The BBC butchered the art of Agatha Christie

There has been a horrible murder on television. No surprise there, except that the victim was not a bumptious aristocrat with a large fortune nor a frumpy wife who must be dispatched to make way for the slinky lounge lizard her husband has just met; it is Agatha Christie’s novel The ABC Murders itself. A work that, over the past three evenings, has been brutally clubbed over the head by the BBC, then stabbed in the back and poisoned for good measure.

Inevitably, as with almost everything the BBC does these days, we were fed Left-liberal propaganda. Hercule Poirot – who is supposed to be French-speaking Belgian but spoke with a half-strangled German accent – was transformed into a victim of antimigrant prejudice, living among xenophobic neighbours. And he ticked police officers off for making assumptions about the gender of the killer, of course.

Next Christmas, I’ll bet my turkey, the BBC will transform him into Hermione Poirot, a Belgian police officer of part Congolese heritage. Not only that, it will be set in post-brexit Britain and she’ll have to come to the rescue after Inspector Japp struggles to solve a murder now that he has been denied access to EU police intelligence.

But it wasn’t just the endless ticking of diversity boxes which made the BBC’S Poirot excruciating to watch. An Agatha Christie novel is essentially a parlour game: it presents clues which the reader is supposed to link together to identify the culprit. Her novels were never supposed to be serious examinations of the minds of murderer and detectives. Giving away the killer’s identity and then trying to add psychological depth to Poirot through brooding flashbacks made the BBC adaptation preposterous.

The copious quantities of blood, and having one victim collapse into a chamber pot after being brutally attacked, made it unpleasant to watch. We were supposed to be noticing tiny clues, not covering our eyes in disgust as if watching a horror film. Agatha Christie books are treasured by so many in this country for their fiendish humour, and their eccentric, glamorous characters. But the BBC seems to think that all people want is blood-spattered grim, grim, grim.

One cannot help but come to the conclusion that the BBC is now so out of touch that it no longer possesses even the most elementary understanding of the basic tastes and preferences of everyday British viewers: sharp wit and a clever plot win over the dark and the sordid. Vivacious, malevolent characters capture our attention more than vinegar-faced, depressing ones.

So disappointed were viewers with the series that many have taken to Twitter, dubbing it the “ZZZ Murders”. Let’s hope that the BBC’S PR gurus relay back the message, and we get a decent Agatha Christie series next year. Us licence-fee payers deserve better. FOLLOW Ross Clark on Twitter @Rossjournoclark; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion