Clive Exton (1930-2007) was the principal screenwriter for most of the original Poirot series. He also oversaw a number of scripts as a script consultant. For an overview of his career, see this obituary in The Telegraph. Other notable works, much in the same vein as Poirot, include Jeeves and Wooster (1990-1993), the P. G. Wodehouse stories, with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie), and Rosemary and Thyme (2003-2006), a television series about two female gardening detectives. Exton wrote all 23 episodes of Jeeves and Wooster at the same time as he was doing Poirot. They are similar, in some ways. Poirot is set in the 1930s, Jeeves and Wooster in the 1920s. Both sets of adaptations have a lot of humour in them, and they both centre on dynamic duos. You could even argue that Rosemary & Thyme follows the same pattern. In any case, that is certainly a very Christie-esque series. However, I should point out that Exton's work as a screenwriter was much broader than just gentle Sunday night television; the obituary in The Guardian focuses on 'his highly individual mixture of black comedy and oblique social criticism'.
Writing about Poirot and Jeeves and Wooster, The Telegraph states in the obituary that 'both adaptations reflected his love of precision in language and his understanding of how people express themselves, as well as his ability to spin out and knit together plot lines from often scanty material'.That is certainly true of his Poirot adaptations, on more than one occasion.
In total, Exton wrote 20 scripts for Poirot (1989-2001). I won't go into detail about every adaptation (have a look at my episode-by-episode posts for that), but I would like to give an overview of his adaptations, and comment on a few of them.
For Series One, he adapted 'The Adventure of the Clapham Cook', 'Murder in the Mews', 'The Adventure of Johnny Waverley', 'Problem at Sea', 'The Incredible Theft' and 'The Dream'. Overall, the adaptations stay impressively close to their source material. This was before the screenwriters felt the need to add lengthy chase scenes or make changes to murderers, motives and plot essentials. Exton does, however, initiate a significant deviation from Christie by introducing the Poirot 'family'; Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon appear in nearly every episode until Series Eight. He also expands their back stories, with an added car interest for Hastings, and eventually an interest in the occult for Miss Lemon. In the 2007 Super Sleuths documentary, Exton explains: 'I do think, for a television series, you need a basic family unit, whether it's a family or not; people who interact with each other. Also, it's very useful, for a not very clever writer like me, to have somebody for Poirot to confide in.'
Personally, I think Exton made the right decision. ITV intended Poirot to become its Sunday night drama 'flagship'. To make people tune in week after week, there had to be something more than just Christie's murder plots to make the nation (and later the world) tune in. His approach to the main cast, 'the big four', also seemed in tune with the short stories on which the early adaptations were based. Christie's short stories are generally much lighter than her novels. Personally, I'm also convinced that Exton and the Poirot team, like Christie, were inspired by the successful Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series, in which the detective is surrounded by Watson, Mrs Hudson and Inspector Lestrade.
For Series Two, Exton did Peril at End House, 'The Veiled Lady', 'The Cornish Mystery', 'Double Sin', 'The Kidnapped Prime Minister' and 'The Adventure of the Western Star'. After the success of the first series, the Poirot team had decided to make some changes. Most importantly, Suchet wanted to make Poirot more human. He explains the process: 'Clive Exton's script certainly helped me. For he too wanted a little more humour in the new series, to make Poirot a bit more moving. It was an excellent idea, even if I sometimes had to restrain him from going too far towards making the little Belgian a comic character, for that certainly was not the Poirot I knew and wanted to portray. But at the same time, Clive also brightened both Hastings and Japp, making them a little less stiff. All this helped to make the films feel more affectionate towards Poirot than some of the first series. (Poirot and Me 2013 p. 77). I suppose nearly all of the above episodes had more humour in them, from Poirot in disguise to the Belgian film star Marie Marvelle. Generally speaking, Exton's scripts are faithful, but some of the additions (or time slot filler) doesn't always work. Suchet admits: 'I'm afraid I was never really happy with Double Sin, The Adventure of the Cheap Flat and The Adventure of the Western Star. They all seemed a little flat to me, a little too one-dimensional compared to the others.' (p. 84-85). However, Exton's adaptation of Peril at End House works particularly well, and I notice that it has a tendency to pop up on people's lists of their favourite episodes.
