28-02-2025
Towards Zero, review: a sexed-up, slang-filled spin on Agatha Christie
Between 2015 and 2020 Sarah Phelps dramatised five stories by Agatha Christie for the BBC. The results were stylish, steamy and lavishly well cast. In Towards Zero (BBC One) the adaptation duties have been handed on to Rachel Bennette, who takes charge of a double murder in a posh pile on the Devon coast, but we remain very much in Phelpsland.
As in Ordeal by Innocence and The Pale Horse, this is richly handsome to look at. The gents' threads and, especially, the ladies' fashions (clinging silk gowns, Cruella de Vil furs etc) are the lush fantasies of touched-up magazine spreads. Like Phelps, Bennette has done plenty of rewiring on the original plot. New characters have been slotted in as red herrings and/or plot mules, while others are cast out.
The 1944 novel was a valedictory case for Superintendent Battle, a lesser-loved detective in the Agathaverse who has been dumped altogether, leaving his assistant Inspector Leach (Matthew Rhys) to piece together clues on his lonesome. To give Rhys some meat to chew on, Leach has shell-shock and suicidal tendencies that formerly belonged to another character.
This being a 2020s reinvention of the 1930s, there are de rigueur anachronisms in casting and in language that will trigger rote Pavlovian groans. The more striking shock is a peremptory oral pleasuring enacted on the main staircase for all to see. In the book such naughtinesses happened between chapters behind closed doors in the reader's imagination. Here, feast your eyes.
At the heart of the case is a good question, posed by Leach. 'What on earth are you doing on your ex-husband's honeymoon?' The husband is tennis hottie Nevile Strange (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who takes his sultry second wife Kay (Mimi Keene) to his aunt's house yet encourages his sultry first wife Audrey (Ella Lily Hyland) to tag along too.
Other characters rather pale next to this preening trio, even the bilious aunt Lady Tressilian. To secure Angelica Huston for the role is a casting coup on a par with John Malkovich's Poirot in The ABC Murders or Kim Cattrall in Witness for the Prosecution. From her eyrie in bed she tosses off bon mots in the mode of a certain dowager countess. 'My dear, a woman can't be her own person.' 'Why have a husband when you can have a lawyer?' Huston's respectable English accent slightly saps her of power and charisma, and she feels somewhat wasted.
Clarke Peters is a grizzled treat as the lawyer Treves. To him falls the opening oration that explains the title. 'I like a good detective story,' he says, 'but you know they begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder.' We must wait until midway into the second episode of three to find whose death is to be solved. Only then does the story work its evidential way back towards the point zero of motive. Thus this Christie feels like a long skip to the centre of an impeccably clipped maze, followed by a long trudge to the exit.
