Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet, review: like watching Paddington Bear on holiday
Given the BBC's recent wheeze, in which they used AI to disinter Agatha Christie and turn her into a creative writing teacher for their Maestro platform, you half-expected Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet (More4) to be a technologically enhanced mismatched-buddy travelogue in the vein of Travel Man. Just how would Hercule Poirot and his creator get on sharing a yurt in Mongolia or exploring the saunas of Finland? Or, perhaps more appropriately, sailing down the Nile or boarding the Orient Express?
Thankfully/sadly (delete according to taste), it is a travelogue like any other. Which means a well-known celebrity is paid to have a whale of a time trotting the globe – in this instance South Africa, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and Canada – while smiling politely at knowledgeable locals and telling us how moved and humbled they are to be on a whizzo (fully paid-for) holiday. This one, however, has a terrific excuse. Suchet is following the route of Christie 's own whizzo (fully paid-for) holiday, when, in 1922, she and her husband, Archibald, were invited on a world tour to help promote the upcoming British Empire Exhibition.
This first episode saw Suchet in Cape Town, before heading north to the diamond mines of Kimberley and the majesty of Victoria Falls. With the Christies' adventure being one to massage the UK's colonial influence, Suchet was forced to confront some meaty issues – and with it being South Africa and what is now Zimbabwe, in 1922, that meant Cecil Rhodes. Suchet politely described Rhodes's legacy as 'complex and contested', though he struggled to find many locals who found it all that complex. The show's USP took him away from the usual travelogue hotspots, with visits to Rhodes's home and grave, as well as a jaunt to a gargantuan former diamond mine. We got a smattering of the usual hotspots too, with Suchet showing he knew the lingo. Table Mountain: 'Iconic'. Victoria Falls: 'The power of nature!'
Following Christie's 1922 route meant the show could unashamedly lean into the linen-suits-and-steam-trains aesthetic, enabling the viewer to indulge their own sepia travel fantasies while also tut-tutting at the imperial shame of it all. Suchet made for an amiable companion, so unfailingly and intensely polite and British that at times it felt like watching Paddington Bear on holiday. One pleasing contrivance was that the diminutive actor took with him the same model of camera his photojournalist grandfather had used, and we were treated to the occasional Suchet holiday snap (black-and-white, elegant, slightly blurred).
The programme promised us deeper insight into the young Christie – at the time of the journey she was a happy wife and mother, starting to make small waves in the crime-writing business – but this first episode didn't provide a great deal of it, beyond Suchet occasionally alighting on places and events that might have inspired moments in her novels. The sedate pace and Suchet's enjoyably rich voice-over gave it the occasional tinge of an advert for Viking Cruises. Still, it's a travelogue with a purpose, and an impeccably turned out host, and that is something to be embraced.
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