Last Night's Telly: 18/05/08

Doctor Who, BBC1: The Wasp And The Unicorn

"Plenty of people write detective stories, but yours are the best! Why? Why are you so good, Agatha Christie? Because you understand ... you've lived. You've fought and you've had your heart broken. You know about people ... their passions, their hope and despair and anger ... all of those tiny huge things that can turn an ordinary person into a killer."

I loved this episode, written by Gareth Roberts, and this speech is why. I knew that a Doctor Who adventure featuring Agatha Christie would have fun with the idea of a traditional country house mystery, that there would be lots of jokes (Professor Peach killed in the library with the lead piping) and references to the murder in the dark, the red herrings, the final scene where the detective assembles the suspects. I also knew that it wouldn't portray her negatively, of course, but the usual thing that people say about Agatha Christie's huge success is that it was because she was so brilliant with plots - "I can never guess whodunnit" "She fools me every time" etc. Received wisdom is that her characters were cardboard stereotypes that can easily be turned into 'Cluedo' types, but that the ingenious plots keep people reading.

But in having the Doctor explain where her real talent lay, the episode did more than I could have hoped to pay tribute to her. And the strewing of Christie episode titles was an unexpected treat too!

As a Doctor Who episode, it was certainly unusual - the quick cut flashbacks and even a moment breaking the fourth wall. I've not been enjoying the Doctor and Donna together that much, but even the pantomime stuff of them playing antidote charades or her repetition of "so he/she killed them?" in the drawing room exposition didn't bother me at all this time, probably because I was loving the rest so much.

Fenella Woolgar was perfectly cast (apparently via David Tennant) as Agatha: she had her shyness, her self-consciousness particularly about her marital problems and her practicality, her curiosity and habit of collecting interesting names and ideas for stories.

One interesting aspect was the thread of Christie being self-deprecating about her work and believing it to be ephemera, not "important". "They're hardly great literature, that is beyond me," she says (which even if you don't consider the crime novels to be such is not true of Absent In The Spring - that 'Mary Westmacott' book is a minor masterpiece). This was the theme of the Doctor Who episode which featured Charles Dickens as well; it's probably a statement about Doctor Who itself, how a family entertainment with aliens and a time-travelling police box can also achieve greatness. But is it true of Christie? I initially thought not, but am now wondering further.

What DID the Westmacott novels represent to her, other than a way of working out her feelings about her first marriage and Archie Christie? At that vulnerable time, with her mother recently dead (not mentioned in the Who story) and her husband going, was there also an element of doubt over her work - even though she'd just written the genre-changing The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd? Later, of course, she knew how successful her books were, but did she still feel they weren't "literature"? How does that connect to her driving need to match her sister in coming up with a successful theatrical production? This has given me something to ponder, which I didn't expect from a story involving a giant shape-changing alien wasp!

The one wee thing I'd maybe have wanted to change was the Doctor's production, at the end, of his paperback reproduction cover from the far future of Death In The Clouds. From the Confidential programme, this was obviously chosen because Russell T Davies had that copy and got the giant wasp idea from there, but it didn't quite work for me because it's one of her more prosaic mysteries and it's not as if she designed the cover herself, so it didn't really fit with the idea of her remembering some things. I'd have gone with The Man In The Brown Suit.

[More evidence for my theory that Donna is going to die at the end of this series: the shot of her as the Doctor says "No one ever knows how they're going to be remembered."]