Murder Is Easy evaluation: Finger-wagging lecture on colonialism
Murder Is Easy (BBC One, final night time)
Christmas presents are available two varieties: those we wish and those a disapproving relative feels we should get, akin to socks, underpants and… Murder Is Easy (BBC1).
Our Auntie Beeb cannot stand the best way we get pleasure from homicide in a Nineteen Fifties village. All these spinsters biking by the morning mist to church, ruddy-cheeked blacksmiths and lads enjoying cricket on the inexperienced – it is so very English, it have to be improper.
So as a substitute of giving us the Agatha Christie adaptation we would like, Auntie devises one thing totally different that can be ‘higher for us’. That is the equal of serving a tofu turkey and insisting: ‘It tastes simply nearly as good, and it is saving the world.’
This means taking a pre-war story from the Golden Age of British detective fiction and turning it into what director Meenu Gaur calls ‘an important allegorical story about colonialism’.
The sleuth is a younger black man newly arrived from Nigeria, who claims to be researching native folklore whereas actually investigating a string of murders.
Instead of giving us the Agatha Christie adaptation we would like, Auntie Beeb devises one thing totally different that can be ‘higher for us’
In Wychwood below Ashe, it is 1954 and locals are being killed off so quick the coroner cannot sustain. Death certificates are being handed out in pairs.
Spoiler alert if you have not seen it but, however the publican drowns, a flighty maid swallows poison, the window cleaner falls from a parapet and the pricey little previous woman investigating these deaths (Penelope Wilton) is run down by a automotive.
So far, so good. But it feels there are worse crimes than homicide within the eyes of author Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre.
The village is a seething hotbed of racism. Our detective, Luke Fitzwilliam (David Jonsson), has solely to stroll right into a pub for the entire place to fall silent. The lord of the manor makes sneering remarks about ‘mud huts’ and the physician is handing out tracts on purifying the white grasp race.
‘Now do you see?’ mutters Auntie Beeb. ‘That’s what your treasured English village was actually like. Fascists, the lot of them.’
This is a Twenty first-centurL Left-wing lecture, drumming within the conviction that Britain after the conflict was a really horrible place and we must always all be ashamed of it. Nostalgia is a thought crime.
The opening scenes of this two-parter are impressed not by Agatha Christie however by the West African legend of a person who makes himself invisible to go searching.
‘Becoming a part of one other tradition, which is what empire and colonialism is,’ says Gaur, ‘means a part of us as folks turns into invisible.’
In a dream sequence, Fitzwilliam is seen clutching an ebony artefact referred to as an ikenga, a double-horned figurine, which he drops as he’s chased by a forest.
The sleuth is a younger black man newly arrived from Nigeria, who claims to be researching native folklore whereas actually investigating a string of murders
This is a left-wing lecture, drumming within the conviction that Britain after the conflict was a really horrible place and we must always all be ashamed of it
Our detective, Luke Fitzwilliam (David Jonsson), has solely to stroll right into a pub for the entire place to fall silent
In tonight’s second episode, he reveals that the ikenga represents a person’s sense of self and future. He additionally slips surreptitiously into his lordship’s research, the place he’s horrified to find a group of African masks, fetishes and carvings – cultural treasures which are plainly the plunder of empire.
This is hardly the primary time the BBC’s loathing of Christie has been obvious. The 2015 model of And Then There Were None was sexed-up with nudity, whereas in Witness For The Prosecution the next Christmas, David Haig performed a senior barrister who unleashed a barrage of four-letter phrases within the Old Bailey courtroom.
In 2020, the plot of The Pale Horse, admittedly not one among Dame Agatha’s most interesting, was comprehensively rewritten – with the end result that it was even worse than the e book.
But no rewrite has gone so far as this reinvention of Murder Is Easy, and quite a few particulars ring false. Some are comical: Fitzwilliam is grudgingly accepted by the locals when he dons a bow tie and dinner jacket, as if this was the definitive mark of a gentleman.
Fitzwilliam is grudgingly accepted by the locals when he dons a bow tie and dinner jacket, as if this was the definitive mark of a gentleman
Some are contradictory: village GP Dr Thomas (Mathew Baynton) is a toadie who refuses to offer correct remedy to those that cannot pay. This may need been believable in 1939, when Christie wrote Murder Is Easy, however the adaptation has been shunted ahead to the NHS period. The physician’s prejudice now is mindless.
Some are lazy: Morfydd Clark as flirtatious Bridget calls herself a ‘seckerterry’, which was definitely not the Nineteen Fifties pronunciation of ‘secretary’, and Fitzwilliam addresses her as Ms Conway, not Miss. And some are simply weird: Fitzwilliam is attacked by a hen of prey, a pink kite, when he arrives on the manor home. Red kites had been extinct in England within the Nineteen Fifties – maybe the author was pondering of herring gulls?
Being a Christmas Christie, it does at the least have solid. Douglas Henshall is especially enjoyable as an previous buffer who served in Africa, and Mark Bonnar made essentially the most of his position as Reverend Humbleby by dropping useless at a cocktail party, making a restoration, and dropping useless once more on the tennis court docket.
Whether he is completely useless this time, we will discover out tonight.
