New Agatha Christie!

I didn’t care about the skin colour-I didn’t know what to expect anyway. I did care that the acting in an Agatha Christie that I’d looked forward to, was dire.

Maremia

I thought they were playing tennis? Loved seeing 'Thomas' from Ghosts in another role. Think he was also in a Death in Paradise.

He also appeared in one episode of Ghosts US. I didn't recognise him but his voice gave him away though not immediately.

Shame really because it was shown in UHD and I thought it might be entertaining.
Alas I found all of the characters instantly irritating and had to switch it off and search for something else.
This was definitely trying too hard to be stylish which only works if the production is worthwhile in other areas.
It wasn’t, and there wasn’t a single scene that I considered credible.

Thank you Iam64 for clearing up my misconception.

We may not have liked this interpretation but it’s certainly got us chatting.

Doodledog is it the change of ethnicity really caused all the fuss. I thought it was the whole production that caused all the fuss. the fact that 2 Scottish actors were trying to talk with an English accent and failing is unfortunate, but I would hardly describe it as all hell breaking lose

Reading back through this thread, the main complaints seem to be dullness, bad script, poorly produced. Casting is almost entirely irrelevant.

The casting wasn't irrelevant to me.

Callistemon21

Found an image. Love it! 😃

Douglas has been at the mince pies !

I’ve just watched a new BBC adaptation of the famous five and killen island. It watched it with grandchildren aged nearly 8 and just 5. They’re wriggly boys but sat gripped throughout. It’s set in 1942, the clothes are dialogue aren’t entirely 1942. George is black, well her mum is, dad is white.
The cast was not entirely white either.

I really enjoyed it, I don’t remember the story and I’m sure it’s not entirely faithful to Blyton’s plot but what an adventure, clever children stooooid or bad grown ups, lashings of sandwiches and cakes, and Timmy the dog, what;s nit to like

I avidly read the Famous Five as a child along with all her other books. I haven't watched the series so can't comment. My enduring memory of George is that she didn't want to be a girl and dressed like a boy. I'm wondering therefore if she is written in this series as trans gender ? that premise after all wouldn't be too far removed from how Enid Blyton painted her, there were rather a lot of comments from the smug boys along the lines of "you're only a girl" which possibly was George's raison d'etre for wanting to be one of the chaps! Just wondering!

TerriBull, like yiu, I was an avid reader of Blytin’s famous five and Secret Seven.
I preferred the 5 and George was my hero. No, thank goodness I say, George is t written as transgender. She’s written as a strong minded, clever girl who stands no nonsense. In this adaptation she tells someone she doesn’t want to be called Georgina and smacked the last person who called her thst.

I loved my Blytons Iam in fact I think I went almost straight from them to Agatha Christie in my teens, all of them, with not a lot in between. I remember being slightly bothered by George's ambiguity, well at that age, I personally never wanted to be a boy. I also remember her referring to "dark swarthy foreigners" thinking "like my father, his siblings and grandad" but not being particularly bothered by those assertions. Strange what we subliminally assimilate as children.

I’ve just watched a new BBC adaptation of the famous five and killen island

I must find that on iPlayer! 😃

Kandinsky

*I can see no reason why a black actor can't play Miss Marple*

How many elderly black women lived in sleepy English villages circa 1935?
It’s ridiculous.
It’s as ridiculous as a white man playing Nelson Mandela.

Gave me a laugh reading that😂

Sparklefizz

Callistemon21

Found an image. Love it! 😃

Douglas has been at the mince pies !

I don’t mind his love handles

My 8 year old grandson is ploughing through the Famous Five books. It doesn’t matter if it’s not high literature, or if the books contain language we wouldn’t use now. What matters is getting children, especially boys, reading. I was with George in thinking boys had better clothes for playing adventurous clothes. Mum wisely told me girls get the best of both worlds, they can dress up and run about in shorts or trousers. I enjoyed George wanting to be a boy, but certainly didn’t think that was a possibility.
I went on to Agatha Christie, then to Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and more recently dark crime novels but with a real enjoyment of Ellie Griffiths and her Dr Ruth Galloway series.

Nelson Mandela’s (true) story was about being black in apartheid SA. Miss Marple is a fictional character who solves mysteries - she could be any colour. I don’t see the connection at all.

Doodledog

Nelson Mandela’s (true) story was about being black in apartheid SA. Miss Marple is a fictional character who solves mysteries - she could be any colour. I don’t see the connection at all.

