Is ITV’s strive to standardise mystery dramas through new branding and marketing techniques having a detrimental effect on the quality of Agatha Christie’s dramas?

Well then, I was quite pleased when I head Miss Marple was making a comeback to our screens. Memories of the grand dame Joan Hickson who made Miss Marple her own came flooding back.

The first series of the newly branded “Marple” (more about that later) was agreeable, cleverly using 1950s style pulp fiction font for the titles etc. The production of some of the better Miss Marples’, such as The Body in the Library or 4.50 from Paddington were a good start I thought. They really went to town on making the set designs animated with 1950s fashions and interiors. Full skirts, headscarves, busts, hips and a hostess trolley thrown in for good measure, made the show come alive, or did it?

Here is my problem. I think ITV with all their fancy set designers and wardrobe assistants have missed Christie’s point. If one reads a Miss Marple Mystery and studies the characters in them, they certainly are not your happy go lucky friendly neighbour type. The murderers Miss Marple uncovers are a symbol of the 1950s themselves; scarred by war, austere, down trodden and grey in the heart and the mind. Take Clothide Bradbury Scott, the witchy murderer in Nemesis, who has a penchant for making hot milky drinks you’re not going to forget in a hurry! She’s not a hip hooraying Diane Dors stylee in full skirt and polka dots; she is cold and calculating, and scared of the modern, changing world.

In all fairness Nemesis is yet to be remade by ITV, but I dread the high gloss version. They’ll have Clothide in heart shaped sunglasses before you could swig that milky drink down in one!