BBC MISS MARPLE EPDES SERIES FEATURING AGATHA

Bbc Miss Marple Epdes Series Featuring Agatha

It was transmitted in two 50-minute parts on Sunday, February 8 and Sunday, February 15, 1987. The adaptation was directed by David Tucker with. Detective drama series featuring Agatha Christie's unassuming amateur sleuth solving a series of murders.She was succeeded in the role by Julia McKenzie. Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury, Helen Hayes and Joan Hickson have all played the part in film or on television. Writing in The Times in 2009, Mike Hale called Ms.

I can be flexible about some detectives, but not Jane Marple, based on Christie's grandmother and her friends. That was two days after they showed the final episode of The Box of Delights, incidentally, which explains why every Christmas since then has been less good, at least in telly terms (though it was also the Christmas my hamster escaped, so the festivities weren't unblemished).Joan Hickson is, as far as I am concerned, the only Miss Marple who matters. All you need to do is play the opening trills of the theme tune to the BBC's Miss Marple, and I would be slammed back to the Christmas of 1984, when the first episode, The Body in the Library, was screened on Boxing Day. If you want to take me back in time with only one sensory stimulus, you could leave the madeleines in the cake tin. McEwan was born on May 9, 1932, in Old Windsor, west of London, and made her stage debut at 14 in вЂњA Midsummer NightвЂ™s DreamвЂќ at the Theater Royal at Windsor.

Yet her mind has plumbed the depths of human iniquity, and taken it all in the day's work'.Hickson's Marple is neither Rutherford's buffoon nor McEwan's camp schoolmarm: she is a frail elderly woman who is simply unshockable and fearless. There she sits, an elderly spinster, sweet, placid, so you'd think. And, by the way, when adapting a Christie novel, it would be sensible to remember that she was better at plotting than most of us will ever be, so maybe the addition of psycho lesbians doesn't improve the story (though obviously, it usually would).Hickson captured perfectly the fluffy ruthlessness of Jane Marple: she has wispy white hair like the mohair she's so often knitting with her softly clicking pins the slight thickening of the voice when she's thinking the real sense that she is, as Sir Henry Clithering describes her, 'one of the most formidable criminologists in England. Suffice it to say Marple is a long way from Lucia, and that is a line which shouldn't have been crossed. And don't get me started on Geraldine McEwan, because I will only say something I regret.

'Apparently, he's a вЂ¦ communist,' whispers the vicar's wife of Edmund Swettenham in A Murder is Announced. Every new person, situation and crime is filtered through this knowledge: she is never surprised by anything. And it is the measure of a good policeman that he can recognise her brilliance in spite of her old-lady mannerisms: Chief Inspector Fred Davy (the much-missed George Baker in At Bertram's Hotel) gets her immediately, whereas poor Chief Inspector Slack (David Horovitch in The Body in the Library) is a less good judge of character.Miss Marple's great gift is to have seen every facet of human behaviour in her village, St Mary Mead.

Hickson was the perfect Marple, and the adaptations are close to the books, as they should be. But, to be honest, I'd be happy to watch any episode, any night of the year, knitting along in tribute to Miss Marple.Iconic? You are joking, of course. It isn't the first murder of the episode, but it is certainly the cruellest: poor trusting Murgatroyd, strangled in the garden, left out in the rain, to be found by her devastated partner, Hinchcliffe (the glorious Paola Dionisotti). The death of Murgatroyd (Joan Sims) at the hands of the killer reveals Marple's iron core. 'Then he must be very lonely in Chipping Cleghorn.'If I had to pick a single episode to watch, it would be A Murder is Announced, which shows Marple at her avenging best.

Bbc Miss Marple Episodes