Latest news with #AgathaChristieLimited
Straits Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, will see you in class at BBC Maestro
With the help of artificial intelligence, Agatha Christie has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture series. PHOTO: BBC MAESTRO/INSTAGRAM Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, will see you in class at BBC Maestro LONDON – Agatha Christie is dead. But Agatha Christie also just started teaching a writing class. 'I must confess,' she says, in a cut-glass English accent, 'that this is all rather new to me.' The literary legend, who died in 1976, has been tapped to teach a course with BBC Maestro, an online lecture serie s. Christie, alongside dozens of other experts, is there for any aspiring writer with £79 (S$136) to spare. She has been reanimated with the help of academic researchers – who wrote a script using her writings and archival interviews – and a 'digital prosthetic' made with artificial intelligence an d fitted over a real actor's performance. 'We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life,' Mr Michael Levine, chief executive of BBC Maestro, said in a telephone interview. 'This is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.' The course's release coincides with a heated debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). In Britain, a potential change to copyright law has frightened artists who fear it will allow their work to be used to train AI models without their consent. In this case, however, there is no copyright issue. Christie's family, who manages her estate, is fully on board. 'We just had the red line that it had to be her words,' said Mr James Prichard, her great-grandson and chief executive of Agatha Christie Limited. 'And the image an d voice had to be like her.' Christie is hardly the only person to have been resurrected with AI. Using the technology to talk to the dead has become something of a cottage industry for wealthy nostalgics. She is not the first dead artist to be turned into an avatar either. In 2021, AI was used to generate American celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain's voice reading out his own words. English actor Peter Cushing has been resurrected to act in movies. In 2024 , a Polish radio station used AI to 'interview' a dead luminary, leading many to worry that it had put words in her mouth. For Christie, AI was used only to create her likeness, not to build the course or write the script. That is part of why Mr Levine rejects the idea that this is an Agatha Christie deepfake. 'The implication of the word 'fake' suggests that there is something about this which is sort of passing off,' he said. 'I don't think that's the case.' Mr Prichard said his family would never have agreed to a project that invented Christie's views. And they are proud of the course. 'We're not speaking for her,' he added. 'We are collecting what she said and putting it out in a digestible and shareable format.' A team of academics combined or paraphrased statements from Christie's archive to distill her advice about the writing process. They took care to preserve what they believed to be her intended meaning, with the aim of helping more of her fans interact with her work, and with fiction writing in general. 'We didn't make anything up in terms of things like her suggestions and what she did,' said Mr Mark Aldridge, who led the academic team. That, for Dr Carissa Veliz, a professor of philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at Oxford University, is still 'extremely problematic'. Even if the author's family consented, Christie has not, and cannot, agree to the course. That is complex with any sort of historical re-enactment or animation, but Dr Veliz noted that writers spend hours finding the right word, or the right rhythm. 'Agatha Christie never said those words,' Dr Veliz said in a telephone interview. 'She's not sitting there. And therefore, yes, it's a deepfake.' She added: 'When you see someone who looks like Agatha Christie and talks like Agatha Christie , i t's easy for the boundaries to be blurred. What do we gain? Other than it being gimmicky?' But Dr Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and digital news at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, noted that this Christie was meant to entertain and also educate – which the author did when she was alive. And the representation draws from something 'close to her actual writings and her actual words – and therefore by her extension, to some degree, her thinking', he said. 'There's also very little risk of this harming, posthumously, her dignity or her reputation,' he added. 'I think that makes these cases so complicated because you can't apply a hard and fast rule for every single one of them and say: 'This is generally good or generally bad.'' Perhaps this sort of fact-fiction-futurism melange is just the way things are going in an age when AI can be used to finish sentences, replace jobs and, perhaps, even try to resurrect the dead. Either way, the creators think Christie – a brave and creative adventurer – would have liked it. 'Can we definitively know that this something she would be approving of?' said Mr Levine. 'We hope. But we don't definitively know, because she's not here.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
The Independent
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How Agatha Christie is teaching a writing course, decades after death
The BBC is launching an online writing course taught by a digital recreation of Agatha Christie, who died in 1976. Using AI, the course will feature the author's likeness and voice, based on archival footage and writings. Aspiring writers will learn Christie's techniques on plot twists, suspense, and character development. The course, available on BBC Maestro, comprises 11 videos and costs £79 or is included with a £120 annual subscription. Agatha Christie Limited and BBC Studios collaborated on the project, aiming to share the author's writing wisdom in her own words.
