Ordeal By Innocence (BBC1) T

“The explicitness of the sexual language in Phelps’s version is not something I remember from the many other Christie novels that I devoured in my youth”

Jesus’s Female Disciples: The New Evidence (Channel 4) Come Home (BBC1)

Scriptwriter Sarah Phelps admitted in a recent interview that, before she started to adapt Agatha Christie’s work for television, she had never watched any other film or TV adaptations of the old girl’s crime novels. Indeed, she said she would sooner curl up in front of Masterchef than follow the machinations of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot on screen.

But, after the success of And Then There Were None which she adapted for the BBC, the corporation prevailed upon Ms Phelps to do a similar number on Ordeal By Innocence and she has come up with another corker.

I haven’t read the original myself, but I did find a brief synopsis on Google which led me to believe that certain liberties have been taken in order to appeal to viewers who shared Phelps’s earlier opinion of such adaptations.

For starters, the explicitness of the sexual language in

Phelps’s version is not something I remember from the many other Christie novels that I devoured in my youth. If Agatha had written that sort of stuff, she’d have been in the dock alongside D.H. Lawrence.

In a flashback we saw the long-dead Jack with the policeman’s wife. It’s no wonder, then, that the said copper fitted him up for his stepmother’s murder. The fact that Jack accused him of being a paedophile was further motivation for his part in the miscarriage of justice, although why he tried to mow down the unfortunate Dr Arthur Calgary on that country road was not made clear. Was he afraid that Calgary’s alibi for Jack would lead to a fresh investigation?

Anyway, fortunately for Arthur, he was an even worse driver than he was a policeman. As for Arthur’s own motivation, it now seems that he wants to clear Jack’s name to atone for his part in devising the nuclear weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who knew that the scientists working on the Manhattan Project were so young? Luke Treadaway gives an excellent performance as the troubled boffin, but he’s considerably younger than the Calgary of the original story.

But, age doesn’t seem to have been a factor in the casting of the piece. Bill Nighy is splendid in the role of Leo Argyll, the millionaire philanthropist whose hobby is fostering children who nobody else in their right mind would give house room to, but he’s a bit long in the tooth to play the love interest of the flighty Gwenda.

It’s the Fifties so, of course, everybody smokes like a lum, although several of the actors look as if they’ve never seen a cigarette before, let alone smoked one. Perhaps RADA should add a course in how to smoke convincingly, along with elocution, deportment and fencing lessons.

Tomorrow night we find out who done it. Snobby wretch Phillip found out in this episode, but it didn’t do him much good. We’re supposed to think it’s the housekeeper, but my money’s on Gwenda.

he new evidence produced by feminist theologians Helen Bond and Joan Taylor in Channel 4’s Jesus’s Female Disciples: The New Evidence was a bit on the flimsy side. After scoffing at the statues of the twelve disciples on the top of the Vatican (both ladies do a lot of scoffing) they left Rome for the Holy Land where they attempted to clean up Mary Magdalene’s reputation. It seems that the public’s perception of Mary as a prostitute is based largely on the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.

The two ladies contended that Mary M was in fact a woman of quite significant means who helped to fund Christ’s travels, along with a circle of her equally well-off woman friends. They suggested that the Magdalene part of her name, meaning tower, was a nickname given to her by the early Christians, just as Simon Peter was called the ‘Rock’.

Then they cited a piece from the Gospel According to Luke that mentioned two women, Joanna and Susanna, who were followers of Jesus. Joanna was the wife of a high-ranking official at Herod’s court. When Jesus ‘healed’ her she showed her gratitude by becoming another of the female followers who “provided for” him.

In terms of firm evidence, that was about all the Bible could provide for Bond and Taylor’s thesis. They boasted at the top of the programme: “Nearly a quarter of the world’s population will have to rethink the origins of their faith,” but, if this is the best they can come up with, I’d advise them not to hold their breath.

Come Home started promisingly enough, but petered out in Tuesday’s third and final episode. Marie, who left her husband and kids so that she could get plastered and pick up strange men in bars, got custody of the kids, while big, soft Greg stuck by his bidey-in-from-Hell. I wouldn’t trust either of them to rear a goldfish.