I think Kandinsky has a point though, as a black woman in a sleepy English village in the 1930s might be considered unusual whereas the whole point of Miss Marple's character was that she was rather quiet and unobtrusive. She sat quietly knitting and observing everything that was going on around her.

No Doodledog she really couldn’t be any colour.Miss Marple appears to be an inoffensive shy old lady who likes to fade into the background while mentally assessing all and sundry.She lives in St Mary Mead, a small rural village in England in the 1930’s where there aren’t any ethnic minorities.But you already know that.It wouldn’t work if she were black, asian or anything else.
I’m all for getting more work for actors of all types into tv and plays where it’s credible but not where it isn’t.
If you’ve noticed, tv ads have not only started to use many black and mixed race families but are now overusing them to the point where an entire white British family is hardly ever shown.It would be wrong if tv drama goes the same way in the rush to be inclusive.Allow period drama to be true to its original form.

X posts Callistemon21 😄

Doodledog Agatha Christie especially described Miss Marple in detail. If she was black she'd have said so.
The current preoccupation with 'colour blind casting' is the sort of thing that has led to people saying in exasperation things like Mandela being played by a white man.

People can be irrational when exasperated, I know, but it is simply not true that white families are hardly ever shown in tv ads .

Miss Marple isn’t real, and as I said earlier there was no fuss when she was inserted into an adaptation of Murder Is Easy. I take the point that a relatively wealthy and upper class (she had servants, had been to finishing school and had titled friends) old lady knitting in the corner of a vicarage in the 40s was unlikely to have been black, but neither was she Scottish and rather dominant, as played by Geraldine McKewan, or the ‘jolly hockey sticks’ version played by Margaret Rutherford. She is a plot device really - her character is thinly sketched, and could easily be adapted to many interpretations of the stories.

It’s the plots that make Christie entertaining, not the characters. Even after reading all of them we know very little about Poirot, Hastings or Miss Marple. They are almost incidental to the stories.

Anyway, it’s not important really. Different people prefer different things, and my guess is that new versions of the stories will continue to be made, to bring them to new generations of viewers. The old ones are never off the screen on ITV3, so there will be something for everyone.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste would make a good Miss Marple. Behind the acquired American accent she is British born and bred. If she's convincing as an FBI agent in Without a Trace, why not Miss Marple? She already has the detective experience.

Having just read the first Christie book featuring Poirot, he was extremely well described and in some detail. I was very impressed as David Suchet exactly fitted her description.
We won't agree on this Doodledog. I have no problem with people of colour (or whatever we're supposed to call them these days) being well represented in modern day dramas but they strike a very jarring note in dramatisations of old books they were not in.

Doodledog you either really believe what you’re saying or dislike backing down on any points.
Agatha Christie did describe her key characters in books and they are certainly not ‘almost incidental’ to the stories as you claim.
Making any of her detective key characters into black people would be ridiculous beyond belief.
It’s the rush to outdo each other in being inclusive that leads to this nonsense, including the tv ads.You only have to know the percentage of ethnic minorities in the UK as opposed to the British white population to see how skewed the ads now are.
It used to be too much the other way, only white families really featured, now the pendulum has swung too far the other way.
In time maybe they’ll get it right.

Of course I believe what I say . I don’t think that physical descriptions of characters - their ‘egg-shaped head’ or their fastidious mannerisms tell us anything about their personality, or motivations. I loved Christie’s books as a child/young woman, and aa others found, they were a stepping stone from Blyton to more adult reading. But with hindsight they are very formulaic and plot-based. Some of the adaptations have made it feel like we know the characters- the Suchet Poirot in particular - but this is the direction and screenplay at work, rather than the books themselves.

It doesn’t matter though. They are good stories, and light entertainment. I don’t expect people to agree, and none of this is important. I said similar things about the black Anne Boleyn, and on the thread about Great Expectations, and was accused of wokeness on those too, when that is not where I am coming from at all.

Actually, both of those examples are of pretty awful adaptations (or representations in the case of Anne B) too . The thinking behind them was lost to the clunky scripts and so on in both cases. I am not saying that any of them were good tv, or that the decisions were the right ones, just picking up on what I still believe to be true, which is that adapting stories and changing some of the cast, plotting and settings is fine if it works, and not sacrilege in any way. It’s not about backing down - it’s just a point of view.