The Herald Scotland
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Agatha Christie brought to life by AI for writing course
Brought to life by actress Vivien Keen and visual effect artists, the course will use AI-enhanced technology, images and restored audio recordings to recreate Christie's words and teachings to make it feel as if she is delivering them directly. 'As a lifelong fan of Agatha Christie, bringing this course to life has been a dream come true, and I am immensely proud of it,' said Michael Levine, chief executive of BBC Maestro, which runs online courses and developed Agatha Christie Writing with BBC Studios, the writer's estate and a team of experts. He said the course invites all Christie fans to 'learn through her own words, exactly how she does it; her background, her inspirations, her craft and the lessons she learned along the way'. The course has been created by a team of experts from Christie's who have reconstructed her philosophy on writing, drawing her insights on story structure, cast creation, plot twists, red herrings and the art of suspense from her work and archival interviews. The writer's great-grandson James Prichard, the chairman and chief executive of Agatha Christie Limited, said: 'The team of academics and researchers that BBC Maestro has assembled have extracted from a number of her writings an extraordinary array of her views and opinions on how to write.' Christie's books have sold more than 200 billion copies and include 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. Her works also include as The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running stage play which has run in London's West End since 1952 with its only break coming during the Covid pandemic. She died in 1976 aged 85 but her crime fiction continues to be produced for television and movies.
Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How to write a crime thriller – with help from AI-gatha Christie
Agatha Christie is the world's best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she's the first person you'd ask. Unfortunately, she died in 1976. But in the age of AI, with a plot twist that would assuredly have had Christie herself itching to incorporate it in a book, death need not be the end. A new BBC Maestro course of online video lessons, made in conjunction with Christie's estate, brings the queen of crime back to life. 'First and foremost, for me, this project is about looking at her process as a writer and paying homage to that,' says James Prichard, Christie's great-grandson and the Chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Limited. 'One of the things I am proudest of that has happened over the last however many years is how seriously Agatha Christie is taken, which I don't think was always the case. She is now held in the regard and esteem that she should be as a writer.' It's that esteem that will encourage wannabe Christies – in this case, myself – to pay their £120 for a Maestro subscription (which gets you a year's access to all manner of courses from Stephen Bartlett to JoJo Moyes to Jo Malone). The new Agatha series is a short lecture course given by a recreation of the writer herself, with Christie's face and voice somehow grafted on to a (brilliant) performance from the actor Vivien Keene. Delivered across 11 videos, all of less than 20 minutes, you sit and are spoken to – nothing interactive here – as Agatha takes you through plotting, structure, detectives and satisfying resolutions. The difference to all the other BBC Maestro courses is that Christie's writing advice is only sort-of delivered by Christie. But the message does come from the horse's mouth, so to speak – it was one of the stipulations of the Christie estate that every one of the words that Keene speaks should have come from Christie's pen. 'It had to be her lessons; it couldn't be some made up thing,' says Prichard. 'So we had a team of academics under Dr Mark Aldridge [an acknowledged Christie expert] to see to that.' In order to fit with the BBC Maestro credo – 'Let the greatest be your teacher' – 'It had to look and sound like her,' says Prichard. 'And what they have done is extraordinary. The final thing was that it had to be of value to both aspiring writers and fans. And I think it does that. All I can say is I was speaking to my father on Friday and both of us agreed that we'd learned a hell of a lot from her that we didn't know.' If AI-gatha's Maestro course could teach her own relatives a thing or two – Prichard said that he learned from the course that Christie's books work because 'they're actually about people, and people never really change' — then surely it could help me? I was lucky enough to get an early view of the Christie course and can report that watching Agatha, or 'Agatha,' dole out aperçus on story structure, cast creation, plot twists, red herrings, and the art of suspense, was most of all… unnerving. A half-smiling Christie-bot stares barrel-straight down the camera with schoolmarm-ish supremacy. She seemed to sense my self-doubt, my daft plot ideas, my general unease. There is also some mild unease at having AI involved at all. To authors, AI is perceived as a threat more than a boon. 