Agatha Christie's country house murders are always hokum, but they can make for easy and entertaining Sunday-evening television. All the pieces are here except for a story or some reasonable dialogue. Ignore the Agatha Christie fanatics - they missed the show. Agatha Christie's writing apparently isn't good enough! He told her to bring the money to him and we see her in the rowing boat coming back from taking the money to him. When Will Writers Remember That You Have to Like the Characters? Awards All in all this is probably the worst of the new Marples that I have seen which is a shame as I like a lot of the actors in it. I agree with all the other reviewers who said that Christie's name should be removed from the title. There was hardly any character development and a rush to close the unbelievable storyline. Slow as a glacier, terrible lighting and awful direction and more bad things, The opening sequence was mesmerising and atmospheric, The acting was good in the main (shame about the direction and pace), It was a long dramatisation and so served to pass the time, The sets and props were wrong in so many ways, The music was, as so often with BBC productions, over-loud and intrusive, The direction was turgid and made the characters even more unpalatable (and, dare it be said, boring) than even the script had rendered them, The plot wasn't Agatha Christie's 'Ordeal by Innocence' (so why bill it as such? I have stopped watching Ordeal by Innocence on the beginning of the third episode and decided to read the novel again instead, because a forgot the end of it, it was a long time when a read it. However, I failed to notice this when watching and found the ending satisfying at the time. Again, the title is misleading from the start because this is not Agatha Christie's mystery as she wrote it and it's unrecognizable to the book. Just had to write a review, because I wish I had known how bad it was before spending 3 hours of my life watching this show... Only made it 40 minutes into Episode 1. The black sheep of the Argyll family resurfaces to deny accusations of killing the matriarch, which initiates the gang's hunt to finding the true murderer. But the script was dreadful. Only the characters remain. Another hatchet job by the hack Sarah Phelps. Let alone the fact that a crisp and clever whodunit has been turned into a 'modern' TV drama, gloomy and bleak, with absolutely no character in it that you could describe as halfway sympathetic, the people who are responsible for this script actually went so far as to CHANGE the identity of the murderer! Agatha Christie come back, all is forgiven, Not based on Agatha Christie's novel.....Kind of a mess pulled togther in the end. Oh well, there ain't much to spoil.) What have these reviewers been watching?? People seem to forget that Agatha Christie was an author who was ahead of her time, and there are many themes running through her books, that when they were first published readers did not think twice about.