If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about television must surely be the idiot's lectern.

Agatha Christie’s Marple

ITV

I hadn’t watched any of the revived Miss Marple until recently. I’d been sorely put off by what I’d seen and heard. I mean, the title for one thing. Yes, Poirot is referred to by his surname. But Miss Marple is always Miss Marple and should always be Miss Marple. Only those close acquaintances and relatives that have her permission to use "Jane" may be excepted. Whether ITV sought to create a brand by naming the series "Marple" or they felt somehow that the word "Miss" was old fashioned I don’t know. Perhaps we should be grateful that they didn’t go so far as to call her Ms Marple. So that put me off.

I was also a little disconcerted that they’d cast such a young actress as Miss Marple. Geraldine McEwan only looked to be in her late 50s. This was foolish on my part for two reasons. Firstly, David Suchet was only 43 when he started playing Poirot and Poirot is meant to be a retired police officer when he is introduced in print which would make him well into his 60s. Agatha Christie once expressed her regret that she made Poirot so old to begin with as it made it impossible for his life in print to make logical sense – if he was so old in the 1920s, how could he still be investigating well into the 1960s when some of the later books were set? Not to mention that Stephen Fry was far too young to play Jeeves in 1990 and we overlook it because he was so utterly great in the part. As for Sherlock Holmes who goes from his 20s to his 70s in the Conan Doyle tales but is generally played by an actor in his late 40s or early 50s regardless of when the story was set, we forgive that too. It is the performance that matters more than the age of the actor. Besides, my second mistake was assuming Geraldine McEwan was as young as she looks – she isn’t – she was 72 when she started playing Miss Marple. My bads.

ITV decided that this Miss Marple adaptation would not feature the occasional guest star. Oh no – this series was to be packed with guest stars. If there was movement, get a star to move. If there was a line, a star would say it. These Miss Marple plays make even the most glam-packed Morecambe and Wise show look like the opening of a new Kwik Save. Take the classic "Murder at the Vicarage" for example, we have Jane Asher, Jason Flemyng, Mark Gatiss, Herbert Lom, Miriam Margolyes, Tim McInnerny, Robert Powell, Rachael Stirling, Stephen Tompkinson, Derek Jacobi and Marc Warren. The theory seems to be to cast the net as widely as possible so absolutely everyone will find someone in the cast list that they really like. I will admit to having looked at the backs of the DVDs to see if there was anyone I fancied in each story. This particular one has Rachael Stirling – daughter of Diana Rigg and star of lesbian classic "Tipping the Velvet". Ms Stirling’s voice is still disconcertingly deep for one so pretty but conversation is so overrated don’t you think?

This being the twenty first century (when everything changes) there has been a certain amount of tinkering with Miss Marple. The stories are set in the early 1950s rather than in that whimsical time between the wars when England breathed a sigh of relief that the war to end all wars had been and gone and never again would our husbands, brothers, sons and fathers go off to fight. "The Body in the Library" establishes that the present day is 1951 (we have a flashback to 1944 and a caption saying ‘seven years later’) which at least makes the flashbacks in "Murder at the Vicarage" make a sort of sense. This is one of the new things – Miss Marple had a lover who went off to war in 1915 and never came back. She kisses his photograph each night and still mourns for her lost love. It wasn’t too obtrusive – out of place certainly but not too obtrusive. I suppose it depends whether we need to know why Miss Marple is a spinster. We managed for eighty years without knowing so it seems a little redundant to drop it in now. Maybe they just wanted to avoid anyone thinking that Miss Marple might’ve remained a spinster because her sort of love wasn’t recognised by church or state. More likely they just wanted her to have a backstory because everyone in modern television has to have a backstory. If Jeeves and Wooster was made today I dare say we’d see flashbacks to the Somme where Bertram Wilberforce Wooster watched his fellow officers die and he somehow managed to blunder into a man trap only for Jeeves to appear out of the gas haze and rescue him.

The internet says various bits in the novels have been changed between page and screen. This doesn’t bother me too much. Things always change when you adapt them for television or film. Even a reasonably faithful adaptation is a luxury these days. Ok, so they chop out a few characters, made the odd character gay and changed the ending a couple of times. It’s only Agatha Christie – it isn’t like changing Sherlock Holmes. The latter is much more serious and should be punishable by death. Agatha Christie’s books have been adapted for decades and bits are always being tweaked. I can see that there is a certain arrogance in a TV producer deciding that he or she can do murder mystery better than Agatha Christie but I’ve not yet seen anything too object to. They have as good a feel for St Mary Mead as you’re going to get.

The production is slick and very similar to the new wave of Poirot films. They don’t try to do anything too over the top – swooping shots are kept to a minimum, there haven’t been many explosions and I haven’t spotted any CGI yet which either means they’ve learned how to do it properly at last or they haven’t felt the need to add a few more trees to an otherwise perfectly acceptable forest. The only thing I didn’t like was the hideous title caption – it looked a good twenty five years old. No where near old enough to be authentic – just old enough to look like a bad video effect from an early 80s Grange Hill or situation comedy. I can see what they were trying to do but it didn’t work at all.

Geraldine McEwan makes a very good Miss Marple. She is different to Joan Hickson of course but then Joan Hickson was an actress playing Miss Marple, not Miss Marple herself. I always felt rather detached from Joan Hickson’s portrayal, something no doubt exacerbated by the cold 16mm film on which the series appeared to be shot. Geraldine McEwan is a cosy old auntie with knitting on the go, a warm hearth and a twinkle in her eye. She gets the all important balance right – Miss Marple is an old woman with no official status and should never be portrayed as the one running the investigation. She isn’t and never should be a female Poirot with detectives and officers at her beck and call. She either does amateur sleuthing with a chum of hers or she helps the detective by subtly prodding him in the right direction.

Gather round as we wrap this whole thing up by going through the clues one last time before naming the murder. Or I could just come to a conclusion. The former is more traditional but would be rubbish. I’d avoided "Marple" for years because I thought I would hate it. I don’t hate it – I rather like it. It has some flawed efforts at modernising and updating Miss Marple (and the name still must go) but it could’ve been a lot worse. Whether this is down to Agatha Christie Ltd having some creative control or just a production team that know better than to make Miss Marple into an historical version of Prime Suspect I don’t know. If you know the books in detail (which I don’t – I’ve read most of Agatha Christie’s books but never more than once) then there may be things which annoy you. If on the other hand you know Miss Marple and enjoy period whodunits then this series is entirely watchable. It’s as good and clean and fun as murder can be.