She might be dead, but Agatha Christie is giving writing lessons. Sort of...
Such questions hover around the new BBC Maestro series, Agatha Christie on Writing, a 2.5-hour online course of 11 lessons led by the author herself, even though she died back in 1976 at the age of 85. Yet here she is, staring into the camera, grey hair neatly curled, a brooch on her lapel, taking us on a time-travel journey to the 1940s to share her tips of the trade.
'I am Agatha Christie,' she announces in the course's trailer, sitting with her hands clasped after a camera has panned across a fountain pen, a magnifying glass and a cup of tea in a floral teacup on her desk. 'And this is my BBC Maestro course on writing.' It's gobsmackingly real. But Christie, who's also shown getting out of a car, sitting on a garden bench writing and wandering through
a large house, isn't entirely AI-created. Conceived with the help of Christie's great-grandson, James Prichard, the online lessons feature a real actor, Vivien Keene, who wears a wig and costumes and uses a script drawn from Christie's letters, interviews and personal writing. Nearly 100 people, including academics, researchers, hair and make-up artists, a set designer and visual-effects experts, are behind the course and the digital magic that allows Keene's moving face to be overlaid with Christie's features.
Resurrecting famous dead people via AI isn't new. Virtually Parkinson, an AI-created podcast 'hosted' by the late Michael Parkinson, features a digitally recreated version of the chat-show host's voice (derived from recordings) interviewing living celebrities. The show's technical prowess means AI Parkinson is able to analyse guests' answers and pose follow-up questions. Take AI Parky asking UK gardening expert Monty Don about what draws him back to the garden: 'It always comes back to the same thing of getting down to the ground, back to the earth,' Don says.
AI Parky: 'I find that interesting. What is it about this connection to the earth that nurtures you so profoundly?' Don, laughing: 'I think it's to do with ... the rhythms of nature ... the way things grow.'
It feels like the tip of the iceberg. In 2024, US software company ElevenLabs partnered with the estates of Laurence Olivier, Judy Garland and James Dean to use the late actors' voices as narrators for books and other text material on its Reader app. How long, then, before Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë, quills in hand, are explaining Elizabeth Bennet or Jane Eyre? If the Queen of Mystery's 'realness' is any guide, the answer is, imminently.
'I will pass on the best advice I can from my own experiences,' Christie says, her crystalline gaze eyeing her students. 'But I should warn you, you must be serious about it if you wish to be a success.' Lenny Ann Low
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Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Read books, don't burn them': Sherlock co-creator looks to the past in new show
Sherlock Holmes' great maxim 'There is nothing new under the sun, it has been done before' could have been a comment on television in 2025. Mark Gatiss, who has adapted Conan Doyle in Sherlock, Agatha Christie in Poirot and now writes and stars in his own series, Bookish, knows the saying well — and quotes it approvingly. He is more than happy to admit that Bookish, his new period detective drama set in London, 1946, about a secondhand bookstore owner called Gabriel Book who doubles as an amateur sleuth, will ring many bells. Loading ' Bookish is a synthesis of all my favourite things,' he says, speaking in London. 'There are a lot of laughs, a lot of melancholy, a lot of black comedy and a lot of horror. The tone was very important to me; it's sort of The Lady Vanishes, Green for Danger and Peter Ustinov in [Agatha Christie's] Evil Under the Sun. I mean I watch that film about five times a year, maybe more because it's just such a great confection, you know: wonderful actors, a brilliant murder mystery, and they're all having a great time.' The six-part series (a second has already been commissioned) sees Gatiss star as Gabriel Book, owner of a bookshop in the fictional Archangel Lane. Book carries with him at all times a mysterious 'letter from Churchill', that grants him access to crime scenes to help the police solve murders. He comes with several further mysteries of his own that run through the series — for one there's his marriage to his childhood best friend, the ever-practical Trottie (Polly Walker, Bridgerton). (It's mysterious because Book is a gay man living