The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio The great ones are back in action.

With the Poirot mysteries, there's a certain level of quality that's expected and David Suchet, Philip Jackson, and the rest of the cast deliver. However, there were a few irritants in this particular production. The biggest is that the children's song upon which the title of the Christie book was taken from is sung in a creepy ghostly manner by some girls near the dentist office. I don't feel I'm giving too much away to say that nothing truly sinister or diabolical was done with the shoe buckle making the singing seem (to put it mildly) out of place.

This focus does tend to give away a key clue as does the inclusion of a scene from India that wasn't in the novel that many viewers thought gave too much of the mystery away. To be fair, due to the complexity of the case, the producers may have felt the viewers could have used some help in trying to understand what happened and I don't think they were unjustified in that.

Despite these criticisms and the lack of a spectacular setting, One Two Buckle My Shoe remains a well-acted, generally well-produced adaptation of the quality I've come to expect from the ITV Poirot series.

Rating: 4.0 out of 5.00

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