Merry Christie- mas!

Murders in a quaint country village. And a Cluedo-esque cast of suspects. Yes, it’s another gem from the Queen of Crime

PICK OF THE WEEK AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER IS EASY Wednesday, Thursday, BBC1, 9pm

Agatha Christie used to publish a new novel, known as ‘a Christie for Christmas’, each festive season, and in recent years the BBC has tried to maintain the tradition on TV. This year it’s a starry adaptation of Murder Is Easy.

Luke Fitzwilliam, on the train to London to take up a job in Whitehall, gets chatting to a delightful old lady. She’s off to report to Scotland Yard what she believes to be a series of murders in her village. The deaths have looked like accidents but Miss Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton) knows better.

Fitzwilliam politely indulges her, but when she is killed by a hit-and-run driver he feels obliged to go to Wychwood, her quaint, picturesque village, to look into her claims. Miss P didn’t tell him the name of her suspect – that would have made for a very short drama.

As fans of the Queen of Crime know, there are few places so dangerous as an apparently idyllic English country village (although much of this was filmed in a Scottish village – Tyninghame in East Lothian). In Wychwood, Fitzwilliam finds a veritable Cluedo collection of potential killers – and victims. They include a Leftie vicar, the Rev Humbleby (Mark Bonnar), Major Horton (Douglas Henshall), a brusque military man, Lord Whitfield (Tom Riley), local bigwig and borderline religious fanatic, and Mrs Pierce (Tamzin Outhwaite), the surly housekeeper. Fitzwilliam seems to have an ally in the flirtatious Bridget Conway (Morfydd Clark), but can he trust her?

His investigations are complicated by the fact that he’s Nigerian. In England in 1954, not everyone appreciates people like ‘you Africans’ asking impertinent questions and he has to endure a fair bit of casual – and not so casual – racism.

In the 1939 novel, Fitzwilliam is a retired English police officer, and in a 2009 TV adaptation he was played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Here it’s the upand-coming actor David Jonsson.

In the past, Christie fans have been up in arms about any changes to her work, but her great-grandson James Prichard has said the author liked adaptations to be ‘radical’, so we can assume she would have enjoyed this two-parter, which has a high body count and more red herrings than a fishing trawler at sunset.

And if one ‘Christie for Christmas’ isn’t enough, the Hugh Laurie-directed Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, starring Will Poulter and Lucy Boynton, first shown at Easter, is on ITV3 on Boxing Day. MYSTERY: Tom Riley, Morfydd Clark, David Jonsson and Penelope Wilton