It’s impossible not to feel snooty watching ITV’s Agatha and Poirot

Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s decision to dedicate 85 minutes of primetime Easter Monday television to a books-related documentary was never likely to result in a steely Leavisite engagement with literature. Nor, of course, should it. Even so, it was hard to avoid a dowager-like shudder when, for example, one contributor declared that Agatha Christie ‘will never be surpassed as the world’s greatest novelist’ — especially when the contributor was that well-known literary critic Lesley Joseph. Or when Danny John-Jules suggested that a murder is ‘the last thing you’d expect’ in a book set on the Orient Express, despite the book featuring Hercule Poirot and being called Murder on the Orient Express. Still, if you’ve ever wondered whether Poirot is ‘iconic’ or not, you certainly got your answer here — sometimes several times a minute. (Spoiler alert: he is.)

The presenter was an extravagantly scarfed Richard E. Grant, who began with the reassuring assertion that ‘there’s nothing more British than Agatha Christie’. (Discuss.) From there, he left much of the not-so-heavy lifting to a selection of celebs most charitably described as random. All said pretty much the same stuff with varying degrees of conviction. They also served to confirm Grant’s later and equally questionable assertion that ‘it’s through television that most of us know Poirot’, which they did by the simple but effective method of constantly confusing the books with the TV series — or ‘the ITV series’, as Grant preferred to call it.

But Poirot was by no means the only television staple that influenced what we saw, as the programme repeatedly sought refuge in other genres it obviously considered more viewer-friendly than an arts documentary.