For Series Three, Exton adapted only two episodes; The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and 'The Theft of the Royal Ruby' (co-written with Anthony Horowitz). The Styles adaptation is near-perfect, with very understandable changes and a genuine respect for the source material. The same could (almost) be said of 'The Theft of the Royal Ruby', but here we have another of those slightly annoying chase scenes added.
The two novel adaptations that followed for Series Four are interesting, in more ways than one. Both mark a significant shift towards darker material and darker adaptations that would eventually take over from the cosy family unit. The ABC Murders is a particularly successful adaptation (though, again, with an added chase scene at the denouement); Suchet frequently refers to it as his personal favourite. The serial killer plot, and particularly the way Exton adapts it to the screen, significantly darkens the series. The second novel, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, opens with a particularly brutal murder scene and has an eerier atmosphere throughout. For those who claim Exton was stuck in his family unit, then, his Series Four adaptations should prove essential viewing. Likewise for those who claim the shift towards darkness in Series Nine was sudden.
For Series Five, Exton adapted 'The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb' and 'The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman'. Both adaptations work, particularly the first, but I think that is more due to its setting than its plot. The second is, yet again, weakened by a lengthy chase scene. Why Exton insisted on adding these scenes I will never understand. Obviously, they are perfect padding to slight stories, but they do seem more and more as an 'easy' way out. He makes up for this in his adaptation for Series Six, though. Hercule Poirot's Christmas is classic Christie, and the adaptation is generally quite successful.
When Poirot returned after its four-year hiatus for Series Seven, Exton seemed to have lost his way somewhat. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has some interesting points in its favour (for instance, I'm very fond of the opening lines from Poirot on the brutality of humanity), but the denouement doesn't work at all, and I'm not convinced the voice-over was the best way to keep Christie's ingenious twist. Suchet says of the episode: 'I felt it lacked something. I am not sure exactly why; perhaps it had something to do with my expectations being too high. The denouement was exciting and unexpected - it should have been marvellous, but somehow, there was something missing.' (Poirot and Me p. 187). Unfortunately, Murder in Mesopotamia for Series Eight is another questionable endeavour. The addition of Hastings feels contrived, and the story itself seems as though it has run out of steam.
In summation, then, how could I describe Exton's legacy? Despite his tendency to use chase scenes as padding, and his sometimes contrived attempts at keeping 'the unit', I remain convinced he was the right man for the job when the series began. For one, he was a Christie fan, and handled her most 'classic' stories with great care. More importantly, to establish the family unit was an ingenious move; I'm sure that helped establish Agatha Christie's Poirot as the phenomenon it is today (Hastings, Miss Lemon and Japp have almost become cult figures!).
In the coming weeks and months I will examine and discuss some of the key members of the Poirot production team, with particular focus on their work on Poirot, of course. My initial plan was to look at these crew members in chronological order, so to speak, but when I read about the sad passing of Kevin Elyot yesterday, it felt natural to start with him.
Kevin Elyot (1951-2014) was a British playwright and screenwriter. I won't attempt to discuss his career in detail. For that, I refer to this well-written obituary. The Guardian's Michael Coveney summed up his subject (as a writer) as 'the longing for love and remembrance of loves lost'. This is certainly true of some of his non-Poirot work that I've read or seen, like My Night with Reg, Clapham Junction and Christopher and His Kind. But it's also true of his Poirot (and Marple) adaptations.
