Yeah, Why?

When I queued up Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (1980), I didn’t realize that it was a full 3 hours long. It turns out this was a BBC TV special shown over three or four episodes, although we didn’t really notice the seams. Anyway, it was enough fun that we didn’t mind the length.

It’s an adaptation of an Agatha Christie tale, one of the first made for TV. It starts with young James Warwick golfing on the Welsh seacoast. He knocks his ball over a cliff, and finds at the bottom, a dying man. While his partner runs for help, he waits with the body and gets two clues: He finds the photo of a beautiful woman in the man’s pocket and hears the man say with his last breath “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” When another man comes along (Leigh Lawson), he asks him to take over the watch and runs to his father’s church to play organ for services. I only mention this because his father is Sir John Gielgud.

He meets up with a pal, a Lady with a title played by Francesca Annis. Little by little, the two begin to investigate the business. Warwick has a picnic by himself and almost dies from a large dose of morphia in his beer. And it turns out that the dead man had been drugged with morphia before he died. Lady Annis goes undercover, faking an accident to get invited to stay at Lawson’s Manor. And that turns out to be next door to a sanitarium - for drug addicts! And so on.

As sleuths, this pair aren’t bad, but Warwick is playing the classic twit, Bertie Wooster style. He even has a friend named Badger who has a stutter and a history of bad business ventures. Annis, on the other hand, is a “bright young thing”, one of the flighty, sophisticated upper-class party girls of the 1920’s. So there’s a light, bright, comic air to all this. Also, there’s drug addiction, forgery, abduction, suicide, and more murder, so it isn’t all beer and skittles.

And someone says the title of the show about every ten minutes. It turned out that it was right under their noses the entire time.

Turns out that the leads, Warwick and Annis, play another pair of Christie detectives in the BBC series Tommy and Tuppence. I have considered watching those, but I’m not sure they are quite exciting enough for me to try. We’ll see.