CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend’s TV: A Christie classic crammed with enough stars to fill the Palladium
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
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Last Woman On Earth
Rating: 
Hugh Laurie’s address book must be a thing to behold. If he ever decides to chuck in the acting lark, he could make a fortune as an impresario.
He appears to know every British star, and they all answer his calls. The cast list for Why Didn’t They Ask Evans (ITV), the Agatha Christie classic which he adapted and directed, is crammed with enough top names to fill the London Palladium.
The first episode saw Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent as a bickering pair of long-married toffs, Conleth Hill as a golf-loving doctor, and Morwenna Banks unrecognisable in a finger-waved platinum wig.
Still to come are appearances from Paul Whitehouse and Miles Jupp, as well as Laurie himself.
Laurie’s script takes one of Dame Agatha’s flightier, frothier plots and highlights the cold menace hidden beneath the snobbery of its upper-crust characters.
Lucy Boynton is socialite Lady ‘Frankie’ Derwent, bored with her life of country gallops and the attentions of her boorish cousin Thicko (Nicholas Banks).
She starts to investigate the mysterious death of a man found at the foot of a cliff — though she’s less interested in playing detective and more in the man who found the victim, clean-cut ex-Navy officer Bobby Jones (Will Poulter).
Hugh Laurie’s address book must be a thing to behold. If he ever decides to chuck in the acting lark, he could make a fortune as an impresario
He appears to know every British star, and they all answer his calls. The cast list for Why Didn’t They Ask Evans (ITV), the Agatha Christie classic which he adapted and directed, is crammed with enough top names to fill the London Palladium
EARACHE OF THE WEEKEND:
Telly bosses love ‘noisy’ shows, their jargon for formats that generate on-screen excitement and social media chatter.
In With A Shout (ITV) takes that too literally, with contestants yelling out quiz answers. It starts to grate very quickly.
As he lay dying, the man gripped Bobby’s wrist and whispered: ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ — baffling last words which Christie later admitted meant nothing when she chose them for the title of her story. She dreamt up the whole plot to fit the phrase.
Earnest but none too bright, Bobby mused aloud that the man might not have realised he was dying when he uttered the words.
‘Mmm, sloppy,’ retorted Frankie, a girl with crushed ice under her bubbles, like a champagne julep.
First aired on BritBox last year, the adaptation is threaded with other puzzling lines. ‘Someone’s been tickling the swallows,’ remarked a postman — an idiom I’ve never heard before. Do write in if it’s something your granny used to say.
In the best Christie tradition, there are real clues: a brass fish on a keyring, a pen that leaks red ink and a photograph of an unknown woman, apparently removed from the corpse by a stranger who calls himself: ‘Roger Bassington-ffrench, two small Fs.’
There is also a silent man with a stony face and a bowler hat, like a serial killer from a painting by Rene Magritte, who sometimes carries a red balloon as he stalks his victims.
Laurie invests it all with a chill of horror, with hallucinations at a fun fair and nightmares before dawn. But he also evokes a subtler sense of unease — a moment of vertigo as we stare over a cliff, a bumblebee casually swatted against a window.
It’s a clever, highly polished take on a tale from the Golden Era of Crime, and I can’t wait for tonight’s second part.
There’s nothing subtle or polished about Sara Pascoe’s travelogue Last Woman On Earth (BBC2).
There’s nothing subtle or polished about Sara Pascoe’s travelogue Last Woman On Earth (BBC2)
On a jaunt to Greece, the comedienne pretended she wanted to try her hand at dying trades with local artisans.
But after ten minutes learning how to cast bells from molten metal in a foundry, she gave up and became an ordinary tourist.
Sara visited an open-air cinema, took a tour of a monastary on a mountaintop, joined a bread-making class and ended up at a street festival where the village children took turns at jumping through flames.
She asked a couple of locals what the tradition signified, but they didn’t know and Sara wasn’t interested enough to find out. If she can’t be bothered, why should we?
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