On TV

AS soon as Joanna Burton declared that "nothing ever happens in the country", you could be certain that many awful events would follow. And, being a Miss Marple mystery, they would involve murder most foul.

What couldn't be predicted was that adaptor Kevil Elyot would turn Agatha Christie's whodunit into a screamingly camp caper in which an unbelievably star-studded cast would have a ball with tongues never far from their cheeks.

Top camper was John Sessions as Cardew Pye, whose very name sounds like a Carry On character. "They'll all think you are a little queer - and what's wrong with that?" he inquired, raising his eyebrow saucily.

Any film that has enfant terrible film director Ken Russell as a mad vicar, rejoicing in the glorious name of The Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop. He was a clergyman of whom his imperious wife Maud (the wonderful Frances de la Tour) told everyone who'd listen that he "has no taste for fornication".

I hate to think what he did have a taste for. Something distasteful, I suspect, and possibly involving Mr Pye. On hearing that the Rev inclined toward the Greeks, he admitted that "No-one does Horace quite like you".

The sleepy village of Lymstock, one of those pretty as a picture postcard places where murderers thrive in Christie stories, welcomed a pair of brother and sister newcomers Jerry and Joanna Burton in The Moving Finger.

The latter was played by Emilia Fox with flaming red hair and a succession of amazing frocks that must have cost the wardrobe department a fortune in the yards of fabric required.

Indeed, TV seemed to have written a very large cheque to cover the cost of the entire film, not least employing a long list of familiar faces. Some had little more than a cough and a spit before keeling over from poison, being struck on the head with a heavy object or a shot in the head.

Lymstock was, as one resident put it, "a gossipy old place" but the sack load of hate mail popping through the letterboxes of the locals was causing raised eyebrows - and falling dead bodies.

Saucy secrets were revealed in these murderous missives. Words like tart and whore were used, as well as information casting doubt on the paternity of children was mentioned in relation to upstanding members of the community.

While gentlemen "locked horns over a rubber" (which sounds vaguely unsettling, not to say saucy), the ladies of the Women's Institute sat chatting in their sewing circle.

This hate mail meant, it was pointed out, that no-one knew "whether the person you share a pot of tea with or buy your sausages from is, in fact, a criminal lunatic". If you can't trust a man who handles your chipolatas who can you trust?

Geraldine McEwan's twittering Miss Marple, knitting so furiously she appeared to be going for gold in the Winter jumper-making Olympics, unravelled the mystery as easily as a cardigan with a missed stitch.

But I had as much fun just watching everyone taking part, from Imogen Stubbs as a gossip who wore dark glasses at dinner parties to Kelly Brook as a nanny via Keith Allen as a dogged detective and Harry Enfield as a solicitor drawn from one of his old black-and-white comedy sketches.