Teresa Reviews The Agatha Christie Code (2005)

Teresa reviews The Agatha Christie Code (2005) and found its trendy pseudoscience and overly dramatic sets an embarrassment for the academics involved.

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Is it entertaining? 2 1/2 Agathas

Entertaining isn’t quite the correct word. Bizarre pseudo-profound is more like it.

Is it educational? 1 Agatha

It’s codswallop from start to finish, and if you don’t get the joke, the joke’s on you for wasting your time.

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

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

One of the mysteries of time is how fast ideas and technology can change, how quickly something that was trendy can turn into yard-sale fodder, and how a fashionable conceit can be so thoroughly discredited that no one would ever believe anyone in ye olden days could ever be so gullible.

Which is one of the amusements of the Agatha Project: We watch movies that were very much of their time and they often hold up very well decades later. In addition to the movies, we’re also dutifully plowing through the heaps of documentaries her legacy generated.

Folks, we took this one for the team so you don’t have to. This documentary is a glorious example of the mysteries of time turning something promoted as cutting edge into bilge.

You’ll get a pretentious title accompanied by portentous music, the high-minded narrator (Joanna Lumley) setting the stage, interviews with important people talking very seriously, and the remarkably dark computer laboratory stage filled with dry ice instead of electric lighting. You’ll hear scientific mumbo jumbo and technobabble as our three professors (who agreed to participate although I wonder what they thought when they saw the finished product) pretend to work magical computer analysis on Agatha Christie’s novels, like The Bible Code and The DaVinci Code, and uncovering hidden and arcane meanings never before realized by man.

This film was aired in 2005 meaning it was probably filmed in 2004. That computer technology you see onscreen looked like MS-DOS. MS-DOS! By 2004, Microsoft declared MS-DOS to be obsolete. Everyone had long since moved on to Windows and was no longer using that command screen format.

Nothing ages worse than what was once cutting-edge technology, unless it’s a former fad like claiming to analyze novels to see why they’re page-turners so you can write your own bestselling knock-off. Page-turner is an old school word never used by these techno-wizards as they discuss how Agatha’s simple vocabulary and non-formulaic formulas hypnotized millions of readers into devouring her books like crack cocaine and then demanding more.
Those are college professors from name universities pontificating in that murky lab. Let’s hope Dr. Forsyth, Dr. Danielsson, and Dr. Dahl still have careers.

As for Dr. Richard Bandler? He’s a self-help guru who pioneered (according to him) neuro-linguistic programming. He’s still operating today. You can sign up for a seminar he gives in how to enhance your charisma. Similarly David Shephard is still working as a trainer in neuro-linguistic programming although he doesn’t conduct seminars with Dr. Bandler. He runs his own, independent show.

The other interviewees at least don’t come across as hucksters. Novelist Val McDermid seriously discusses how and why Agatha became so popular and is still being read and discussed decades after her death. I wonder what McDermid thought when she saw the program. Similarly, Laura Thompson took her interview seriously even though when she’s done talking, the documentary leaps back to how, because Agatha used the word “said” instead of “answered,” she’s more widely read than any other English author. They proudly show off three-dimensional computer models to prove it. Roy Ramm, an ex-Scotland Yard commander was equally serious about learning from Agatha’s careful observations. The psychiatrist, Darain Leader, and the hypnotist, Paul McKenna, took their interviews seriously. Like McDermid, they must have been taken aback when they saw the finished product. And poor actor James Fox! He sounded like a fool.

Clumsily woven into the interviews and the badly lit science lab with our intrepid professors are clips from films of Agatha’s books, clips from a stage presentation of And Then There Were None, and reenactments of scenes from Agatha’s life. The film clips remind you to reread her novels or watch her movies. The reenactments tell you your time would be better spent reading Thompson’s biography of Agatha. You’d learn more and you wouldn’t feel stupid afterwards.

I sure hope the checks cashed for everyone involved.

What really makes this “documentary” — and I use the term loosely — codswallop is the underlying reason behind it. I’m indebted to Ben Goldacre and his website Badscience.net. He spotted adverts for the documentary larded with technobabble like “Christie’s use of such a device reflects the notions of Embedded Commands and Phonological Ambiguity used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.” A bad-science debunker, he was intrigued and watched the documentary. For the full story, visit his website at https://www.badscience.net/2006/01/agatha-references/.

If you don’t want to dive down that rabbit hole, here’s the summary. The writer of The Agatha Christie Code, Roland Kapferer, PhD, is a philosopher, anthropologist, and sometimes producer of TV shows. He’s got a page at IMDb showing he performed in music videos in the ’90s, wrote TV episodes between 2005 to 2008, and was assistant producer on a few more shows from 2004 to 2009. There’s nothing listed that marks him as a linguistics professor, a codebreaker, or an Agatha Christie expert.

When Ben Goldacre tasked him about Code, Kapferer admitted that the documentary was a parody. A joke. That anyone with a brain would have seen through it and realized he was having fun with the format and laughing at typical overwrought films getting all pretentious about some subject. Keep in mind that he must have supplied the newspapers (via press releases) with his own overwrought prose about neuroscience. Phrases like “higher than usual activity in the brain” and “these phrases act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin” and “release of these neurological opiates make Christie’s writing literally unputdownable” do not come from some reporter’s pen. Reporters don’t learn how to write technobabble in journalism school. They’re supposed to learn to “follow the money” and ask “who benefits” and “who, what, where, when” and possibly, “why.” If they had scientific aspirations, they wouldn’t become reporters.

Was any scientific research done at all? It doesn’t seem like it. Dear Son is a computer programmer and he’ll tell you that if your program is poorly thought out, the result will be bilge. If you don’t understand the questions you’re asking, you’ll get bilge. If you use poorly collected or incomplete data, you’ll get bilge.

The Agatha Christie Code is codswallop. Watch it if you want to see how not to take her or scientific research seriously. If you do, you’ll never get that hour of your life back no matter how much effort you put into reprogramming your neuro-linguistic abilities.