The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie

No, big round bales are quite a recent thing!!

Anyway, I remain
Should not have tried to multi-task.

Baffled! but I did drift off half way through. Strangely I always found her books, which I read throughout my teens very easy to follow.

I haven't watched it. I have read the book and would get confused.

But I agree with rubysong on both big bales, in the '60s. Straw came in bales then, the kind you see being fed to horses or used as seating or protection at gymkhamas and sports events. You are right about the sleeves, as well. I did a lot of knitting then and , as you say, no dropped shoulders.

Yes, we used to sit on proper bales at proper barn dances!
You'd roll off the round ones.

Well that's two hours of my life I'll never get back! MOnica you needn't have worried about being confused. The title and the names were the only things it shared with the book. Why doesn't the woman just write her own stuff instead of cashing in on Agatha's name?

Did she get paid?
I want a refund on that portion of my TV licence

Can someone explain that ending to me?

I’m just pleased it’s over. Mr C enjoyed it, I was just baffled.

Yep, we were baffled too.

I expect Agatha Christie herself would have been baffled.

I enjoyed it and thought it was very clever. It did take me a minute to remember who Jessie was though. I now will read the book, which I still have in my bookcase. Just to see how different it is.

Where did people get the info about the screenwriter 'cashing in', and her lack of confidence? I haven't seen anything about that in the press (not that I've looked very hard, to be fair).

I would have thought that she'd have been commissioned to write an adaptation, but I don't know that for sure, and I'd be interested to see where people got their information from.

Oh, and I'm another who got completely lost .

Spoiler alert if you haven't seen it yet - scroll down if you have seen it and understood the ending:





Was it all a dream that Mark was doomed to keep reliving?

I'm going to write a drama set in a poorly performing comprehensive school in the inner city. Most of the girls will be from chaotic homes, the head teacher will be a drug addict having an affair with her supplier and the main character will be a teenage mother who's murdered her brother. I'm sure you all recognise my adaptation of Enid Blyton's Malory Towers

I just didnt understand the ending.

I think it helped not knowing the book. Taking it as a completely different tale. I suppose though that there would then have been cries of plagiarism.

Will read the book.

Nope, I didn't understand the ending either! Anyone who did, could you please explain it!

I took it that it was his conscience taking him over. And that the witches didn’t have the powers after all. Or did they....?!

How about a poor family living in a dockyard slum? The father a exploited Philipino seaman, away 11 months of the year and earning a pittance. The 4 children have no toys and scavenge on the forshore, making up games using the bits of wood they find there to build a boat of sorts, but then an expensive yacht moors nearby and the two pampered children on board laugh at the poor children and destroy the pretend boat. The children go for a long walk and find a body on the mud. It is their father who had discovered the yacht owner was a drug smuggler and had been killed and thrown overboard

Swallows and Amazons.

Any more people with ideas? we could submit them to Sarah Phelps and the BBC and perhaps get to meet Rufus Sewell!

In this adaptation Agatha Christie was the victim and Sarah Phelps the murderess.
There is a version of this tale with Miss Marple on the ITV players with Julia McKenzie, although not sure this was originally a Marple story.

The Pale Horse is not a Miss Marple story. The narrator is called Mark Easterbrook, but that is all the character in the book and tv character have in common.

It is a very good and rather creepy story on its own account, without any messing about and the denouement and who the murderer actually is comes as a big surprise as does the very clever way the murders are carried out.

I came to it through R4 who dramatised it 5 years ago or more. A good straight adaptation. As a result I downloaded the book onto my kindle and read it.

Download it and read it and then report back.

I have read the original, but the adaptation is so different that I am still no wiser about the ending of it. I mean the very last bit - the murderer and the revelation (no pun intended!) of how it all happened is the same, if memory serves.

I enjoyed the first episode but last night’s episode completely confused me. I’m obviously not ‘arty’ enough to appreciate things like that. The only thing I gathered from last night’s episode was the identity of the murderer. I didn’t read the original but it didn’t help one bit. At least I have Last Tango In Halifax and Line Of Duty to look forward to.

I think he had "gone to hell" in the end....or I had??

I was got a bit last in the first part and completely lost in the second. Mr B is going to watch it all again to see if he can understand it a bit more but it won't be while I am at home.