TV Review: Is this Agatha Christie adaptation for children?

Seven Dials won't linger in the memory

Mia McKenna-Bruce stars in Netflix's Seven Dials

My wife put her finger on it halfway through the first episode of Seven Dials (Netflix). She asked “is this made for children?”.

And there’s the problem. I was looking forward to this adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery. It promised murder in a big house, great costumes, Helena Bonham-Carter and Martin Freeman.

It delivers Enid Blyton. The dialogue is dull and jolly. Everyone is quite nice. There is about as much tension as a room full of sleeping kittens.

It starts well. A man is trapped in an empty bull-ring in Spain and killed by a rampaging bull, blood everywhere.

The action moves to a bash in a posh mansion in England, where the host Lady Caterham (Bonham-Carter) is complaining because they have to put up with some awful new money visitors. How very Downton Abbey of them.

It’s all champagne and 1920s ants-in-your-pants dancing.
Caterham’s daughter, nicknamed Bundle, is flirting with her boyfriend Gerry, there is talk of marriage. They go to separate beds because this is Enid Blyton, and Gerry wakes up dead with seven alarm-clocks (dials, geddit?) arranged meaningfully on the mantle-piece of his bedroom.

The inquest suggest suicide but Bundle isn’t having it and uncovers an international conspiracy headquartered in a night club called The Seven Dials. That’s not a bad plot. But there are two problems with the way it’s delivered (which comes as a surprise because the screen-play is from the writer of Broadchurch.).

The first problem is Helena Bonham-Carter. She’s so good as the matriarch here that the others look like they are on a work-experience gig from acting school. At times it feels like she is in different show altogether, about a very posh English woman who never gets old. Poor Bundle, played by Mia McKenna-Bruce, never stood a chance.

She just lacks the inherent haughtiness you need to pull off a good aristocrat, despite the double-barrelled surname. Martin Freeman, on the other hand, isn’t given a chance as the detective from Scotland Yard on the case; he’s given very little to do here beyond looking bemused at Bundle’s determination.

The second problem is there isn’t any menace. All of the characters, including you have to presume the people who killed Gerry, are terribly nice. This lends Seven Dials a kind of Sunday evening cosy-crime feel, when the plot calls out for a hard-smoking film noir type who’d shoot you and kiss you in the same scene.

Maybe cosy crime is what we need when it’s this dark outside. But this won’t linger long in your telly memory.