at a time when homosexuality was illegal.) For another, there's Book and Trottie taking in young Jack Blunt (Connor Finch) after his release from prison. It seems like good people giving a second chance to a young man who's gone down the wrong path, but as Jack helps out both at the bookshop and on the murder cases, it soon becomes clear that his job offer wasn't quite as random as it first appeared. Add to these overarching mysteries the three two-part stories — the poisoning of the local chemist; the poisoning of a film extra when Lovelorn in London is shot on Archangel Lane; and yes, the poisoning of an army captain at the August Walsingham Hotel (there is a lot of poisoning in Bookish) — and you have a knotty, stylish and witty period piece. Bookish sits squarely within the current vogue for Agatha Christie and cheery murder-mysteries but while it is terrific fun what it isn't is frothy or glib. Gatiss recognises that quirky detectives and the puzzles they solve offer the viewer escapism, but it's an escapism that we need because, as he says, 'The world situation right now is so frightening.' It's precisely because Gatiss knows the detective genre inside out that he is able to use the diversion of a TV show as something of a Trojan horse to make his point. Book, for example is a gay man who society forces to hide in a lavender marriage. Loading 'I wanted to show to people who don't really know what it was like that we're standing on the shoulders of giants: we've come such a long way [with LGBTQ+ rights] but also how fragile it is. Because it's happening again. Sometimes I slightly despair of the rarefied arguments we have when, not very far from here, people have been put in camps or murdered for being gay. [Progress] can all be undone in a minute. Just look at Trump.' As a prolific star and writer of cult comedy The League of Gentleman and then Sherlock, episodes of Poirot and countless TV ghost stories in homage to his hero M.R. James, Gatiss recognises that his first responsibility is to entertain. 'I don't want to be didactic,' he says. 'It's entertainment and the murder mystery is a hugely important part of it. That's what people come for. But I think you can do stuff while you're there. That's what I was trying to do at least.' 'The central thing is: read books, don't burn them.' Gabriel Book is unusual in the detective canon in that he is a super-sleuth without a superpower. He doesn't really have a 'thing' like Holmes's powers of deduction or Poirot's whirring little grey cells. He has merely read a lot and spends all his days in a capacious bookshop that Gatiss describes as 'an analogue computer'. Book has no need to consult Google or ChatGPT, even if they existed — all knowledge is there in those fusty pages, but he does have to look it up. Loading 'I didn't want him to be a know-it-all,' says Gatiss. 'I don't like that. When Steven Moffat and I wrote Sherlock, by going back to the [Conan Doyle] books we were able to demonstrate that one of the things people had forgotten about Sherlock Holmes was that he was spectacularly ignorant about things that didn't interest him. As a child, I found that thrilling.' As such, Book is full of flaws, both gaps in his knowledge and in his own make-up. 'Part of Book is directly inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, one of the great detectives: everyone thinks he's a bit of a silly arse, but we know that he has PTSD. He screams in the night at flashbacks from the trenches. I love that, and I thought Book should have a very light-hearted view of the world precisely because he's seen some really terrible things.' Book also has a team of people around him who do the things he's not so good at. Trottie is practical; Nora (Buket Kömür), the waitress at the restaurant from over the road, happens to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of crime fiction and gruesome real-life cases; Jack, the jailbird, turns out to be a willing and capable apprentice, a Watson to Book's Holmes. And the period itself is not just there for ambience. In 1946 a murderer, Bookish reminds us, would face the death penalty. The shadow of the noose always dangles in the background, even as our team gad about and correct one another's grammar. Loading 'It's a different flavour if you feel someone's going to just get eight months as opposed to dangling from a noose at the end,' says Gatiss. As a whole then, you have a detective drama that has in many ways been done before, as Sherlock Holmes put it, but also, being a Gatiss script, knows exactly where it has come from.
