Soldier Island Revisited - How the BBC Made Agatha Christie Look Like Shakespeare

Well,  I have now sat through the whole three buckets of the BBC���s Agatha Christie adaptation,  ���And Then There were None���.

It was, alas, garlanded with good reviews all over the place. This can only mean that TV reviewers share the programme-makers��� deep, prejudiced ignorance about the past, and indeed about this country as a whole.

If you haven���t yet watched it, and plan to, don���t read on. Multiple spoilers follow:

The moment that made me bridle most of all was during the final grotesque scene, as the retired Judge explains why he has killed everyone else on the island. 

As he sadistically watches a young woman (who has bizarrely decided to end her life by using a noose which has appeared from nowhere in her bedroom to hang herself, apparently unconcerned by how the said noose comes to be there at all, given that everyone on the island is dead expect her, and it wasn���t there before) , the Judge explains why he sentenced a certain young man to hang.

We have been given to believe that the young man involved may have been innocent, and that this judicial murder is the Judge���s crime, for which he has been brought to the island to die with the others.

The Judge says, in the TV version:

���The evidence that led me to convict Edward Seaton was too terrible to be made public���.

 

What!?!!?

Does nobody in the BBC, no scriptwriter , no researcher, no anyone, know that in English courts, Judges do not convict (or acquit) defendants? Do no TV reviewers know this? Do they also not know that (save in very rare cases involving national security) there can be no such thing as secret evidence, and even that must be disclosed to the jury (Note to BBC: twelve ordinary citizens, who decide guilt or innocence at English trials) at the trial ���in camera���, in a court cleared of public and press?

I have also never heard of a Judge attending the execution of a defendant he has sentenced, and certainly not of any doing so regularly. It���s also the case that if the jury brought in a guilty verdict on a charge of murder, the Judge in the days of the death penalty had no option but to pass the prescribed sentence of death. The Home Secretary might grant a reprieve, and often did, but the Judge could not.

As for the execution, repeatedly shown in flashback in the programme, it was wrong in so many well-known details that one wonders whether anyone cared in the slightest about getting things right.

I suspect they didn���t.

Yet again there was incessant smoking to make it clear that we were in the past, and a small fortune had been spent on period clothes and cars. It looked as if several of the cast weren���t willing to do any smoking, so a small minority had to smoke even more,  to make up for it. I hope they were paid extra.

But (as usual) either the director or the actors balked at adopting the actual hairstyles, male or female,  of the era, which would seem very ugly and unsexy to modern eyes.

As for the language, leaving aside the impossible swearing in mixed company, I don���t believe any Englishman in 1939 even knew the term ���Krauts��� . Germans might have been rudely referred to as ���Huns��� or ���Fritz��� , or ���Jerry���, even (among war veterans) ���the Boche��� . But ���Krauts��� was then an entirely American term and probably not widely used even there, before World War Two.

Next, we have a policeman whose crime seems to have been to have beaten an arrested man to death in a police cell. The man has been arrested by this officer for homosexual importuning, but the police officer is himself a repressed homosexual (there are no homosexuals or lesbians in Agatha Christie���s original book, so it has been necessary to create some, because this is the BBC, after all).

In the book, the officer has perjured himself to ensure the conviction (by a jury, yes, one of those things the BBC hasn���t heard of) of an innocent man who has then died in prison leaving his wife and children bereft. You might think this more likely, and also more likely to have gone unpunished,  than beating and kicking a man to a pulp in London police station.

I have no doubt people sometimes ���fell downstairs��� in pre-1939 British police stations. But the idea that a man could actually be beaten to death in such a place, and that nobody would be brought to justice for it seems far-fetched to me, and I will stick to that view unless and until anyone can show me wrong with facts.

In the book, all the people on ���Soldier Island��� have a guilty secret, but in most cases it is one that couldn���t have been proven in court or even prosecuted under normal law, or wasn���t punished adequately when it was. That is, if I may say so, the whole point of the story. Justice is coming anyway, even if they have escaped it up till now.  In the TV series, almost all these crimes are made more blatant or more gory, or both. A World War One soldier who sends a brother officer to certain death in No Man���s Land, when he finds he���s been having an affair with his wife is shown, ludicrously, shooting the said brother officer in the back with his service revolver,  in a Flanders dugout. Someone would have noticed this.  

In the book, the officer involved can���t bring himself to go to his village church on Sundays when the Bible story about David, Bathsheba and Uriah is to be read.   Why change this? The original story is so much more interesting. Perhaps anything that isn���t crude or blatant is simply beyond the people in charge of these things nowadays. Christie isn���t Shakespeare, but by comparison with this soapy simplicity, she nearly is.

The sinister servant couple,  whose malign but undetectable neglect led to the death of their rich employer, who has left them a large legacy, are transformed. The TV version husband suffocates the rich old lady with her own pillow (a common form of death in the modern soap opera) , while his protesting wife looks on in horror, and then he viciously beats her for protesting.

Wife-beating is also, of course, a common feature of soap operas (so are drunkenness, swearing and casual sex, all also inserted pointlessly into the story).  But it isn���t in the book and doesn���t add to the story. In the England of the 1930s, I suspect the deliberate suffocation of an old woman by her servants would have been quickly detected and the culprits hanged.  Even the doctors of the era might have been able to detect the signs of suffocation, and the police of the time would certainly have suspected servants who stood to benefit from such a  death. The whole point of the original crime was that it couldn���t possibly be proved in court.

You might say this would have been harder to portray than a suffocation, but the programme wasted an awful lot of time in moody long-shots and recaps, not to mention a stupid, pointless and interminable drunken scene, and dialogue-free shots of birds flying in slow motion. It must have used up the entire BBC supply of sinister music for the next ten years.

Then of course there���s the one overtly Christian character, Miss Brent, a smug woman who has driven her maid to suicide (by drowning, but in the gory TV version she hurls herself under a train) by cruelly throwing her out into the cold and the rain when she becomes pregnant.  In the TV version, the overtly snobbish spinster actually assaults her errant servant, another soap-opera moment utterly out of character with the person involved, the times or the original story. I mentioned Miss Brent in my earlier article on this programme, because her ocean-going hypocrisy and heedless over-the-top self-righteousness seemed to me to suggest that Miss Christie had an anti-Christian prejudice . But if she had such a prejudice it is as nothing compared to the BBC���s.

I wasn���t sure, but I thought the TV drama sought to portray Miss Brent,  the Christian spinster,  as some sort of frustrated and of course repressed lesbian (there was a curious, slyly suggestive scene involving blood oozing from her pricked thumb and exchanged glances with the maid).  Like the murderous police officer, by being repressed she sacrifices the moral superiority her sexuality would otherwise give her in BBC eyes. And then there was the device by which Christie���s Judophobia was brought into the story  and attributed, well, I never,  to the only overtly Christian character.  

Isaac Morris, the man with the ���thick, Semitic lips���  (Christie���s words) who is hired by the mysterious U.N.Owen to assemble his doomed guests, is not portrayed as especially Jewish, apart from his name, and certainly doesn���t have thick lips . But the Christian spinster is given the bigoted line: ���Whenever there���s a problem there���s Jews at the bottom of it���   

The trouble is that, if you didn���t know anything, you might genuinely be beguiled by this stuff, and not notice its manipulations. And if you do know anything, you can���t possibly enjoy these dramas.