Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Apr. 13th, 2023 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessAfter being shown on Britbox (does anyone actually have Britbox?) we plebs got to see Agatha Christie’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? this Easter, much trumpeted as being adapted by your actual Hugh Laurie and sticking faithfully to the source, unlike Not Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. I don’t think that I’ve read the original (but I never remember whodunnit in Christie novels that I have read, in any case.) I meant to post about it episode by episode, but here’s my response to the whole.
It featured Will Poulter, who I’ve barely seen in anything since he was Eustace Scrubb all those years ago, and Lucy Boynton off The Ipcress File playing posh again, but in a different hair colour and decade.
First things first, they had a male voice choir singing ‘Myfanwy’ to let us know that this was set in Wales. (I’m surprised they restrained themselves from using the folk song ‘Ar Lan Y Môr’.) For the record, Reverend Jones did not sound like a native Welsh speaker, or even like a Jones who’d had the Welsh squeezed out of him, but had been serving the parish for at least twenty years when he introduced the Welsh hymn. And we had a another folk song on the soundtrack later just to remind us that we were still in Wales, look you, fancy some bara brith, boyo?
All that was less distracting to me than the fact that this made-up village was supposed to be in Denbighshire, but nearly all the Welsh accents were south Walian instead of north Walian with a touch of scouse.
That aside, Bobby Jones was the last person to see a man who fell/was pushed down a cliff alive and heard his last words i.e. the title. By the time Bobby bumped into Lady Frankie, all grown up and claiming he owed it to the dead man to investigate his doubts that it was an accident, he was having nightmares. A lot of havey cavey stuff happened that made the ‘accident’ seem even more suspicious - a sister who wasn’t the lady in the picture that Bobby had seen when he was searching the body, a mystery man who kept appearing and disappearing everywhere (although he was more for the audience to notice.) Bobby then got a job offer that was too good to be true. When he didn’t jump at it because he had other commitments, there was an attempt to poison him, and finally the nice doctor who Bobby had a warmer relationship with than his own father seemed to have killed himself in the very way he had described as a selfish method. A1 on not making it look suspicious, murderer(s)!
Certainly up until the poisoning, Bobby had been busy thinking about his future – having left the navy (for no other reason other than he could stumble upon a murder) he was doing odd jobs but looking to go into partnership in a used-car business with an old Navy friend, Knocker. Oh, and trying to quash the UST with Frankie, who had admitted she’d had a crush on him when she was a girl and wanted to play detectives. Reminding her of the difference in their social status didn’t go down well because she thought he was accusing her of being a snob. She wasn’t, but she definitely wasn’t quite grasping that Bobby needed to earn a living. Overall, I liked Frankie, but I really enjoyed the scene where the circus owner cut through her posturing. (I had been feeling sorry for local lass Ivy, who wanted kisses from Bobby, until she seemed perfectly happy with another chap entirely on a date at the circus.)
They spent a good job on getting the period details on screen, wherever they were filming looked pretty, the credits were stylish. It didn’t hold back on the malice. I’d probably be more into it if I hadn’t tripped up over the unconvincing Welshness.
Episode 2 opened with a choirboy who didn’t sound very comfortable singing in Welsh, so it was a good job that soon after the funeral (Bobby didn’t believe that Dr Thomas had killed himself), the story moved to London and Hampshire or ‘Hampshire’.
Anyway, it was all japes as Frankie came up with a plan to get to Roger ff’s house (i.e. the man who’d stayed with the body after he died and Bobby had to leave), only it involved faking an accident, which brought out Bobby’s protective streak, but spunky Frankie mostly got things her own way. Bobby decided to stay in the local inn and stumbled upon all sorts of clues and suspects. The one that jumped out at me was that the woman in the real photo (Moira) claimed not to know the deceased. Frankie learned about double ff’s family, and the nearby ‘sanatorium’ for mentally ill people that wasn’t all it seemed to be. Oh, and the suspicious guy in the bowler hat visited Pa Jones and pal Knocker, looking for Bobby, speaking in a hard-to-pin-down accent and acting so suspiciously that I was willing to rule him out as a suspect, wondering if he was actually Evans and just needed some help with social skills, when he attacked Knocker.
Fortunately, Frankie’s butler turned up at the right moment and was able to keep Frankie’s original plan on track. It involved Bobby doing a terrible impersonation of a chauffeur, and him getting perhaps overly obsessed with Frankie finding Roger ff handsome and ruling him out as a suspect, while Frankie got hung up on Bobby having dreamt about the pretty woman in the real picture.
Having repeatedly turned down Bobby’s overprotective offers to extract her, the episode ended with Frankie facing the head of the san telling her he knew an awful lot about her in a rather threatening way. (He was played by Hugh Laurie himself. The last two episodes had been littered with supporting turns that made you go, ‘Is that…? Yes, it is.’)