Elyot adapted three Poirot novels for the series: Five Little Pigs, Death on the Nile and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case. The tragic story of the Crale family, Jacqueline de Bellefort's vendetta, and the final hour of the friendship between Poirot and Hastings - all these adaptations could fall under that phrase in The Guardian. In an behind-the-scenes interview, Eylot explained the appeal of Poirot to him:
'What appealed - appeals - to me about him is that he's a foreigner, and an outsider, a refugee, in a very class-ridden, and snobbish, and xenophobic society. That instantly gives any situation he's in an edge, and I find that very... full of potential.' (Behind the Scenes: Death on the Nile, 2004)
I'm not in any way qualified to make assumptions based on Elyot's career, but that seems to fit in well with his record of writing 'gay stories', in lack of a better phrase, stories about outsiders, often faced with prejudices from the society around them. Poirot is a 'bloody little frog', as one character describes him, and he is frequently met with a substantial amount of scepticism, even in the three stories Elyot adapted. For instance, in Five Little Pigs:
'As he had often felt lately, things were not what they used to be. Dash it all, private detectives used to be private detectives - fellows you got to guard wedding presents at country receptions, fellows you went to - rather shame-facedly - when there was some dirty business afoot and you'd got to get the hang of it. But here was Lady Mary Lytton-Gore writing (...) And Lady Mary Lytton-Gore wasn't - no, decidedly she wasn't - the sort of woman tou associate with private detectives (...) And Admiral Cronshaw (...) And now here was the man himself. Really a most impossible person - the wrong clothes - button boots - an incredible moustache! Not his - Meredith Blake's - kind of fellow at all. Didn't look as though he'd ever hunted or shot - or even played a decent game. A foreigner.' (The War Years: Five Little Pigs, p. 222)
Personally, I cherish Elyot's adaptations, all three of them. Five Little Pigs, as a whole, is still my favourite Poirot episode. It's a difficult novel to adapt successfully, with internal monologues and observations, and I think the balance was just about right between flashbacks to the past and the present day. Curtain was faithfully and accurately adapted, with the right amount of sensitivity to its themes. An apt farewell with a beloved character. Death on the Nile was possibly less successful, particularly with some of the changes to the minor characters, but nonetheless among the better episodes of the entire series. The scene, singled out by David Suchet in several interviews, between Jacqueline and Poirot, with dialogue borrowed from Dead Man's Folly, is a magnificent glimpse of that character trait that would blossom both in later novels and in later adaptations; Poirot's longing for love and remembrance of loves lost (think Vera Rossakoff, Verginie Mesnard and 'the mystery of love').
As such, I think Elyot brilliantly managed to move the character of Poirot on, to deepen, in collaboration with Suchet of course, the interpretation and add layers and dimensions. Regardless of what some fans might think of his more radical changes (mercifully fewer between on Poirot than on Marple), he deserves praise for that accomplishment. To me, he remains one of the best Poirot screenwriters.
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| (c) ITV |
This is a very special blog post! Screenwriter and actor Ian Hallard kindly offered to do a Q&A on the process of adapting Agatha Christie's Poirot stories for television. He has co-written The Big Four (2013) with Mark Gatiss, and acted as a script associate on the other adaptations Gatiss has scripted, Cat Among the Pigeons (2008) and Hallowe'en Party (2010). He also played Edmund Drake in Hallowe'en Party, and appeared in a cameo as Mercutio in The Big Four.
This Q&A offers a rare glimpse behind-the-scenes of the television series we all love. A big thanks to Hallard for taking the time to do this!
SPOILERS on Cat Among the Pigeons, Hallowe'en Party and The Big Four follow. Don't read on if you haven't seen the adaptations.
1) You and Mark have adapted some of the ‘impossible’ Christies. Were you commissioned for these or could you choose from the remaining novels?
Mark was approached due to an existing working relationship with Damien Timmer, the executive producer on the Christies, and asked if he’d be interested in adapting one of the remaining stories. That must have been in about 2005 or 2006, by which time most of the classic novels had already been produced, and ITV were left with an increasingly diminishing pile of books which, with the best will in the world, could not be described as the cream of Dame Agatha’s oeuvre! Nevertheless, we are both lifelong Christie lovers, so we jumped at the chance to collaborate on them. Mark initially said he’d be interested in ‘The Big Four’ purely because of the challenge involved, but instead he was asked to consider ‘Cat among the Pigeons’. Then, a couple of years later, we were asked to do ‘Hallowe’en Party’, presumably because they thought it would be a good match for Mark and his sense of the macabre. And finally, when the last 5 stories were greenlit, after all those years, the call came for ‘The Big Four’. So we pretty much did the ones we were assigned, with the exception of requesting ‘The Big Four’. Though we definitely got the impression that no one else was clamouring to adapt it!
2) How does the process work? Page by page? Script meetings? Producer/Suchet involvement? Number of drafts?
It varies from one script to the next. Usually there will be some kind of discussion with the production team about what we and they think the story needs, and what is achievable on the budget and within the 90 minute time scale. ‘Cat’ was relatively straightforward to adapt, as the structure is strong, and we were able to stick pretty closely to the story beats of the original. ‘Hallowe’en’ is more rambling, so that required more work, and then ‘Four’ even more so. Mark and I spend hours, days, weeks(!), forensically dissecting every element of the plot and the characters – deciding on any themes we want to highlight and what we think is expendable. We talk through all the potential plot holes, logic problems and any restructuring of the plot. Then finally we get on with the writing of it! Once the first draft is delivered, we meet with the producer and the script editor to discuss it, we agree on a set of notes, and then we work on a second draft and the process continues until we’re all happy with what we have. As you get nearer to the shoot and the director has come on board, he may suggest a change based on a particular location that has been found and which would work particularly well for a specific moment. David Suchet deliberately chooses only to read the very last draft or two, because he doesn’t want to get too attached to a scene, a character or even a line that may end up being cut!
