Teresa Reviews Alan Carr’s Adventures with Agatha Christie (2022)

Teresa Reviews Alan Carr’s Adventures with Agatha Christie (2022) and found it a magical mystery tour of Christieland

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Documentary found on Amazon Prime.

Is it entertaining? 5 Agathas

A whirlwind, fun tour of Agatha, her inspirations, and the origins of Miss Marple and Poirot.

Is it educational? 4½ Agathas

The occasional mistake doesn’t detract from meeting a host of important people in Christie World.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Like The Trouble With Agatha Christie, this show isn’t exactly a documentary. It’s a fast-paced, sometimes repetitive (due to the requirements of a multi-episode TV documentary with commercial breaks), funny and irreverent tour of how Agatha Christie leaped into Alan Carr’s life at 13 or so and opened up an entire new world. Now that Alan Carr’s a famous TV personality in Great Britain, he’s returning the favor by opening up Agatha’s story to a new world of fans.

Don’t laugh. Everyone meets Agatha Christie for the first time somewhere, whether picking up a battered paperback because it’s raining and you’ve got nothing else to do or watching a mystery film on TV and saying, “Wow. Who wrote this? Are there more stories like this?”

As a child, Alan Carr picked up a paperback of Murder at the Vicarage and was off to the races. He became a major fan and wants you to know it! And he wants you to share his boundless enthusiasm for all things Agatha! Until he leaped onto the screen in this documentary, I’d never heard of Alan Carr and had certainly never seen him perform. This shows the value of stretching yourself into new areas. By showing the world how much Alan loves Agatha, he introduces his fans to her and her fans learn about him. It’s so synergistic, don’t you know.

This documentary isn’t just good for Alan and Agatha; it also shows off the Devon countryside and Torquay, Agatha’s hometown. Among many, many features, you’ll get a tour of Greenways, one of her homes and even better, her great-grandson, James Prichard, is your host! The Devon Board of Tourism and Torquay’s Chamber of Commerce benefited so much from Alan’s enthusiasm, they should put up a plaque honoring him.

The show is divided in three episodes. We watched them one after another, which made the commercial interstitials and openings and endings repetitive but that’s broadcast TV for you. It has its own conventions. Alan explores a unique aspect of Agatha in each episode and interviews people who are important in Christie World or who help him learn how to do something related to Agatha.

Of the guests, Laura Thompson, the author of the biography Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life gets featured most prominently. She’s in all three episodes. In the first episode, where Alan focuses on Agatha’s life, she dispels some of the mystery surrounding Agatha’s infamous eleven-day disappearance.

Folks, it wasn’t that mysterious although the panting press liked it like that. Agatha was distraught and overwhelmed when her adored mother died and her adored husband asked for a divorce so he could marry his paramour. Desperately needing to escape, she notified her brother-in-law of her intentions and took a much-needed spa break where she’d be left alone to think. She never expected the worldwide panic that ensued. It was mortifying.

Other highlights of the first episode include James Prichard’s tour of Greenways, two visits to the theater, (The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution with scenes! But no spoilers!), and a meeting with archeologist Raksha Dave discussing how Agatha met Max Mallowan and reinvented herself as an amateur archeologist helping to record and clean his ancient relics at the digs.

The second episode focuses on Miss Marple and how Agatha based her on older aunts and grandmothers. Don’t be fooled by the upper-crust trappings of clothes and surroundings in the paintings and portraits. Those women saw babies, children, siblings, and husbands die of diseases we’d cure today with a shot of penicillin. They may have been isolated from slum living but they saw their fair share of tragedy. My favorite guests were Dreda Say Mitchell who’s included in the new collection of short stories Marple: Twelve New Mysteries, and Rev. Richard Coles who discussed what vicars learn about their congregations.

There’s also a priceless scene where Alan learns how to dress like Miss Marple. He patterns himself after Geraldine McEwan’s performance and gets to wear her hat and one of her coats. Later, with Susie Blake, he steps on stage in a scene from The Mirror Crack’d in front of an audience of Miss Marple cosplayers! Plus, the presentation takes place at the very movie theater Agatha attended. If you endured the indifferent film Ordeal by Innocence (1984) with Donald Sutherland, you saw this grand theater in Dartmouth, still open for business.

The third episode focuses on Hercule Poirot, his origins and development as a character and what Agatha thought of her most famous creation. Without a doubt, the highlights are Alan learning how to dress like Poirot, walk like Poirot, and — helped along by the Handlebar Club who are devoted to exuberant mustaches — choose an acceptable mustache of his very own.

Alan interviews Mark Aldridge, Poirot’s biographer, in the Torquay Museum which houses relics from the Poirot TV show. That’s fun but not too far out of the ordinary.

It’s his visit with Carla Valentine, a forensic pathologist that heads over into murderous territory. They meet at Bart’s Pathology Museum in London, loaded with what must be thousands of creepy specimens showing gunshot wounds, stabbings, heads bashed in, and countless other ways of killing people.

Hardened by her experiences as a mortuary attendant, Carla’s blasé, while poor Alan looks squicked out by some of the specimens. Carla points out, as Alan mentions several times during the documentary, that Agatha was much more than an old lady at a typewriter. As a young woman during the Great War, she served as a nurse taking care of horribly injured patients. In her autobiography, she mentioned hauling severed limbs to the incinerator and mopping up buckets of blood. The pharmacy, with its array of drugs and poisons, must have been a welcome relief from the horrors of the wards. Agatha’s experiences in the wards and the pharmacy provided great material for murder mysteries. Her descriptions of traumatized bodies are accurate!

This is a fast-paced, amusing documentary that never takes itself seriously. It never takes cheap shots at Agatha or her legacy, nor does it try to turn her into something she’s not: a boring old lady who stayed home and wrote cozy mysteries. Agatha’s mysteries are not cozies. She lived an eventful, dramatic life, and when she needed to, she reinvented herself and bravely moved forward into the future. Don’t miss this one.