TV review: Curtain: Poirot's Final Case

Curtain: Poirot's Final Case, the adaptation of Agatha Christie's last 1975 book about her fat little Belgian hero, presented Poirot as he had never been seen on TV or film before.

For the last appearance of the iconic character and his little grey cells, Suchet shed two stone and his normally portly Poirot was a shrunken and sickly old man, seemingly crippled by arthritis.

The terminal mystery for the great Belgian detective took him back after the Second World War to the scene of his first appearance in the works of Agatha Christie, re-uniting him with Captain Hastings (Hugh Fraser) for a baffling case that eventually ends in three deaths.

A great cast had been assembled for the last outing of Suchet in the role that he has made his own and he did not disappoint with one of his best ever and most moving performances.

Philip Glenister, Helen Baxendale, Anne Reid and John Standing were among the characters filling the guest house of Styles Court with a wheelchair-bound Poirot determined to unmask a killer before he knew who was to be the victim.

"I am a wreck, mon ami," Poirot told his old friend Hastings, who was shocked at his decline, but it was quickly clear that the detective's mental powers were undiminished as he boasted "my brain is as magnificent as ever."

The plot presented a wide choice of candidates for murderer and victim for the viewer to pit his wits against the fading Poirot, who was wracked throughout with Catholic guilt.

The mood was much darker than the usual Poirot and many scenes were shot by candlelight adding to the tense and menacing atmosphere.

Even Hastings acting as the stricken Poirot's eyes, ears and legs, tormented by his daughter's attraction to a cad, seemed at one stage to be a potential killer.

Poirot's own death from natural causes came as a surprise 35 minutes from the end of the two-hour long goodbye.

With Poirot no more, instead of the trademark summing up scene and the pointing of the finger at the guilty party, the device of a letter written by him and delivered four months later to Hastings was employed to explain all with the help of flashbacks and Poirot's own voice reading his last message.

The villainous instigator of numerous murders turned out to be the meekest of the suspects and his own killer, with a gunshot perfectly placed in the centre of the forehead, the last person that anyone would have guessed would get away with a perfect murder.

The episode ended with a final enigmatic shot of Poirot with his trademark moustache firmly in place on his egg-shaped head.

In Being Poirot, which followed the last episode, David Suchet told the story of his television character and offered some illuminating looks behind the scenes of the successful show, which ran for 13 series and was watched by 700 million around the globe.

He confessed: "Hercule Poirot is for me much more than a character on the written page: for me he is almost a real person."

Poirot was the most important part in the 67-year-old actor's career and the affection he holds for him after making 70 films as him was clear.

To research the role he won in 1988, the meticulous method actor read every single word Christie, who died in 1976, wrote about the neat and precise little Belgian sleuth in 30 novels and 50 short stories and produced a list of 93 notes to help him play the part.

One thing he did not mention in the documentary was how he perfected Poirot's 'rapid mincing gait in patent leather boots' with the aid of a penny clenched between his buttocks, a method he borrowed from Laurence Olivier.

John Corser