3) What constraints are placed on you by ITV, the Christie estate, and the producers? (e.g. costs, creative licence, series continuity, character development?)
We’ve had relatively free rein regarding creative decisions, although it’s a collaborative process, and every adaptation has involved lengthy discussions about what stays and what goes and the overall tenor of an episode.
Some of the decisions are purely logistical. For example, with ‘Hallowe’en’ we were told right from the start that Zoe Wanamaker was only available for the first two weeks of the shoot, which unfortunately meant that Ariadne’s involvement in the story had to be limited in some way. We came up with the idea of a cold confining her to her bed, meaning she could still be a continuing presence, but also that all her scenes could be shot all at once over a day or two and so hopefully you don’t feel her absence too strongly!
You’re constantly aware that even for a high budget, prestige show like ‘Poirot’, the funds are not limitless. So, as we write, we’re bearing in mind that if we include any more than sixteen or so guest speaking characters, we’re going to be asked to cull some of them. Equally, during filming, moving between multiple locations is time-consuming and expensive, so a producer will always be grateful if you can limit the number of different locations, and put as many scenes as possible in the same place. (This is particularly relevant in a more ‘episodic’ story like ‘The Big Four’.)
4) Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon are back! Could you describe the process of reintroducing them?
Well, we always knew that Hastings was going to be returning in ‘Curtain’, so we wanted ‘The Big Four’ to be mostly Japp’s farewell story. In fact, we were concerned that, after all this time, the emotional impact of Hastings and Poirot’s reunion in ‘Curtain’ might be diluted if we’d only just seen the two of them so recently. For a while we debated whether Hastings should appear in our episode at all! Hopefully we ended up having the best of both worlds by only bringing Poirot and Hastings together in the final minute of the episode.
It was Damien Timmer who suggested we use this as a final ‘walkdown’ for the Old Guard, and of course it’s a nice coincidence that ‘The Big Four’ can refer to Poirot, Hastings, Lemon and Japp as well.
Also – and I don’t think this is really a spoiler – the fact that Poirot stages his own death in the novel gave us the opportunity of dramatising his funeral with his oldest friends, which isn’t something you’ll see in ‘Curtain’.
In terms of their backstories, it’s muddied a bit by the fact that in the series’ chronology, it’s only actually been a couple of years since they all saw each other, whereas of course, in the real world, it’s more like eleven or twelve! Consequently, we’re in a strange situation where the gap feels much longer for the audience than it does for the characters! As a result, we decided to keep the time scale and the circumstances deliberately vague. We wanted a sense that they had drifted apart as people often do, and that as Poirot himself has aged and become a more sombre and solitary character, they have not been part of each other’s lives very much. We leave it to the audience’s imagination as to why this might have come about, but Miss Lemon’s line that she supposes Poirot must have grown used to acting on his own these days, hints at a certain melancholy which fits in with the mood of these final valedictory episodes.
5) Purists’ reactions to the plot changes are mixed, particularly the new ‘denouement’, Achille/Vera/Tysoe. Why were these changes made?
We’ve approached every script with the intention of maximising its strengths and staying as true to the source material as possible. Nothing gets altered or omitted without good reason. Of the three we’ve worked on, ‘The Big Four’ is obviously the adaptation that departs most significantly from the novel – and this is for a variety of reasons.
It’s no coincidence that it’s been left till the very end, and although the book is a lot of fun, I think you’d be hard pressed to describe it as any kind of classic: it does show signs of being cobbled together in a hurry. Poirot suddenly becomes a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and a pre-Bond James Bond; globetrotting, getting kidnapped and blown up, all of which is not very consistent with the character we’ve seen develop in the TV series over the years, especially now he’s in his old age. In addition, the villain who is a ‘master of disguise’ is all very well on the page - but how do you successfully conceal the same actor playing five or six different parts without either the characters or your audience twigging? And the Fu Manchu-like evil ‘Chinaman’ definitely feels like a product of its time and wasn’t an element of the story that we particularly wanted to perpetuate in the twenty-first century!
