angelophile | On Miss Marple and lesbians

I wound up buying a boxed set of the BBC production of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple stories starring Joan Hickson after watching a rather lamentable more recent ITV adaptation while I was on holiday, that appeared unrecognisable as the original story and also, inexplicably, crammed with sizzling lesbians.

And I was pleasantly pleased by how well the productions have held up. Being period already and shot on location rather than some dodgy sets like, say, I Claudius was cursed by, the BBC version stands up incredibly well and knocks the recent versions into a cocked hat. not least because of the utterly sublime performance of Miss Marple by Joan Hickson.

And Hickson's everything a Miss Marple should be - prim, almost shrewish, gossipy, sometimes patronising, but also kind, genteel, intelligent, beautifully doddery. And, supposedly, Christie's own choice for the role as she remarked years before they were filmed she considered her perfect.

And she is. Joan Hickson's a wonderful actress and lucky to be ably supported by a host of obscure and not so obscure character actors in the adaptations.

But never fear, not a lesbian free zone. While the recent adaptations seem determined to squeeze them in for modern audiences, there was a perfectly depicted lesbian couple in the adaptation I watched today of A Murder is Announced, notable for the fact that while modern television must think itself daring and sensational for depicting lesbian couples, it was being done quite comfortably 20 years ago and far more successfully. In this case with Paola Dionisotti and Joan Sims playing a wonderful couple who clearly adore one another and who are never sensationalized or deliberately focused on in the "OH LOOK AT US, WE'RE SO DARING!" way modern TV shows seem determined to portray anything but a purely heterosexual relationship. It was refreshing to see a same-sex partnership portrayed in exactly the same way a heterosexual relationship would have been and not cheapened. It's just a shame it's from a show that's twenty years old and not the modern version.

All in all it's not one of the best Miss Marple stories, relying too much on so many red herrings and people masquerading as people they're not, but Joan Hickson's wonderful portrayal of Miss Marple's slightly snobbish musing on how village life has changed after the war and a bunch of well known faces playing well rounded characters made it thoroughly enjoyable.

All that and lesbians too. See, ITV, you don't need to alter the books beyond recognition to produce a cracking Miss Marple adaptation.