Andrew Grieve

The time period of ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot stories is always the 1930s, with occasional flashbacks to earlier times. That results in a stupid, readily-avoided anachronism. One of the characters is an American studying in London on a Fulbright scholarship, which she says and Poirot repeats in ~1936...but the program wasn't founded until 1946. Why not make her a Rhodes scholar? She's female, of course, and that wasn't allowed in the 1930s, but at least the scholarships existed then! Anyway, why is such a throwaway moment even retained? She's studying in London. Nuff sed.

Since Dame Agatha loved to people her stage with scads of bodies, there was considerable pruning of the cast done and if we're honest to desirable dramatic effect. Also tidied away is the extraneous Scotland Yard man who is morphed into TV regular Chief Inspector Japp. This also works to make the series universe stronger, and does no violence to the Dame's detail-oriented clockwork. Another difference, and in my never-remotely humble opinion an improvement, is the streamlining of the major crime's motivation. Students smuggling drugs are always, always going to be suspected of such; but in the show it's diamonds, only diamonds, that they're smuggling and that would be so much less expected as to allow the ring to function longer and better.

But in the end, the episode did little with Miss Lemon and her sister, introduced to very little effect in both versions of the story and, in the already altered TV verion, still underused. I get it, she's not the star, but the show was in its sixth season! Give the lady some room to be. Now for the reasons I rate the show as mingily as I do: the director introduces a scene-wipe of a flippin' mouse scurrying through the walls and the clock of the hostel! THEN there's an *irritating* soundtrack of sweet itty soprano ladies singing "hickory dickory" at dramaticall moments. The title can't be changed, I get it, but the nursery rhyme connection made no sense in the book and even less in the episode.

Cheeseball Cornpone Junction called, they want their tropes back.

So, while I was diverted and mildly amused by the tale in both versions, it simply isn't top drawer in either version. More than good enough to read and watch, not necessary to experience again in either format.… (meer)