Watching episode 3 was harder than it needed to be because ITVX is the worst. The cliffhanger was slightly resolved, although Frankie’s ‘accident’ story was debunked, but with another dead body (no, Tommy, don’t look at your father’s corpse!) the mystery deepened. Frankie decided to trust handsome Roger ff, while Bobby became increasingly worried about Moira. She explained that she’d lied about not knowing Carstairs, which didn’t rule her out of the still enormous list of suspects. We learned that Knocker’s attacker was connected to the san.
While Frankie went to London to investigate the other suicide everyone had kept mentioning, among other things, Bobby tried to rescue Moira from the san, even though she was supposed to be in London, but got caught and drugged. Was it to be girl rescues boy time? No, as Frankie ended up drugged and came to handcuffed in the same room as Bobby tied up in a chair prepped for EST. So, it turned out to be Knocker who saved them. I grasped that, but I was really, really confused about the conspiracy and what clues ‘the organisation’ were hunting down by this point and onwards. Their investigations led them back to the titular question and home. (Cue ‘Myfanwy’ again.)
I will note that it seemed a bit convenient that the former cook and parlour maid had both got married in, like a month, even if their positions had come to an abrupt end.
At home, they found Moira – I LOVED that Frankie was suspicious and paranoid enough to stop her from poisoning them. Bobby got to save another life. It was neat that the two people our detectives had been jealous of turned out to be in on it together. The conversation with Roger ff in the prison had to make do as there was no scene in the dining room where Poirot explains it all. Admittedly, I’m still not clear on how he killed his brother.
And then I got irked by the coy umbrella. I was there for the build-up of the Bobby/Frankie till then: declaration interruptus, Knocker ships them!, the domesticity of the shaving. And given all the attempts on their lives, I could buy that he’d decided to go for it. Oh well, we got the wedding, where for once the cheeky song choice worked, on top of learning that truly, the usual organist was dire. Frankie’s wedding attire was as chic as anything she’d worn – she’d gone from gamine to glam with excellent hats. Boynton had the most to get her teeth into, as Frankie was very much an equally important character as Bobby, and had way more layers than him.
There were witty touches, and in the main it felt faithful (well, I’d be curious to check if Christie used ‘okay’ with such abandon in the original) and you felt that Laurie was trying to make the most entertaining adaptation possible, not Making A Point as the recent Beeb adaptations have, thus reminding us that, overall, ITV has done better Christie adaptations than the BBC. [Edited for typos 31/5/25.]
It featured Will Poulter, who I’ve barely seen in anything since he was Eustace Scrubb all those years ago, and Lucy Boynton off The Ipcress File playing posh again, but in a different hair colour and decade.
First things first, they had a male voice choir singing ‘Myfanwy’ to let us know that this was set in Wales. (I’m surprised they restrained themselves from using the folk song ‘Ar Lan Y Môr’.) For the record, Reverend Jones did not sound like a native Welsh speaker, or even like a Jones who’d had the Welsh squeezed out of him, but had been serving the parish for at least twenty years when he introduced the Welsh hymn. And we had a another folk song on the soundtrack later just to remind us that we were still in Wales, look you, fancy some bara brith, boyo?
All that was less distracting to me than the fact that this made-up village was supposed to be in Denbighshire, but nearly all the Welsh accents were south Walian instead of north Walian with a touch of scouse.
That aside, Bobby Jones was the last person to see a man who fell/was pushed down a cliff alive and heard his last words i.e. the title. By the time Bobby bumped into Lady Frankie, all grown up and claiming he owed it to the dead man to investigate his doubts that it was an accident, he was having nightmares. A lot of havey cavey stuff happened that made the ‘accident’ seem even more suspicious - a sister who wasn’t the lady in the picture that Bobby had seen when he was searching the body, a mystery man who kept appearing and disappearing everywhere (although he was more for the audience to notice.) Bobby then got a job offer that was too good to be true. When he didn’t jump at it because he had other commitments, there was an attempt to poison him, and finally the nice doctor who Bobby had a warmer relationship with than his own father seemed to have killed himself in the very way he had described as a selfish method. A1 on not making it look suspicious, murderer(s)!
Certainly up until the poisoning, Bobby had been busy thinking about his future – having left the navy (for no other reason other than he could stumble upon a murder) he was doing odd jobs but looking to go into partnership in a used-car business with an old Navy friend, Knocker. Oh, and trying to quash the UST with Frankie, who had admitted she’d had a crush on him when she was a girl and wanted to play detectives. Reminding her of the difference in their social status didn’t go down well because she thought he was accusing her of being a snob. She wasn’t, but she definitely wasn’t quite grasping that Bobby needed to earn a living. Overall, I liked Frankie, but I really enjoyed the scene where the circus owner cut through her posturing. (I had been feeling sorry for local lass Ivy, who wanted kisses from Bobby, until she seemed perfectly happy with another chap entirely on a date at the circus.)