'I'd be lying if I said there weren't worries [about using AI],' says James Prichard. 'But I believe and I hope that this is using AI in both a helpful and ethical way. The AI model of Agatha doesn't work without the performance of Vivien Keene. This was not written by AI. It is a leading academic unearthing everything that she said about writing. And I believe that what we are delivering here in terms of her message is better presented and will reach more people as a result of being presented, if I can use inverted commas, 'by her.'' What kind of tutor is AI-gatha? The course shows that Christie plainly studied her craft and while she opens up saying, 'I don't feel I have any particular method when it comes to writing,' which is disappointing, she does in fact adhere to a broad methodology founded in meticulous planning. 'And I take it seriously,' she says, looking serious. The importance of saying something – not preaching but there being some form of moral backbone to your story — is emphasised throughout. Readers like to see justice served, she says. 'I write to entertain but there is a dash of the old morality play in my work – hunting down the guilty to protect the innocent.' But where to even start? That's my problem. Agatha recommends - glory be! – idleness (but not sloth) as a fallow field where ideas can take seed. She encourages eavesdropping on conversations on buses as a source of characters and dialogue, and so I head to that virtual bus that is the Internet and find that Telegraph readers are particularly interested in Air Fryers (see below). I open with a blood-spattered, Grand Guignol set piece, only to remember that Agatha 'doesn't like violence;' she likes puzzles with realistic characters in well-defined settings. And so I concoct a well-defined village and open up with what I hope is a well-defined, air-fryer related teaser. Most of all, she says, in a computer-generated voice that somehow defies all dissent, you 'must play fair' with your reader. Set that puzzle, ask the questions, but don't expect them to use their own little grey cells to unpick mysteries that can't be unpicked. So I make sure to introduce the detective, a sidekick (the reader's eyes and ears) and the murderer in the first few pages. And so with all that in mind, I present to you my first attempt at a crime thriller. No AI was involved in its writing. Perhaps that would have helped… For more details on BBC Maestro's Agatha Christie course, see here The Air Fryer Cracked From Side to Side By a student of AI-gatha Christie The air fryer started shaking on the worktop. The chicken wings within were crisp and crumbly, cooked at least 33 seconds quicker than they would have been in a conventional oven, but that meant nothing to Mrs Veronica Dime. She just stood there, staring at the silicon-lined basket, mouthing, 'Surely…' She didn't have time to add, 'not.' The air fryer exploded, sending chicken wings to the ceiling and Mrs Veronica Dime to the floor. As the first flames danced down the kitchen island, there she remained. Baked to perfection. 'Hold on, just a minute, I'm coming!' said Roger Cairns as he ran down the hall. Packages, deliveries, sorry we missed you… this was the scourge of so-called convenience. Everything the next day, but never a moment's rest (now that his wife Penelope had discovered Amazon Prime). He looked through the peephole to see a man in a motorcycle helmet holding a large cardboard box. It wasn't the usual delivery man, but then these days there was no usual delivery man – anyone and everyone could turn up unannounced with a 'parcel for you.' Roger opened the door, said hello and reached for the package. The man seemed reluctant to hand it over. 'Are you Roger Cairns?' he said, voice muffled through his visor. He didn't have a motorbike parked outside like they normally did. 'Why yes I am. How are you today?' said Roger. The delivery man didn't answer. He handed over the package and scurried off, leaving Roger on the doorstep. The parcel was addressed to him, but he didn't recall ordering it. Dodging a Labrador and the umbrella rack on his way back to the kitchen – why was the godforsaken umbrella rack always in the way? – he set to the packing tape with a kitchen knife. It was an 'Air Fryer,' whatever that was, and it came with an anonymous note: 'This is for you.' 'To lose one parish councillor to a freak air fryer explosion may be regarded as misfortune,' said Lt Col. Bennett. 'To lose two looks like carelessness. I think it was Richard Osman who first said that.' Monique Van Dingus put down her cello. 'Don't tell the police. They won't know what to do and anyway, there's nothing to tell yet.' Bennett poured the tea. 'But don't you think it's strange – two new air fryers, both delivered when no one actually ordered them, to people who wouldn't know an air fryer from a kumquat, both of whom are now dead?' 'It's only strange if you think guilt is strange, or greed, or retribution,' said Monique. 