Why didn’t they ask Evans?
Last woman on Earth
Hugh Laurie’s address book should be a sight to behold. If he ever decides to throw in the acting lark, he could make a fortune as an impresario.
He seems 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 he adapted and directed, is packed 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 unrecognizable in a platinum wig with finger waves.
There will be performances by Paul Whitehouse and Miles Jupp, as well as Laurie herself.
Laurie’s script takes one of Dame Agatha’s more volatile, frothy plots and highlights the cold menace hidden beneath the snobbery of the upper crust characters.
Lucy Boynton is socialite Lady ‘Frankie’ Derwent, bored with her life of country gallops and the attentions of her crass cousin Thicko (Nicholas Banks).
She begins 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, sleek ex-naval officer Bobby Jones (Will Poulter). .
Hugh Laurie’s address book should be a sight to behold. If he ever decides to throw in the acting lark, he could make a fortune as an impresario
He seems 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 he adapted and directed, is packed with enough top names to fill the London Palladium.
Earache of the weekend: Telly bosses love “noisy” shows, their slang for formats that generate on-screen excitement and social media chatter.
In With A Shout (ITV) takes that too literally, with contestants shouting out quiz answers. It starts to grate very quickly.
As he lay dying, the man grabbed Bobby’s wrist and whispered, “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” – baffling last words that Christie later admitted meant nothing when she chose them for the title of her story. She invented the whole plot to fit the sentence.
Serious but not too smart, Bobby mused aloud that the man might not have realized he was dying when he said the words.
“Mmm, sloppy,” replied Frankie, a girl with crushed ice under her bubbles, like a champagne julep.
The adaptation first aired on BritBox last year and is peppered with other puzzling rules. “Someone tickled the swallows,” a postman remarked—an idiom I’ve never heard before. Write in if it’s something your grandma used to say.
In the best Christie tradition, there are real clues: a brass fish on a bunch of keys, a pen leaking red ink, and a photograph of an unknown woman, apparently taken from the corpse by a stranger who calls herself: “Roger Bassington-ffrench, two little F’s.’
There is also a silent man with a gritty face and a bowler hat, like a serial killer from a René Magritte painting, who sometimes carries a red balloon as he pursues his victims.
Laurie wraps it all in a chilling shiver, with fairground hallucinations and predawn nightmares. But it also evokes a more subtle sense of unease – a moment of dizziness as we stare over a cliff, a bumblebee casually hitting a window.
It’s a smart, highly polished take on a story from the golden age of crime, and I can’t wait for tonight’s second installment.
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)
During a trip to Greece, the comedienne pretended to try her hand at dying crafts with local artisans.
But after ten minutes of learning how to pour bells from molten metal in a foundry, she gave up and became an ordinary tourist.
Sara visited an open-air cinema, toured a mountaintop monastery, took a bread baking course and ended up at a street festival where the village children took turns jumping through the flames.
She asked some locals what the tradition meant, but they didn’t know and Sara wasn’t interested enough to find out. If she doesn’t care, why should we?