They spent a good job on getting the period details on screen, wherever they were filming looked pretty, the credits were stylish. It didn’t hold back on the malice. I’d probably be more into it if I hadn’t tripped up over the unconvincing Welshness.
Episode 2 opened with a choirboy who didn’t sound very comfortable singing in Welsh, so it was a good job that soon after the funeral (Bobby didn’t believe that Dr Thomas had killed himself), the story moved to London and Hampshire or ‘Hampshire’.
Anyway, it was all japes as Frankie came up with a plan to get to Roger ff’s house (i.e. the man who’d stayed with the body after he died and Bobby had to leave), only it involved faking an accident, which brought out Bobby’s protective streak, but spunky Frankie mostly got things her own way. Bobby decided to stay in the local inn and stumbled upon all sorts of clues and suspects. The one that jumped out at me was that the woman in the real photo (Moira) claimed not to know the deceased. Frankie learned about double ff’s family, and the nearby ‘sanatorium’ for mentally ill people that wasn’t all it seemed to be. Oh, and the suspicious guy in the bowler hat visited Pa Jones and pal Knocker, looking for Bobby, speaking in a hard-to-pin-down accent and acting so suspiciously that I was willing to rule him out as a suspect, wondering if he was actually Evans and just needed some help with social skills, when he attacked Knocker.
Fortunately, Frankie’s butler turned up at the right moment and was able to keep Frankie’s original plan on track. It involved Bobby doing a terrible impersonation of a chauffeur, and him getting perhaps overly obsessed with Frankie finding Roger ff handsome and ruling him out as a suspect, while Frankie got hung up on Bobby having dreamt about the pretty woman in the real picture.
Having repeatedly turned down Bobby’s overprotective offers to extract her, the episode ended with Frankie facing the head of the san telling her he knew an awful lot about her in a rather threatening way. (He was played by Hugh Laurie himself. The last two episodes had been littered with supporting turns that made you go, ‘Is that…? Yes, it is.’)
Watching episode 3 was harder than it needed to be because ITVX is the worst. The cliffhanger was slightly resolved, although Frankie’s ‘accident’ story was debunked, but with another dead body (no, Tommy, don’t look at your father’s corpse!) the mystery deepened. Frankie decided to trust handsome Roger ff, while Bobby became increasingly worried about Moira. She explained that she’d lied about not knowing Carstairs, which didn’t rule her out of the still enormous list of suspects. We learned that Knocker’s attacker was connected to the san.
While Frankie went to London to investigate the other suicide everyone had kept mentioning, among other things, Bobby tried to rescue Moira from the san, even though she was supposed to be in London, but got caught and drugged. Was it to be girl rescues boy time? No, as Frankie ended up drugged and came to handcuffed in the same room as Bobby tied up in a chair prepped for EST. So, it turned out to be Knocker who saved them. I grasped that, but I was really, really confused about the conspiracy and what clues ‘the organisation’ were hunting down by this point and onwards. Their investigations led them back to the titular question and home. (Cue ‘Myfanwy’ again.)
I will note that it seemed a bit convenient that the former cook and parlour maid had both got married in, like a month, even if their positions had come to an abrupt end.
At home, they found Moira – I LOVED that Frankie was suspicious and paranoid enough to stop her from poisoning them. Bobby got to save another life. It was neat that the two people our detectives had been jealous of turned out to be in on it together. The conversation with Roger ff in the prison had to make do as there was no scene in the dining room where Poirot explains it all. Admittedly, I’m still not clear on how he killed his brother.
And then I got irked by the coy umbrella. I was there for the build-up of the Bobby/Frankie till then: declaration interruptus, Knocker ships them!, the domesticity of the shaving. And given all the attempts on their lives, I could buy that he’d decided to go for it. Oh well, we got the wedding, where for once the cheeky song choice worked, on top of learning that truly, the usual organist was dire. Frankie’s wedding attire was as chic as anything she’d worn – she’d gone from gamine to glam with excellent hats. Boynton had the most to get her teeth into, as Frankie was very much an equally important character as Bobby, and had way more layers than him.
There were witty touches, and in the main it felt faithful (well, I’d be curious to check if Christie used ‘okay’ with such abandon in the original) and you felt that Laurie was trying to make the most entertaining adaptation possible, not Making A Point as the recent Beeb adaptations have, thus reminding us that, overall, ITV has done better Christie adaptations than the BBC. [Edited for typos 31/5/25.]