'Are you saying what I think you're saying? 'What do you think I'm saying?' 'I don't know. I was hoping you'd say it and then I wouldn't have to ask.' 'Well then yes. This looks like murder.' Bennett had known Van Dingus long enough to know that she would not say such a thing lightly. Ever since she had moved in to Chiply Wensdale, taking the old railwayman's cottage that had once belonged to Roger and Penelope Cairns' errant son Wrongun, she had brought energy and no little gumption to the proceedings of the Parish Council. She was, Bennett had come to learn, the daughter of a once-famed German detective who had grown up in the suburbs of Aachen — to her, there were no mysteries, just an absence of evidence. That of course never explained the mystery of why she had come to Chiply in the first place. Some said she had arrived to start up a garden business called, 'Convenient Plotting.' But even Van Dingus confessed that she had never seen anything like the Air Fryer Murders. No one had. They were in many ways, Van Dingus would come to say years later, the perfect crime. Everyone was buying Air Fryers. They were just so convenient and took up remarkably little space on the worktop. So the sight of a Ninja Foodie XL Two-Tier being delivered to a Chiply Wensdale front door had become part of village life. No more remarkable, you might say, than Roger Cairns popping round to Veronica Dime's each Wednesday morning. Where if you looked at the upstairs window, shortly afterwards the bedroom curtains would be hurriedly closed…
The Independent
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
BBC accused of poaching Traitors concept by Agatha Christie's great-grandson
The concept behind the BBC deception gameshow The Traitors was taken from Agatha Christie's murder mysteries, the author's great-grandson has claimed. TV and film producer James Prichard, the chairman of Agatha Christie Limited – the company managing the literary and media rights to her work – believes that the 'brilliant' reality show is inspired by Chirstie's famous 1939 mystery novel And Then There Were None. In a new interview with Radio Times, Prichard said: 'It's absolutely based on an Agatha Christie murder-mystery concept.' "At the beginning of the series, they're on the train. They've got the board with all the faces being picked off, one by one. They've got the library, it's everything Agatha Christie. It's And Then There Were None in lots of ways." The award-winning series, hosted by Claudia Winkleman, sees a group of 22 contestants arrive at a 19th-century Scottish Baronial-style castle where they are secretly split into two camps. A small number are the 'traitors', who must work together to 'murder' their fellow contestants, called 'faithfuls', while their identities remain undetected. The aim of the game is to successfully identify other contestants' status in the game and root them out – or hide in plain sight – to make it through to the final, where a £120,000 prize pot is available. Christie's 1939 novel has parallels to the show, since it follows 10 strangers who are invited by a mysterious host to an isolated island with an unknown killer living among them. They are killed one by one, while those who remain must work out the identity of the murderer. The Traitors also includes tropes prominent in Christie's stories, such as a grand library and a luxury train carrying a group of passengers. Prichard said: 'There's a recognition amongst a lot of the crime-writing fraternity that my great-grandmother is an inspiration. It's great. I love that murder mystery is growing in popularity.' However, the show is based on the Dutch reality show format, originally known as De Verraders in its native language. De Verraders, which first aired in 2021, was inspired by the story of a real-life mutiny onboard a 17th-century Dutch ship, the Batavia, that was wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629. The surviving passengers the split into faction, killing each other after anarchy broke out among them when they were shipwrecked on land that had no food or drinking water. The Dutch show was originally planned to be filmed on a large ship, before producers settled on a castle. Jasper Hoogendoorn, the programme's developer, said at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2023: 'It's a story about people who murder each other, backstab each other, betray each other. It's a horrible story. But it was such a fascinating story and I was thinking it's also exciting.' The Traitors has since become a global hit, with three series of the British version presented by Winkleman (launched in 2022), an Australian edition presented by Rodger Corser (2023), and a celebrity Traitors US version hosted by Alan Cumming (2023). The show's format also has parallels with the party game known as Werewolf or Mafia, a social deduction game wherein players are secretly assigned roles as werewolves or villagers. The werewolves can kill other players, while during the day, players debate and vote to eliminate a suspect.