The one instruction we had from ITV and the producers when we started work was that the adaptation had to, as much as possible, resemble a traditional episode of 'Poirot'. And of course, we knew that the budget would never stretch to filming in a variety of foreign locations with a guest cast of thirty to forty characters. So it was always a case of trying to come up with something which represented the fun and craziness of the novel, whilst still grounding it in some kind of reality.
We decided to focus on the three murder mysteries within the story – ‘Leg of Mutton’, ‘Chess Problem’ and ‘Yellow Jasmine’, as we thought these were stronger than the pure ‘thriller’ episodes where Hastings or Poirot get kidnapped and then escape from the villains. The problem we encountered is that once you accept the notion of the Big Four as this incredibly powerful cabal, with limitless supplies of wealth, power and intelligence at their disposal, the cases do end up seeming rather trivial. For example, in ‘Chess Problem’, Christie has Number Four spending months masquerading as Dr Savaranoff in order to inherit his money. But why bother when you have Abe Ryland – the richest man in the world – on your team?! Then there’s ‘Leg of Mutton’ which has a clever solution, but again, if the terrifying and all-powerful Big Four want to kill off Whalley, why mess about having to dress up as a butcher in order to do it?
So Mark came up with the idea that rather than the Big Four being real, they could all be the fantasy of just one man. That would explain why some of the cases might at first seem comparatively inconsequential, and remove the curse of the secret society which “sounded like something out of a book”. It also gave us something the book doesn’t have and which you ideally want in a Poirot episode – a twist for Poirot to reveal at the denouement. And given that in the book Darrell is an actor, it seemed logical to play up that element and explore the theatrical setting.
We needed a way for our villain to publicise his scheme. How about an ambitious journalist to do the job, and whip up some public hysteria in the febrile atmosphere of 1939? Enter Tysoe. He was then able to be a conduit between Darrell and Poirot and provide a succession of false clues and red herrings.
We lost Countess Rossakoff because we couldn’t find a way to work her into the narrative in this new structure. With Japp, Lemon and Hastings also around, plus the three separate murder mysteries, there simply wasn’t time to do justice to her. And again, we knew she was going to feature in ‘The Labours of Hercules’, so we felt we could cut her with a clear conscience!
Deleting Achille was a much harder decision. It had been one of the things that we’d been excited about doing when embarking on ‘The Big Four’. However, the idea of Achille just being a clone of Hercule seemed a bit dull and rather a wasted opportunity, so for a long while, we considered making him a complete contrast to Poirot: an unshaven, slovenly womaniser. But whilst this would have been fun, ultimately we couldn’t imagine Poirot being able to suppress his fastidiousness sufficiently to convince in the role. He isn’t a master of disguise like Sherlock Holmes after all – so would Japp and the others have gone along with the charade despite presumably seeing through it? (Not even Japp is that stupid, after all!) It would have been fun, but with the plot steam-rolling its way to its conclusion, it just ended up being another element that we would have had to explain with yet further exposition at the end. A shame to lose him, but we wanted to focus on the funeral and Poirot’s reunion with his friends instead.
I did get a tweet from a very angry man who said he was 'livid' and that Mark and I should be arrested for the outrages we had perpetrated on the book! Well, you're never going to please everybody. If you hate the adaptation that much, you can always go back and read the book and you never have to watch the TV version again! Would purists only be happy if they see every single character and episode from the novel faithfully recreated on the screen? The story has to work for an audience who know nothing of the original material, and who have no interest in seeing it preserved in aspic. As long as we're satisfied we've done the best job we can, that's all we can aim for, although of course it is nice if people enjoy your work, and happily we received plenty of positive messages and tweets and only one or two which were negative!
6) Generally speaking, how do you decide what to cut/keep/add/change in the various adaptations?
Sometimes it’s very simple. The novel of 'Cat' had more characters than we could do justice to on screen, so some inevitably had to go, and Miss Vansittart was an obvious candidate. She's really a paler imitation of Miss Bulstrode, so we didn’t feel she would be much missed, plus it made sense to make Miss Rich the second ‘victim’ instead. By having Miss Chadwick fail in her murder attempt, it made her a more sympathetic character, ready for when she redeems herself at the end by saving Miss Bulstrode’s life.
Other changes in ‘Cat’ were made for a bit of added colour. We made Miss Springer nastier, a blackmailer, and killed her with a javelin rather than a gun. (Although when we wrote it we never imagined Ann launching her spear from across the other side of the sports hall - which goes to show you can never predict exactly how a director might choose to interpret your script!)
