Over to You 2001/2002 Close View 5 Programnr: 01062ra 5 CLOSE VIEW – SPECIAL REPORT Agatha Christie– In a League of her Own Manus: Trese McPhie Producent: Claes Nordenskiöld Sändningsdatum: 6/3, 2002 Längd: 14'38 Excerpt from "The Murder at the Vicarage" Music: The Smiths "Girl Afraid" Presenter: Close View – Special Report presents an excerpt from Agatha Christie's "The Murder at the Vicarage" starring the one and only Miss Marple: When the hated Colonel Protheroe is murdered, everyone in St. Mary Mead is a suspect. Excerpt from "The Murder at the Vicarage" Music: The Smiths "Girl Afraid" Narrator: Welcome to "Agatha Christie – In a League of Her Own". What you heard was a short excerpt from "The Murder at the Vicarage" – one of Christie's many best-selling books. Agatha Christie has sold more than two billion books in forty-five languages, making her the most popular novelist in history, with titles such as "Death on the Nile", "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" and "The Murder on the Orient Express". We sent Becky Dickinson to the British Museum to take a look at their retrospective exhibition on Agatha Christie, but first Becky sat down to chat with the author's grandson Matthew Prichard, for a firsthand account of the famous writer. Matthew Prichard: I was actually very fond of her, as an ordinary grandmother. Leave aside all the books that she wrote and the plays that she wrote, et cetera, who played quite a part in my upbringing, as I didn't have a father, who was killed in the war. So my mother and my grandmother were responsible for my upbringing. And she was a very kind, gentle person, who really looked after me. Becky Dickinson: Matthew Prichard remembers his grandmother, Agatha Christie with great affection. A grandfather himself now, he's never forgotten the part she played in his childhood. 1 Over to You 2001/2002 Close View 5 Programnr: 01062ra 5 MP: Certainly family life, both to my grandmother who I called "Neema", and to the rest of the family was… family life was all the utmost importance. And I think it was something that I learnt from my grandparents, how family life is an integral part of growing up. And how it is necessary sometimes for the older members of the family to make sacrifices to make sure that the grandchildren and children do have a proper family life. BD: Agatha May Clarissa Miller was born in Devon, southwest England in 1890. She became Agatha Christie in 1914 when she married her first husband Archie Christie, a First World War fighter pilot. It was during the war that Agatha began writing her first novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles". But unlike her books where she could control the outcome, Agatha could do nothing to prevent her husband leaving her for another woman in 1926. Henrietta McCall: Agatha was completely devastated by the collapse of her marriage. She still loved her husband. And to add to everything her mother had just died as well. And she'd had a miserable summer after the divorce, getting her daughter settled into school, buying herself a London house and realizing she was going to have to survive as an independent woman. BD: Henrietta McCall is the curator of an exhibition about Agatha Christie at the British Museum in London. She says it was the culmination of these events that lead the author to go travelling, where she met her second husband and developed a side to her personality about which little is known. HM: Everybody knows about Agatha Christie the crime writer. But not everybody knows that Agatha Christie was married in real life to an archaeologist. A well-known and much respected archaeologist called Max Mallowan. And it was because she met and married an archaeologist and travelled in the Middle East that so many of her books have Middle Eastern settings or archaeologists in the cast list. BD: It wasn't just the people she met and the places she saw that inspired so much of her work. It was also the means by which she travelled. HM: Not least of which was the discovery that the only way you could get to Baghdad in 1928 was aboard the Orient Express, which was something she'd always wanted to do. Excerpt from "The Murder on the Orient Express" 2 Over to You 2001/2002 Close View 5 Programnr: 01062ra 5 MP: Well, "The Murder on the Orient Express" was the last major film production that my grandmother saw before she died. And I think she thought it was wonderful and I think it also came as quite a relief to her because she never really accepted, I think, the efficacy of television particularly as a medium for producing her detective stories. But that was successful and also very faithful to what she imagined. And I think that was a great relief to her. Excerpt from "The Murder on the Orient Express" BD: Ah, the unmistakable, unforgettable Hercule Poirot. Although he'd appeared in earlier novels, it was in the upper class carriages at the Orient Express that the Belgian detective earned his place as the best known sleuth since Sherlock Holmes. Excerpt from "The Murder on the Orient Express" BD: Monsieur Poirot"s fictional career spans more than thirty books. About twice as many as his female counterpart, the enigmatic Miss Marple, an elderly spinster whose hobbies included classical music, going to church… and murder – solving them, that is. All together, Agatha Christie wrote more than eighty crime novels and short story collections. Each one eagerly awaited by family and fans. MP: She used to send me her annual book and we had a system at that school that all books had to be initialled by the headmaster to make sure they weren't pornography or worse, and my book used to take rather longer to come back than some others. And I later discovered that the headmaster's wife took the opportunity to read it before sending it back. BD: In addition to all her novels, Agatha Christie produced nineteen plays. One in particular remains an outstanding success. "The Mouse Trap" opened in 1952, when Winston Churchill governed Britain and Stalin ruled Russia. It's since been translated into more than twenty languages and performed in forty countries. Its appeal, like the plot, is something of a mystery. But for Richard Attenborough, who appeared in the original, it's down to one vital ingredient. Richard Attenborough: I think "The Mouse Trap" is a success because it's brilliantly written. We tried to change it when we were on tour. We got her to write new scenes and the when we came to London we played all the original dialogue exactly the way she had written it. And she intersperses comedy and drama quite brilliantly. 3 Over to You 2001/2002 Close View 5 Programnr: 01062ra 5 BD: And members of the present cast are just as enthusiastic about the play's enduring qualities. Actor, male: As a young actor, it feels great to be involved in something that has such a history behind it. And as you can see there are a lot of people that've been involved with it in the past and it feels good to be a part of that. Actor, female:Well it's a great honour to be part of what is now a national institution. It's very exciting to follow in other people's footsteps. But also, I think essentially we're always… we're an inquisitive species and the whole play is a question. It's a puzzle and I think that's why it's lasted so long. BD: But perhaps there's another reason why Agatha Christie has stood the test of time and critics. MP: I think what is not generally recognized is that they are quite often about very topical subjects. "The Mouse Trap", for instance is basically about child abuse, which regrettably is a very topical subject. I don't think if you asked most people what "The Mouse Trap" was about, they would say that. But if you actually go to the play and listen to all the nuances of it, it is actually about child abuse. There are many other books which have almost uncanny resonances in the modern world. I mean if you read the frontispiece to a book called "Passenger to Frankfurt", you will hear an impassioned dire tirade from my grandmother about terrorism and its likely results, which was written twenty or thirty years ago. BD: But child abuse, murder, crime, death – hardly the sort of subjects you'd expect to flow from the pen of a well brought up middle-class English lady – are they? MP: She always wanted to write, from quite a young age and she found a medium, like many other people do, to convey her thoughts and bring pleasure to the public. Which quite apart form the money, was something that was always very important to her. And I think it is to her credit that throughout her life she never really basically tried to change that. Admittedly, she wrote some romantic novels under the title of Mary Westmacott. But broadly speaking she stuck to what she knew best. I think that is one of the reasons why she was so successful. HM: And you know somehow in Agatha’s books, nobody really gets broken-hearted. They don't go into the sort of psychological drama. 4 Over to You 2001/2002 Close View 5 Programnr: 01062ra 5 They're much more like mathematical puzzles, which it's entirely satisfactory to work out.