Then They Came for Dame Agatha
One of the great memories of a childhood spent long ago, in another world, was my introduction to Agatha Christie and her sublime detective fiction.
much later arrival of the quintessential Hercule Poirot, the equally sublime David Suchet, completed the love affair. And, incidentally, introduced a whole new generation of viewers and readers to the genre, and to this especially gifted exemplar of the craft.
An especially fond memory as my letter to Dame Agatha in which I told her how much I loved her books. Astonishingly, she replied. I still have the blue-coloured aerogram, somewhere. (For younger readers unfamiliar with the word aerogram, look it up). I don’t know if Dame Agatha had Bradmanesque devotion to answering fan mail, but I suspect she may have.
Post-Suchet, there has been a typically twenty-first century tendency to go a step too far. This has taken two forms. One has been the ludicrous re-imagining of Poirot by, of all people, the astonishingly gifted Kenneth Branagh, of Shakespearean fame and of the supreme Wallander. Whatever Ken was thinking of, it wasn’t excellence in crime fiction. It is as if you grew Poirot’s famed moustache by a foot and a half, you could proportionally extend his fame and excellence. You couldn’t, and you didn’t. Wallander represented peak Branagh.
The second has been to re-imagine Agatha Christie ideologically. Latterday Christies are infested with lesbians, for example. The homosexualisation of Agatha Christie makes even the Lifestyle channel look heteronormative. This makes Branagh’s sins merely venial. The now infamous British Broadcasting Corporation has had several goes at this. The previous efforts were merely pathetic. Now they are evil.
The latest, and most egregious effort, is Murder Is Easy. It is much in the news at the moment. We have a black African sleuth. Inevitably. An immediate red flag. Doing research on English villages of the 1950s. The murders pale into insignificance compared to the colonialism uncovered.
The Daily Mail’s reviewer, Christopher Stevens, is uncompromising.
Our Auntie Beeb can't stand the way we enjoy murder in a 1950s village. All those spinsters cycling through the morning mist to church, ruddy-cheeked blacksmiths and lads playing cricket on the green – it's so very English, it must be wrong.
So instead of giving us the Agatha Christie adaptation we'd like, Auntie devises something different that will be 'better for us'. That is the equivalent of serving a tofu turkey and insisting: 'It tastes just as good, and it's saving the world.'
This means taking a pre-war tale from the Golden Age of British detective fiction and turning it into what director Meenu Gaur calls 'a great allegorical story about colonialism'.
Well, bully for you, Meenu! Meen is a British “South Asian” (aka Indian) filmmaker, artist and academic. (She has written on the politics of change, and her previous work in film dealt with illegal immigration). At least she is being frank about her intentions. The reviewer continues:
… there are worse crimes than murder in the eyes of writer Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre.
The village is a seething hotbed of racism. Our detective, Luke Fitzwilliam (David Jonsson), has only to walk into a pub for the whole place to fall silent. The lord of the manor makes sneering remarks about 'mud huts' and the doctor is handing out tracts on purifying the white master race.
'Now do you see?' mutters Auntie Beeb. 'That's what your precious English village was really like. Fascists, the lot of them.'
This is a 21st-centurL Left-wing lecture, drumming in the conviction that Britain after the war was a truly terrible place and we should all be ashamed of it. Nostalgia is a thought crime.
The opening scenes of this two-parter are inspired not by Agatha Christie but by the West African legend of a man who makes himself invisible to go hunting.
Sian Ejiiwunmi-Le Berre, no less. She has been described thus:
[She] is a versatile and intelligent screenwriter with a forensic mind and a nimble, humorous touch.
https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/sian-ejiwunmi-le-berre
And, apparently, the ability to deliver ideology-on-demand.
It is reassuring that at least some journalist/reviewers have a sense of proportion, history, standards and excellence. Of course, once “adaptations” were about fidelity to the original author and his or her work. Authenticity was key. Now, adherence to the intent and form of the creator is neither here nor there.
Christopher Stevens sees a pattern at the BBC, for whom this version of Murder is Easy was specifically made:
This is hardly the first time the BBC's loathing of Christie has been apparent.
Boom. It is all true. But Stevens himself is merely scratching the surface. It turns out that the ideological lecturing, the frame shifting, is the least of the problems.
First, there is the utter dishonesty of the enterprise. Think of adaptive literary ideology also as cheating, indeed, as plagiarism. Instead of using another’s work without acknowledgement, you are acknowledging the original author in passing but appropriating structure, plot, dialogue and characterisation for ends not remotely intended or even envisaged by the author. The project here is no longer putting a novel on the screen. This isn’t just a twist or adding a soupcon of (shall we say) colour. It is a complete re-engineering. It is, as the Director herself says, now a story about colonialism. This is innovative plagiarism. It is insulting to the original creator, to boot. And if you are insulting, simply using the author for your own purposes, while pretending to be so deferential that you rely on her for the whole architecture of the story, then that is hypocrisy of the first order.
Second, it is unutterably lazy. Why not write your own account of 1950s British rural village racism – or whatever – rather than having the gall to nick someone else’s work? To use and abuse one of the great literary figures, certainly one of the greats in the field of crime writing.
