Why can’t the BBC leave Agatha Christie alone?

I would like to report a murder. It took place in the evening of 27 December in millions of homes around the UK simultaneously. The victim was Dame Agatha Christie – well, one of her works, and to an extent her posthumous reputation. But unlike in the great Dame’s novels, there was no beguiling mystery about the culprit: it was the BBC, a serial offender.

Yet again, in what has now entered the list of modern Christmas traditions, our national broadcaster chose to ‘reinvent’ and thus more or less kill, one of the Queen of Crime’s novels. Christie’s Murder is Easy was retrofitted to suit the BBC’s obsession with racism and colonialism. The hero Luke Fitzwilliam, in the book a retired English police detective, was recast as Nigerian. Meanwhile, themes derived from Yoruba culture were woven into the plot by writer Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre to produce an ‘allegory of colonialism’, as the director Meena Gaur put it.

The BBC calls this ‘repurposing’ the classics, an Orwellian formulation that is perhaps more accurate and revealing than was intended.