The BBC TV adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ordeal by Innocence was lined up as the biggest show of last Christmas. Then, in November, Ed Westwick, who had the key role of Mickey Argyll, was accused of rape and sexual assault – allegations he has denied. Ordeal by Innocence was pulled from the schedules.
Now Sarah Phelps’s three-part drama will air on BBC One from Easter Sunday with Christian Cooke in Westwick’s role. The reshoots, which constituted 45 minutes of material, took place over 12 days. Phelps admits her overwhelming feeling is relief. “The BBC made absolutely the right decision [to pull it] and I completely supported that decision because it’s about being moral and right and having integrity, but then there’s that thing of: oh God, is it going to see the light of day?” she says.
“When I realised that Mammoth [the production company], the BBC and Agatha Christie Ltd were going to bust a gut to make sure it went out, I was overwhelmed.”
Neither decision, to pull the show then to recast Westwick, was taken lightly. “It was a tricky situation,” she says. “Very distressing for everybody but I’m incredibly proud to be a part of a group of people who have really knocked it out of the park.”
The integration of the re-shot footage appears seamless, and Cooke delivers a strong performance in what is probably Phelps’s darkest Christie adaptation yet, a pitch-black tale of murder, motherhood and the desire for perfection, which plays out against the paranoia of the cold war.
“We keep thinking of the 50s as though it was this dull age when we’d won [the war], and everything was calm and nice with non-stop street parties but behind that is a very different story,” says Phelps. “There’s a fear simmering all the time and a sense that even though we’re all smiling away, there’s blood running through the bunting.
“When you think about the second world war, and about what follows it, then how would you actually live, knowing about the ovens and the chimneys, the piles of bodies and the twisted spectacles? How would you live, knowing that we have harnessed a power that can sear a human being into a shadow on a stone?
“I wanted to take all that fear and paranoia, and tell a story of a family, and motherhood that has been absolutely weaponised. How else could it be, knowing all of that. Because if family isn’t everything, if motherhood isn’t everything, if perfection isn’t everything then what the hell was everything else for?”
She chose to set the adaptation in the summer of 1956 “because in a few months’ time the voices of Hungarian dissidents will be silenced for generations, and Suez will take us very close to the brink of God knows what. There’s a conspiracy of silence, a global mood of paranoia, and then you put all of that into a family and think: what’s the secret at the heart of it? Who is the person who holds the key to why this woman died? Not whodunnit, but why?”
In some ways it’s not surprising that Phelps brings an outsider’s eye to her adaptations. Now 51, she grew up in Mosley, Surrey and left school at 16 before reading English at Cambridge as a mature student, and made her name as a writer on EastEnders (“a piece of my heart will always be in Walford”). Phelps had never read Christie, whom she describes as “clever, subversive and tricksy”, before she adapted And Then There Were None, broadcast over Christmas 2015. She admits cheerfully that she has changed the ending of Ordeal by Innocence: “I have done a bit of a number on it because it’s one of those books where people talk a lot but nothing much happens.”
Does she worry at all about purists complaining? She snorts. “Oh purists. Anything that’s purist is deeply problematic to me – I think it’s a philosophy that’s dangerous whether applied to books or to larger considerations of policy and philosophical thought.
“I don’t give a bollocks about people saying it has to be pure. No, it doesn’t. If you want a pure adaptation, go and get someone else to do it.”
She is equally robust about period drama, having also adapted well-received versions of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. “With period drama, we look at it through the wrong end of the telescope like it’s people gesticulating emptily because they’ve always gesticulated emptily, and that’s just not bloody true,” she says. “When I was doing Great Expectations I kept thinking: who are they? Why are they doing this? What would it do you to be in this house with this woman living in this moment of extreme trauma, and a kind of theatrical eroticisation of her grief giving you this sexually depraved education that your beauty must punish men, and that’s what you’re for. Rather than standing back from it, and going “oh here we go again’”, you tell it like it’s never been told before. As though nobody knows it. As though it really matters.”
Similarly, the key to a good murder mystery, she says, is that “a terrible thing has happened, an act of violence whether by accident or design, and the how and why matters so much – why is it this person who is dead on the floor? What led to this moment?
“What were these people like as human beings – whose house do they live in, who owns the house, the furniture, what’s the ceiling like? Is the light dim? Is the water warm enough to have a proper bath? Does damp run down the walls? Do you wake up and look at the person lying next to you who you’ve been married to for the past 30 years and hate their guts?
Those questions tell you everything. They tell you how people live, how they move through the world. They tell you why someone might end up dead or someone might end up charged with murder…”
That approach drives both Phelps’s own work and the work of the television shows she most admires. “My big belief is that if you’re going to be universal then you have to be absolutely specific,” she says. “Look at shows like Mum, Derry Girls, This Country – they’re great because they have so much heart and soul, and they work because of their specificity. What you’re writing about has to matter because otherwise people think: why am I watching this? If you set out to be gigantic from the start and forget about the specifics, then you’re doomed.”
Ordeal by Innocence begins on BBC One on Sunday 1 April at 9pm
