TV’s murdered another Agatha Christie classic, say angry fans
Missing characters. A sexed-up plot. A bachelor turned into a womaniser...
THE BBC is in the dock over its latest Agatha Christie adaptation, with purists blasting the Corporation for ‘butchering’ another murder mystery.
They claim the new two-part dramatisation of The Pale Horse, which begins on BBC1 next Sunday, has changed the plot and sexed up the story.
The TV drama has been penned by Sarah Phelps, who has faced criticism for her work adapting four of Agatha Christie’s works for previous BBC productions.
In her version of Ordeal By Innocence, she changed the identity of the killer and she was accused of including an anti-Brexit storyline in her version of The ABC Murders, starring John Malkovich as Hercule Poirot.
Fans expressed their fears when it was announced that Phelps, who has the backing of the Christie estate, was tackling The Pale Horse.
One said they wouldn’t be tuning in and described the dramatist as a ‘f***ing butcher’.
The Pale Horse, published in 1961 – a murder mystery that embraces black magic and is set in the sleepy village of Much Deeping – is regarded as Dame Agatha’s ‘scariest’ novel.
The Mail on Sunday has decided not to give away any of the plot twists in the drama but can reveal there are significant differences between the BBC version and the original novel.
The book begins with the murder of a priest called Father Gorman, who never appears in the TV version, while a central character played by Rufus Sewell is a twice-married womaniser with a dark secret on screen but is a bachelor in the novel.
In the TV drama Sewell’s character is involved in a sexual relationship with one of the killer’s victims. In the novel he and the woman never meet.
Phelps has also written out of the story Ariadne Oliver, one of Christie’s most popular recurring characters.
Christie biographer Laura Thompson expressed concerns about the extent to which the drama had ‘simplified’ one of Christie’s most intriguing and layered plots. She said: ‘It sounds like a superbly executed exercise in what can we do next to make Agatha Christie cool.
‘I’ve always thought that Agatha an innate dramatic sense, even in her books, which means that she wrote naturally in scenes – you can transpose them perfectly to the screen without much change. She also understood human nature. There is no need for all the jazzing up.
‘I can understand the urge to push her this way and that, as it were to give the modern overview, but the end result is inevitably something other than what she wrote. The Pale Horse is perhaps the most inventive of all her books, the plot is layer upon layer of complexity that has to be peeled back.’
Christie’s great-grandson James Prichard, 49, an executive producer of The Pale Horse, defended Phelps’s ‘intelligent’ handling of the novel.
He said: ‘This is Sarah Phelps’s fifth adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel for the BBC, and as with all her previous television adaptations, there are some differences between the book and screen but these are more than outweighed by the similarities.
‘In a two-hour drama, choices need to be made as not all of the detail in a novel will make it on to the screen. My great-grandmother was well aware of the need to make changes for different media and made significant changes to her stories when adapting them for the stage.
‘We work very closely with Sarah and the BBC throughout production and I love the way she brings these books to life on screen. She reads Christie in an incredibly detailed and intelligent way.’