Lockdown, Lowdown… Ringside Report Looks Back at the TV Show The ABC Murders

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

British television series like their iconic and definitive takes on characters. Actors playing recognizable roles are forever placed in a certain timeframe and their performances can be both career defining and the straitjacket out of which they struggle to escape. There are plenty who will debate for several hours the individual merits of Clive Merryson’s radio Sherlock Holmes or Benedict Cumberbatch’s television version. As for Miss Marple we can see Joan Hickson’s televisual version – Agatha Christie apparently thought she would be perfect – against the filmic interpretation of Dame Margaret Rutherford or the radio’s June Whitfield.

Hours can be lost in trying to work out who captured that character the best or who embodied the character more truthfully, and, in whose performance, you got their spirit. Of course, it takes a certain depth of character to make that happen and we need literary depth to ensure a debate gets beyond a slagging match.

Hercule Poirot.

For most, and for me, the definitive performance is David Suchet. A televisual treat for those of us who have read the books and know his little traits exceptionally well. Currently getting the big film treatment with Kenneth Branagh in the title role for Deaths on both the Orient Express and now the Nile, the source material has been mined and developed with great skill several times over. There are plenty of books where Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective hints at a back story and delves a little at times but we are left with great gaps we can fill or leave as we wish.  And so, in 2018, when the BBC announced that they were going to broadcast a new version of the story, The ABC Murders, most were unexcited by the prospect until the person playing Poirot was announced. It was going to be that Hollywood heavyweight John Malkovich. We could but wonder what he was doing on a lowly TV show when the career he had built of being quite the perfectionist and indeed the maverick was being poured into a character that had PhD level interest from fans the world over. Such scrutiny would surely daunt all that picked up that distinctive moustache. It helped that he was supported by the likes of Rupert Grint, Andrew Buchan, Tara Fitzgerald and Shirley Henderson.

We were not amused and indeed many were very skeptical.

What could this interloper do with a classic of our times?

The story was simple. Poirot has been receiving taunting letters that predict murders following an alphabet pattern, beginning with an A. he takes them to skeptical police who initially dismiss his concerns as his career has been faltering recently and the “little grey cells” for which he was so famous have less power than they had in the past.

And it is here that Malkovich gave us a masterclass.

The script, beautifully penned by Sarah Phelps, filled in much of his past and gave us a side to Poirot we had never seen before. In short it added to our understanding of his character but did so by taking us on a flight of fancy that may not have been truly supported by the original stories but added such depth and color to the character that we were enthralled by this flight and buckled in to be carried along with such whimsy.

Malkovich’s Poirot was vulnerable and fading. His previously secure relationship with the police and Inspector Japp is gone, Japp has retired, and the new Inspector has no relationship upon which to fall back on to give Poirot any credence. Poirot seeks out Japp and once he is found hopes that he can get down to the serious business of investigating, when Japp dies with Poirot in attendance.

The killings continue from A in Andover to B in Bexhill then C in Churston…

Failing to stop any of these crimes when D comes in for Doncaster, the ABC murderer makes his first mistake. But it does not stop him and E for Embsay is next. Poirot manages to help the police apprehend who they believe is the killer, but all is not as it seems – will Poirot discover the truth as murders are set up to hide the true intentions of the killer who remains at large? I think we can work that one out for ourselves.

What Malkovich did over the three episodes was to fill in the humanity of Poirot. He moved from an arrogant and haughty figure to a man with a past, a person with vulnerabilities and appeared much more humane. The final scene shows Poirot in priestly robes, much affected by what he saw in the First World War – the Rape of Belgium.

What this showed us all was that the depth of character we knew and loved but also a new version we could warm to. Critics were slightly less favorable though the ones who mattered most really did get on board with the new version. I was as skeptical as the rest, but Malkovich won me over quite quickly and I loved it by the end.

Just goes to show what can be done with great detail and love.

British television is a curious affair. Begun through the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) it is funded through the universal license fee. In essence, if you wanted to watch the television , you had to pay the license fee. The BBC got it all and is state run, albeit at arms-length. Then came along commercial television in the form of the Independent Television (ITV) in 1955. Designed to bring a bit of competition to the BBC, it was paid for through advertising but still free to air… well they didn’t add another license fee to it. By the time that I was born, 1965, there was BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. And that was it. It was still years before Bruce Springsteen would moan that there were 55 channels and nothing on but here in the UK, we kept this going until in 1982, we added a fourth channel and in 1997, a fifth. With sparkling imagination, they were called Channel Four and ehm Channel Five… In between came Sky and we understood what Springsteen meant. And so, my childhood and leading up to early adulthood we had three options… But the programs made were exceptionally good. And so, here is some critical nostalgia as the lockdown has brought a plethora of reruns, new formats and platforms and old classics trying to make their way back into our consciousness as broadcasters flood their schedules with classics… or are they classics at all? Let me take you through an armchair critics’ view of what we have to see, to find out… Welcome to the Lockdown Lowdown…