There’s a modern tendency to overdo Christie adaptations: her plots get drenched (as they have here) with too many extraneous visuals, with CGI creations of 1920s London and flapperishly frenetic Jazz Age partying.

It’s not just Seven Dials: it’s Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials. Because in case we need reminding, adding the queen of crime to a title sprinkles extra icing on a humdrum whodunit. Even if, as in this case, Christie’s 1929 novel The Seven Dials Mystery, in which a country house murder turns into an espionage thriller, has been thoroughly overhauled. Episode one begins, for reasons that later become (sort of) clear, in Spain, in Ronda, where Iain Glen is gored to death in an empty bullring. Will we ever see that fine actor again? Then we shoot over to England and a vast country house called Chimneys where a party is being hosted by its tenants, the industrialist Sir Oswald Coote and his wife. I don’t think Christie imagined a house called Chimneys looking like Chatsworth, but there is certainly lots of space for a gathering. Lady Caterham, owner of Chimneys, and her daughter Eileen, known as Bundle, are among the guests and Lady Caterham is not at all keen on the newly rich vulgarians the Cootes.

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