Following the success of And Then There Were None last Christmas, the BBC will be screening eight more Agatha Christie adaptations.
This year we will be getting The Witness For The Prosecution, adapted by Sarah Phelps, directed by Julian Jarrold and starring Toby Jones (who seems to be in everything these days), Andrea Riseborough, and Kim Cattrall.
And this week the BBC announced it has acquired the rights to seven more titles. Ordeal By Innocence is up first, by the same production company that made And Then There Were None and Poldark (both of which starred Aidan Turner). Amongst the other six are Egyptian history-mystery Death Comes as the End and The ABC Murders.
Past Offences: Classic crime, thrillers and mystery book reviews 
Well, this is interesting, Rich! Thank you for sharing it.
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Tell you what, DEATH COMES AS THE END is a really welcome surprise -so as long as they don’t cast David Walliams …
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That was my thinking too, Sergio!
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Fingers crossed … 🙂
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…and update it to the 1950s, and set it in a family-run habidashery business, and add a comedy sidekick and/or stunt-cast three of Coldplay. I mean, that’s effectively what happened with Poirot and Marple, right? Admittedly on another channel, but there’s a disturbingly-recent tendency to misjudge this kind of alteration like it’s adding something and miss the point entirely.
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Well, while I didn’t enjoy many of the later episodes of POIROT, it never got quite THAT bad. I can imagine them adding a framing device to match the Mallowans on a dig, so as to have a more modern feel, which wouldn’t be a bad move …
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“This year we will be getting The Witness For The Prosecution”
…and maybe next year too. Apparently a big budget Hollywood version is also in the works:
http://deadline.com/2016/08/ben-affleck-witness-for-the-prosecution-agatha-christie-fox-batman-live-by-night-1201805943/
I guess the Christie estate is laughing all the way to the bank.
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They’re already *at* the bank. They’d have to laugh all the way home.
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Death Comes as the End will be challenging (and expensive!) if they keep with the ancient Egypt setting. I hope it isn’t updated to modern times…or worse the 1950s which is the era that UK TV has fallen in love with of late. OH! just saw that JJ thought the same thing!
Ten to one the Affleck version of WFTP is nixed the same way his wife’s production company scrapped the updated Miss Marple that was suposed to star Garner as a revamped young and hip American Marple. While I’m reminded of failed mystery movie adaptations… whatever happened to Robert Downey Jr’s Perry Mason movie?
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“…whatever happened to Robert Downey Jr’s Perry Mason movie?”
Apparently the Perry Mason project is alive at HBO. Nic Pizzolato of “True Detective” fame is working on the series.
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A series?!?!? Oh my gosh, that’s exciting news!
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Hmmmm – I’m a tad sceptical about all this. Most of the recent adaptations have been so glossy and the plots so altered that I barely recognised them as Christie. I shall exercise caution about which ones to watch….
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As someone who didn’t much like the And Then There Were None adaptation, I am less than thrilled. How about adapting some less frequently filmed golden age mystery writers, such as Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey, or Edmund Crispin? There are at least two versions of many of Christie’s works, but none of most of these other writers. There are about a half dozen versions of Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None alone. Enough already! More importantly, perhaps, how could a new adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution possibly top Billy Wilder’s version?
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The BBC’s production of and then there were none was almost identical to the famous Tussian film, even down to the way some scenes were staged, and the result was very good though a long way short of outstanding. Hiwever, the advance publicity suggests they may be about to make a bit of a dogs’ breakfast of Witness for The Prosecution. Fingers crossed!
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Fingers crossed for a dogs’ breakfast? 🙂
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