22-05-2025
Poirot's on his hols, but all we get is a dreary lecture on the evils of empire: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV
Travels With Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet (More4)
Sir David Suchet on a surfboard is quite the mental image. In a striped 1920s bathing costume, the great thespian would be a picture of Hercule Poirot on his holidays.
But as the first episode of his Travels With Agatha Christie (More4) took him to Cape Town, the producers fluffed this glorious opportunity.
Instead, they obliged him to embark on a dreary circuit of apologies for Britain's heinous imperial past.
Sir David, who played the pompous little Belgian detective for 25 years on ITV, was eager to trace Dame Agatha's footsteps around southern Africa.
In 1922, she accompanied her husband Archie on a world tour, to champion the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition in London.
Her first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, had just been published, and Mrs Christie was eagerly soaking up atmosphere for her story The Man In The Brown Suit.
On the voyage to the Cape, she took her notebooks and typewriter, and was inspired to send her heroine Anne Beddingfeld on the same sea journey — beset by spies, murderers and jewel thieves, of course.
Like Agatha, in Cape Town the actor marvelled at Table Mountain: 'It's as though someone's come along with a big knife and just taken the top right off.'
But he ignored the coastline, and with it the chance to inject some real fun into this travelogue.
Agatha was fascinated, she wrote, by the 'perfectly entrancing bathing . . . people had short curved boards and came floating in on the waves.
'Surfing looks perfectly easy. It isn't. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I would not be beaten. Quite by mistake I got a good run on my board, and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.'
We learned none of this from Sir David, who trundled off instead for a series of lectures on how ghastly the 19th-century diamond tycoon Cecil Rhodes was.
Three activists introduced themselves as the founders of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which succeeded in getting a statue of the former prime minister of the Cape Colony torn down — sparking a brief fad for statue toppling in Britain, too.
Later, he visited Rhodes's home (where he admired a granite bathtub), a diamond workshop (where he admired a hefty sparkler) and Rhodes's grave in Zimbabwe's Matobo National Park (where he admired the view).
This trivial tone rather undermined the lectures on injustices inflicted by the British Empire.
Anne Beddingfeld, in The Man In The Brown Suit, does actually visit the grave, which means Agatha must also have seen it.
Bizarrely, the documentary didn't mention this. By now, the author's travels had been relegated to a footnote in a biography of Rhodes — a man she never met.
Sir David did take a moment, though, to buy a wooden giraffe from a stall. Agatha Christie had one just like it, apparently.
