hold this feature-length outing
back until Christmas, when it would have gone down beautifully with a snifter of port. Vicki Power