{"id":19521,"date":"2018-05-12T00:01:04","date_gmt":"2018-05-12T06:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=19521"},"modified":"2018-05-11T20:40:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-12T02:40:48","slug":"audio-drama-review-agatha-christie-lost-plays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/audio-drama-review-agatha-christie-lost-plays\/","title":{"rendered":"Audio Drama Review: Agatha Christie: The Lost Plays:"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ss&#038;ref=as_ss_li_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=adamsblog03-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=B014HGN45U&#038;asins=B014HGN45U&#038;linkId=2b5b6849092dbbb3982f54d9a5b1d0ac&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><em>Agatha Christie: The Lost Radio Plays<\/em> collects three BBC radio plays that aired between 1948 and 1960. It also includes some bonus material.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Butter in a Lordly Dish&#8221; from 1948 stars Richard Williams as Sir Luke Enderby KC, a skilled prosecutor who is also a philanderer, who is headed out on his latest fling. Then there&#8217;s Personal Call, a 1955 original story about a man receiving calls from someone claiming to be his dead wife. It stars Ivan Brandt and Barbara Lott. Finally, Williams stars as Poirot in the hour-long adaptation of Christie&#8217;s &#8220;Murder in the Mews.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The acting is mostly solid with a few exceptions. There is a slight bent to the melodramatic in the original radio plays, and Williams isn&#8217;t the best Poirot ever.<\/p>\n<p>As for the writing, anyone expecting new masterpieces will be disappointed. &#8220;Butter in a Lordly Dish&#8221; is comparable to an above average episode of the 1960s American series <em>Theater Five<\/em>.\u00a0 &#8220;Personal Call&#8221; is comparable to an average mid-1950s episode of <em>Suspense<\/em>. &#8220;Murder in the Mews&#8221; is a good story undermined by direction and style that is competent at best and Williams is a somewhat mediocre Poirot.<\/p>\n<p>The extras include Agatha Christie-related audio recordings and interviews with actors who appeared in the original London stage production of her play the Mousetrap. In addition, comedian Toby Hadoke interviews the last-surviving cast member of the radio plays. In that extra, they discuss his showbiz career and how he became a successful costume designer on both sides of the pond. Hadoke is a talented interviewer who shows great interests in his subjects and makes this far more interesting than you might otherwise expect.<\/p>\n<p>Overall,\u00a0 major fans of Agatha Christie will enjoy this release. It features rare and little-heard radio productions featuring her work that are okay, but not remarkable. In addition, the bonus material is well-presented and engaging.<\/p>\n<p>Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5<\/p>\n<p><em>If you enjoyed this post, you can have new posts about Detective stories and the golden age of radio and television delivered\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B004U8SET2\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=adamsblog03-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B004U8SET2\">automatically to your Kindle<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchase<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agatha Christie: The Lost Radio Plays collects three BBC radio plays that aired between 1948 and 1960. It also includes some bonus material. &#8220;Butter in a Lordly Dish&#8221; from 1948 stars Richard Williams as Sir Luke Enderby KC, a skilled prosecutor who is also a philanderer, who is headed out on his latest fling. Then&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[132,123],"tags":[165,409,2177,1624,533,612,2087],"class_list":["post-19521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-drama-review","category-golden-age-article","tag-agatha-christie","tag-audio-drama","tag-audio-drama-review","tag-faint-praise","tag-mixed-review","tag-poirot","tag-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-54R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19521"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19549,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19521\/revisions\/19549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}