He elects to say nothing of this to Inspector Lejeune (Sean Pertwee, whose voice could now plane doorframes and who may need to be sponsored by Strepsils in years to come) when he is called in by the police to account for his name on the dead woman’s list and to start his own investigations instead.Īs the mass of connections grows, so does the body count and that miasma of doom. And one belongs to the nightclub hostess with whom he is having an affair and whose corpse he wakes up beside one morning. One of those names belongs to the recently widowed (wife, bath, electrical fault) and even more recently remarried Mark Easterbrook (played by Rufus Sewell, whose face is now so striking that when you see it full on you almost flinch as if hit). She is found to have a list of names hidden in her shoe, and to have worked for the three women (played by Rita Tushingham, Sheila Atim and Kathy Kiera Clarke) who live in the pickled snake house in the village of Much Deeping and make their living through palm readings and the like.

The woman staggering towards the police station, who collapses and dies just before she reaches it, is Jessie Davies (Madeleine Bowyer). The Pale Horse is a Dennis Wheatley-inflected offering from 1961. But fans of either or both writers should understand that change is not the same as abandonment staying true to the spirit is what matters and Phelps, for my money at least, always cleaves tightly to it. By most viewers at least – Phelps has dismembered, augmented and reassembled the plot in her usual manner, which will upset Christie purists in their usual manner. Our almost-annual adaptation of the one by the other is here at last, and though The Pale Horse (BBC One) arrives a little bit later than the traditional Christmas splurge, it is deeply welcomed nevertheless. It can only be that Sarah Phelps has been at the Agatha Christie again.

P ickled snakes in jars, a palm reading, a hopeful young wife, a bath, an electrical fault, a man uncrating a stuffed polar bear, a woman staggering towards the police station, an affair, a list of names in a shoe, several large country houses, a man in a white suit strolling through a picturesque English village and an air of malevolence and dread so thick you imagine actors diving for a Silkwood-style scrub down as soon as the director yells cut, to rid themselves of the menace.

Bbc the pale horse