Then there is the irony of it. It was only a few years back that it became fashionable for the victim class and its cheer squads across the West to intone, “stay in your own lane”. Don’t mock us, but, as well, don’t imagine as us, write as us, perform as us, borrow from us.
I wonder if anyone remembers the name Yassmin Abdel-Magied. No, I, too, had forgotten it. But I did remember that, some years ago, a victim-princess had achieved brief notoriety by walking out on a speech by the American novelist and commentator, Lionel Shriver, at a writers’ festival. It was in Brisbane in 2016. Then, perhaps anticipating Brittany Higgins, Yassmin left the country in a huff.
Lionel Shriver had been talking about staying in your own lane, offence-taking and related issues.
In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look-but-don’t-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.
Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.
In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.
Theft. Just think about this for a minute. What are these activists of colour doing, if not appropriating a largely white, colonial-era literary sub-genre and turning it upside down and inside out for their own ideological purposes? When non-BAMEs (Blacks, Asians, Minority Ethnics) do it, they are crucified. When BAMEs do it, the rest of us are meant to cheer. They are being very, very colonial.
It is all very, very colonial.
It is also rampant hypocrisy (again), all the pretending to be suffering from colonialist whitey not staying in his lane, when all the while, the assorted victims of colonialism, who, by the way, benefited immensely (as did white writers and artists) from the cross-fertilisation of ideas and literary genres that imperialism brought to the new world, are doing it themselves, quite deliberately and with the ultimate purpose of giving offence.
The re-casting of classic Western literature in the image of our current ruling elites is nothing new. When the feminists and other faux-victims took over the education departments and curricula in the 1980s, we were given a societal heads-up. They made classic literature an ideological plaything. Just as they intended. We ignored this. We-the-parents ignored it. That we-the-marketplace and readership have allowed this to happen says just about all that needs to be said about post-modern Faustian bargains.
Yet there is something especially fetid about this latest assault.
Meanwhile, the Christie descendants think it is just tickety-boo.
Agatha Christie’s family welcome diversity in new BBC adaptation.
Author’s great-grandson suggests she would have approved of changing lead’s ethnicity in Murder Is Easy.
However, the great grandson also had this to say:
Asked by the Radio Times what Christie would have made of changing Fitzwilliam’s heritage to Nigerian, James Prichard, 53, said: “Rule one: I never try to second-guess my great-grandmother – therein lies madness.
Wise advice. But, in a sense, it doesn’t really matter what Dame Agatha might have thought. And two, what we have here is not a simple change of “heritage” for the star sleuth. It is a wholesale re-imagining. As the Director admitted. And whether Christie would have thought this all good, perhaps having donned white post-colonial guilt, is quite another story.
Mind you, the Christie estate and its descendant-custodians, no doubt egged on by their bank manager, probably never feel like saying “no” to any new adaptation, whatever damage (fatal or not) it might have done to the original. But James Prichard didn’t merely “approve of” this adaptation. As the man running Agatha Christie Limited, he co-produced the thing (with Mammoth Screen). So, he would say that. (And he is the producer of the appalling Branagh vehicle, A Haunting in Venice. So up to his armpits in the desecration of his great grandmother’s oeuvre, and in allowing others with agendas to sponge off her reputation and skillset).
The left, which generally affects, indeed, exudes, woke-denialism, is holding its ground (in the person of Marc Barham of medium.com):
The Usual Suspects have once again — because of the change in the colour, background, and heritage of our hero — smeared this new adaptation as “woke”. A review in the Financial Times said that by confronting themes of “colonialism, prejudice, privilege and inequality — racial, but also gender- and class-based” the new adaptation lost sight of its main focus on being a murder mystery.
“Balderdash,” I say. Loud and clear.
It seems that even the Financial Times is upset about the show being too “woke”. I found that although these references were there — and why shouldn’t they be? — they were very subtle and did not impugn or dilute the quality of the Christie story. They added to the relevance and brought the story into our real modern world with an emphasis more on class privilege and the inequality of the working class…
https://medium.com/counterarts/murder-is-easy-bbc1-review-27322b2c3114
Again, he would say that. Whether he is simply naïve, or, more likely, disingenuous, he has managed to sidestep the narrative re-framing activity going on – the elephant in the room – and managed to give the good old racist deplorables a whack as well.
The acclaimed British writer Phillip Pullman had his own, other issues with the new production:
"Shan't be watching Episode 2 of the 'Agatha Christie' on BBC1. The actors had no idea what to do, and the director didn't know either, and the script was pitiful. What a waste," he wrote.
https://news.yahoo.com/agatha-christie-murder-is-easy-reactions-165720774.html
Oh dear. Perhaps it is another case of “go woke, go broke”.
Paul Collits
30 December 2023
We live in the age of Witless Woke Wankers. It won't end well.
Collective madness has always resulted in disaster and suffering.
Under the current circumstances hope for an improvement in the New Year is pissing into the wind.
The BBC must be defunded, ignored and left to die in poverty.
It is a cancer upon society.