It bemuses me that television writers believe they can 'improve' upon a story written by the best-selling author of the twentieth-century. Miss Marple did not appear in the original novel, so it was a bold stance to introduce her to this tale - that is perhaps the only way that the TV writer actually demonstrated some skill, by managing to inter-twine her among the other events. There is a truly excellent cast, floundering against a poor script, made especially bad by the necessity to introduce a character by the name of Evans. The original story is effectively mentioned in passing in a few of the key events from the original story, but that is as close this production gets to actually having anything to do with the real Christie story. In reality this is a new story by someone who just got so many elements wrong! I cannot classify this as 1 (awful) because the highly skilled actors do the best they can to pull off a reasonable performance, but this is not a good production. Julia McKenzie tried very hard but she just did not appear anything like the Miss Marple that Dame Agatha created, perhaps because her part was created by a television writer not the late, great mistress of crime fiction. 2 and a half out of 10 is the best I could give to this effort.
Review of Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