Ann disguising herself in order to get her hands on the tennis racquet is another example of something which is straightforward on the page but much harder to translate to the screen, so that episode was eliminated. And Miss Blake didn’t have a motive in the book, so we added one, and the intrigue of the voodoo doll gave us a nice segue into the commercial break – which is another thing you constantly have to have in your mind when writing for ITV!
The biggest change was probably involving Poirot right from the start. As a late Christie, she clearly would rather not have had him in it at all, but obviously that was never going to happen!
When it came to ‘Hallowe’en Party’, we knew we’d have to be a bit more inventive. After the startling and arresting image of the murder victim in the apple bobbing tub, the rest of the story is very much late Christie – meandering and a bit repetitive. We wanted to extend the atmosphere and spookiness of Hallowe’en beyond the party itself into the rest of the episode (it gets a bit forgotten about in the book). So we added sequences like Rowena being stalked in the garden, Ariadne’s nightmare and Poirot’s fireside story denouement. Also, most of the characters are single women living alone, which in a dramatisation isn’t much help, as you need characters to interact with each other. It’s all very well being told that Rowena Drake is a dreadful and bossy woman, but far more effective to give her two children to be unpleasant to – then you can show it! And we rather liked the idea of the insular village populated principally by women. The only male residents we see are the elderly vicar, Edmund the mummy’s boy, and strange Leopold. So it’s no wonder all the women are transfixed and swooning at the arrival of the exotic Michael Garfield!
Equally, with a limited number of cast members, you want to maximise your cast of characters and try to make everyone as suspicious as possible. Consequently, we omitted Supt. Spence and his sister, and gave their function to Mrs Goodbody. That’s often the case with an adaptation – you find a way of combining several characters into one: so Mrs Goodbody gets to be a source of information and a suspect and thematic colour as the ‘witch’ at the party.
You also don’t have long to establish each character and give them a motive: you want to make them distinctive enough to give the actor something to get their teeth into and to make them memorable for an audience - particularly when they don't have very much screen time, hence Rev Cottrell being the penny-pinching vicar, Mrs Reynolds the moaning martyr and Frances the bored and boozy vixen!
You quickly realise how succinct you need to be with your story telling to fit everything into ninety minutes. A character or a scene really has to justify their place in telling the story in order to survive being cut.
7) Did the fact that The Big Four is one of the final episodes, essentially a build-up to Curtain, impact your script choices at all?
Impact upon! (That was Mark popping in to make a contribution, by the way.) Other than reuniting Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon, and giving us the chance to show Poirot’s funeral, not especially. Given the more sombre tone of the later episodes, it had to feel thematically consistent with the rest of the series, which a completely faithful adaptation of the source material would have struggled to do.
8) I also run a Poirot chronology blog. What made you decide on 1939? Have you had a particular series chronology in mind in your three adaptations?
Our brief for all of the episodes has been to keep the period setting as the 1930s. Given that the novel is a departure for Poirot into the world of international intrigue, and as time is marching on for him, it made sense to move the story into the months preceding World War II. Other than that, it’s really the series producer and script editors who keep an eye on that sort of thing. Sometimes the art department ask for a decision on when exactly the script is set to produce a prop, for example a newspaper which requires that information.
9) You mentioned on Twitter that you would have included all of Poirot's friends at his funeral in The Big Four if the budget had been unlimited, and that Ariadne Oliver was in an early draft. Any other scenes or characters you would like to mention that didn’t survive the time/budget constraints, in The Big Four, Cat Among the Pigeons, and Hallowe'en Party?
Yes how wonderful would that have been! To see rows of characters paying their respects – Col. Race, Miss Bulstrode, Supt. Spence, Colin Lamb, Ariadne... It’s always annoying when soap opera characters die and their kids who apparently live in the next town don't bother to show up at the funeral! There was supposed to be a big floral wreath from Ariadne but I'm not sure whether that ended up being shot. And yes, in the first draft, it was Ariadne rather than Hastings who burst through the door at the end with the line “I thought you were dead!”
As for other casualties: there's nothing too significant I think. A romantic scene between Adam Goodman and Ann Shapland had to be dropped from 'Cat' because they ran out of time to shoot it. Mrs Reynolds had a husband in an early draft of 'Hallowe'en' who didn't survive to the final shooting script.
And our first pass at 'Four' experimented with a suggestion of a romantic attraction between Poirot and Mme Olivier (she also inherited some of the characteristics of Countess Rossakoff) – but maybe that would have been a sacrilege too far!
10) There are plenty of references to past episodes in The Big Four. Some fans have also pointed out that there are several nods to Sherlock. Were these deliberate?
Similarities to Sherlock? Well of course the original novel is directly indebted to so many aspects of Conan Doyle's work, which Christie herself actually acknowledges with the sly comment that Poirot makes about all great detectives having brothers who would be even more celebrated were it not for constitutional indolence! Life is littered with so many of these coincidences: even down to the fact that Mark of course plays Mycroft Holmes (the equivalent of Achille) in 'Sherlock'. The irony is that we've been pencilled to work on 'The Big Four' for years now – long before 'Sherlock' was even a twinkle in Mark and Steven Moffat's eyes! And yet Mark, by sheer coincidence, ended up working on 'The Big Four' and his new 'Sherlock' episode 'The Empty Hearse' at more or less the same time, when of course both stories deal with our heroes' apparent demises and subsequent resurrections.
Other nods? Some of them were deliberate: the letter to Miss Bulstrode for instance, the references to Mrs Japp, the lines about “bringing down the curtain”, and the themes of thwarted or frustrated egos - for both Darrell and Flossie – but also for Poirot of course! As Darrell rightly points out, there's absolutely no need for Poirot to stage these elaborate denouements, much less fake his own death – it's just that he adores a theatrical flourish. Both Mark and I have always been interested in that side of the character. Poirot in the books is a vain, pompous, insufferable little egomaniac, so it's fun to tweak everyone's expectations of him, to undercut the image of this twinkly, avuncular figure, and expose the less pleasant side of his personality!
11) Finally, was the new ending (The Big Four) inspired by the story of Suchet's grandparents or the location you filmed in?
Yes, I saw David's interviews about his grandparents, and I'm afraid I have to spoil the romance! We didn't know the story beforehand and it wasn't an inspiration for the film's climax. Nor did we write it with a specific location in mind - Hackney Empire was simply the choice of the production team.
Please do not reproduce without permission. Contact me via e-mail (poirotchronology@gmail.com) or on Twitter (@pchronology).
A big thanks to Tom, a fellow Poirot fan, for brilliant question ideas!
For those of you who have read my chronology of the ITV Poirots over at www.poirotchronology.blogspot.com, it must sometimes seem as if all I care about is pointing out all the mistakes and inaccuracies of the excellent production team in setting their adaptations in specific years and on specific dates. Now, I won’t pretend that I do find some of the mistakes they’ve made inexcusable. That applies mainly to the instances of setting episodes at the exact same time, or overlooking previous character development; in short, what the person responsible for checking for continuity errors should be doing. However – and this is important – I am very keen to defend their decision to keep Poirot in its pre-war setting. I’ll try to explain why.
Having spent an unmentionable number of hours re-watching and thinking about the different episodes of this series purely with chronology and setting in mind, I can safely say that, bar the aforementioned inexcusable mistakes, the 1930s setting of the episodes makes a lot of sense. If we look at a list of all Christie’s stories in chronological order (see this Wikipedia article) and publication order (see this official list), there are really only five novels and three short story collections set in the years prior to 1930, and fifteen novels set in the years after 1940. In other words, 13 of the 33 Poirot novels and two of the five short story collections are set in the 1930s. In summary, that means that no more than fifteen novels were set in the post-war years of Poirot’s (literary) career, as opposed to eighteen novels and five collections of short stories in the pre-war years.
The list above may seem unnecessary and rather confusing, but I include it to support my main argument here, i.e. the producers were right to choose a pre-war setting for their adaptations. My only regret is that they didn’t start the series in the mid-to-late 1920s instead, so that the first few series of short story adaptations (1, 2, 3 and 5) would be seen in their accurate 1920s setting. Still, I can understand why they chose the 1930s in the end. Visually and historically, that decade is naturally the most exciting, a period of great changes in technology and society, including a coming war on the horizon. Also, although I’ve never seen this mentioned explicitly, I would think the producers were keen to distance themselves somewhat from the magnificent Sherlock Holmes adaptations with Jeremy Brett produced at the time (1980s and 1990s), and setting the series in a decade that was easily distinguishable from the Victorian period would obviously help in that respect. [There’s more on their decision over at poirotchronology, in the documentary Super Sleuths (2006) and in Peter Haining’s book Agatha Christie's Poirot: A Celebration of the Great Detective (1995)].
Original producer Brian Eastman once said that to him, ‘there was something about all her [Agatha Christie’s] writing which felt pre-war’ (Haining, p. 13). I think that’s a point most Poirot fans can agree on. Personally, at least, I like to read about Poirot in the era of post-war austerity and the youth culture of the swinging sixties, but there is always a sense that he doesn’t quite fit in. Of course, that’s part of Christie’s fun in the later stories, but I still think Poirot is very much a man of his time, and that time was pre-WW2. Also, there’s the issue of age. Christie admitted that it was a mistake to make Poirot a retired policeman in her first novel, particularly in light of the fact that he continued to exist for so many decades. I don’t see why a television series can’t attempt to make up for that mistake by moving him back to his milieu. Especially since Christie actually wanted to kill him off as early as the 1930s and wrote his death in the 1940s, so it’s not as if she really wanted to write books about him in the post-war era (or at least that’s what it looks like from a reader’s perspective).
To begin with, I don’t think the production team were consciously thinking that they would keep all Christie’s stories in the 1930s. In fact, in Haining’s book on the series, they seem to think of the decade more as a starting point than as the final destination, explaining that they are considering how to age David Suchet for the stories set in the post-war era (p. 39). But this decision must have been reversed by the series’ return in 2000 – and certainly by the reboot in 2003. Still, it’s interesting to note that it was not until Series Ten and Eleven that they decided to tackle the most “challenging” post-war stories, e.g. Taken at the Flood and Third Girl, clearly considering their options.
The setting of the post-war novels in the 1930s has largely been a success. Evil Under the Sun, Five Little Pigs, The Hollow, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, After the Funeral and Cat Among the Pigeons, all set in the 1940s and 50s, didn’t need much adjustment (in terms of setting, that is!). Novels like Hickory Dickory Dock and The Clocks needed some adjustment, but both seemed to work (I particularly like the war preparation in the latter). Hallowe’en Party is, I’ve been told, somewhat out of place, since the concept of Halloween celebrations weren’t really known in the UK in the 1930s. The main challenges – and the least successful adaptations perhaps, in terms of setting – have been Taken at the Flood and Third Girl. The war setting of the former is integral to the storyline, and the latter lacked the drug element central to the 1960s plot. The final five adaptations, however, shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt to a late 1930s setting (Curtain, of course, about a decade later).
The title of this little article ends with a question, ‘A 1936 time warp?'.That question refers to the most common criticism of the decision to set all the stories pre-war, i.e. that the series seems to be stuck in a constant 1936 setting, much like a completely different period drama, ITV's Heartbeat, which was predominantly set in 1969. (I've noticed that the current version of Wikipedia's list of Poirot episodes seems to reinforce this idea by stating that only The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Murder on the Orient Express are set outside the 1936 time frame). However, what I learned from my chronology project was that although one might tend to think that the entire series of Poirot is set in 1936, the majority of the episodes do not refer to specific dates or years at all. In fact, when it comes to the most “sensitive” stories, i.e. the ones that should really have been set in the 1920s or in the post-war era, there are only rarely explicit references to 1936. Of course, costumes and production design do reveal that it’s set in the 1930s, but there’s luckily no attempt made at forcing absolutely every episode into this and surrounding years – even if they have come close on the occasions I mentioned initially. As a result, I have tried to allow for some leeway in the setting of these episodes by widening the time frame of the series from 1928 to 1939 (plus Styles and Curtain, obviously). You can see my chronology for more details on that. Also, even if we take the episodes that are explicitly set in the 1930s into account, the myth that it’s all 1936 is wrong. In fact, the conscious time span (if there ever was one) seems to be from 1934 to 1938 (probably 1934-39 by the end of the final series), not too far away from my chronology.
To conclude, I wholeheartedly support the decision to set the stories in the pre-war years, mainly because the character and the stories he is in generally seem pre-war in tone (with some notable exceptions), and because the ageing of the character – an error Christie admitted to – seems much more realistic. Also, the myth that the series is stuck in 1936 is mainly just that – a myth. My only regret is that they didn’t set the majority of the short stories in the 1920s, even if the decision seems sensible enough. Hopefully my chronology has managed to compensate for at least some of that discrepancy.