The Age
6 days ago
- The Age
‘Read books, don't burn them': Sherlock co-creator looks to the past in new show
Sherlock Holmes' great maxim 'There is nothing new under the sun, it has been done before' could have been a comment on television in 2025. Mark Gatiss, who has adapted Conan Doyle in Sherlock, Agatha Christie in Poirot and now writes and stars in his own series, Bookish, knows the saying well — and quotes it approvingly. He is more than happy to admit that Bookish, his new period detective drama set in London, 1946, about a secondhand bookstore owner called Gabriel Book who doubles as an amateur sleuth, will ring many bells. Loading ' Bookish is a synthesis of all my favourite things,' he says, speaking in London. 'There are a lot of laughs, a lot of melancholy, a lot of black comedy and a lot of horror. The tone was very important to me; it's sort of The Lady Vanishes, Green for Danger and Peter Ustinov in [Agatha Christie's] Evil Under the Sun. I mean I watch that film about five times a year, maybe more because it's just such a great confection, you know: wonderful actors, a brilliant murder mystery, and they're all having a great time.' The six-part series (a second has already been commissioned) sees Gatiss star as Gabriel Book, owner of a bookshop in the fictional Archangel Lane. Book carries with him at all times a mysterious 'letter from Churchill', that grants him access to crime scenes to help the police solve murders. He comes with several further mysteries of his own that run through the series — for one there's his marriage to his childhood best friend, the ever-practical Trottie (Polly Walker, Bridgerton). (It's mysterious because Book is a gay man living at a time when homosexuality was illegal.) For another, there's Book and Trottie taking in young Jack Blunt (Connor Finch) after his release from prison. It seems like good people giving a second chance to a young man who's gone down the wrong path, but as Jack helps out both at the bookshop and on the murder cases, it soon becomes clear that his job offer wasn't quite as random as it first appeared. Add to these overarching mysteries the three two-part stories — the poisoning of the local chemist; the poisoning of a film extra when Lovelorn in London is shot on Archangel Lane; and yes, the poisoning of an army captain at the August Walsingham Hotel (there is a lot of poisoning in Bookish) — and you have a knotty, stylish and witty period piece. Bookish sits squarely within the current vogue for Agatha Christie and cheery murder-mysteries but while it is terrific fun what it isn't is frothy or glib. Gatiss recognises that quirky detectives and the puzzles they solve offer the viewer escapism, but it's an escapism that we need because, as he says, 'The world situation right now is so frightening.' It's precisely because Gatiss knows the detective genre inside out that he is able to use the diversion of a TV show as something of a Trojan horse to make his point. Book, for example is a gay man who society forces to hide in a lavender marriage. Loading 'I wanted to show to people who don't really know what it was like that we're standing on the shoulders of giants: we've come such a long way [with LGBTQ+ rights] but also how fragile it is. Because it's happening again. Sometimes I slightly despair of the rarefied arguments we have when, not very far from here, people have been put in camps or murdered for being gay. [Progress] can all be undone in a minute. Just look at Trump.' As a prolific star and writer of cult comedy The League of Gentleman and then Sherlock, episodes of Poirot and countless TV ghost stories in homage to his hero M.R. James, Gatiss recognises that his first responsibility is to entertain. 'I don't want to be didactic,' he says. 'It's entertainment and the murder mystery is a hugely important part of it. That's what people come for. But I think you can do stuff while you're there. That's what I was trying to do at least.' 'The central thing is: read books, don't burn them.' Gabriel Book is unusual in the detective canon in that he is a super-sleuth without a superpower. He doesn't really have a 'thing' like Holmes's powers of deduction or Poirot's whirring little grey cells. He has merely read a lot and spends all his days in a capacious bookshop that Gatiss describes as 'an analogue computer'. Book has no need to consult Google or ChatGPT, even if they existed — all knowledge is there in those fusty pages, but he does have to look it up. Loading 'I didn't want him to be a know-it-all,' says Gatiss. 'I don't like that. When Steven Moffat and I wrote Sherlock, by going back to the [Conan Doyle] books we were able to demonstrate that one of the things people had forgotten about Sherlock Holmes was that he was spectacularly ignorant about things that didn't interest him. As a child, I found that thrilling.' As such, Book is full of flaws, both gaps in his knowledge and in his own make-up. 'Part of Book is directly inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, one of the great detectives: everyone thinks he's a bit of a silly arse, but we know that he has PTSD. He screams in the night at flashbacks from the trenches. I love that, and I thought Book should have a very light-hearted view of the world precisely because he's seen some really terrible things.' Book also has a team of people around him who do the things he's not so good at. Trottie is practical; Nora (Buket Kömür), the waitress at the restaurant from over the road, happens to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of crime fiction and gruesome real-life cases; Jack, the jailbird, turns out to be a willing and capable apprentice, a Watson to Book's Holmes. And the period itself is not just there for ambience. In 1946 a murderer, Bookish reminds us, would face the death penalty. The shadow of the noose always dangles in the background, even as our team gad about and correct one another's grammar. Loading 'It's a different flavour if you feel someone's going to just get eight months as opposed to dangling from a noose at the end,' says Gatiss. As a whole then, you have a detective drama that has in many ways been done before, as Sherlock Holmes put it, but also, being a Gatiss script, knows exactly where it has come from.
The Age
13-07-2025
- The Age
This historic theatre sits in the heart of a booming city. It's been closed for more than a decade
It's the smell of melted butter on the popcorn, the taste of the milkshakes, screenings of classic films such as Star Wars and Alien, and the Christie theatre organ that stand out in the memories of many who visited what was once Parramatta's most iconic cinema. Those of a different generation think of lining up to get into a nightclub, booming music and watching footy games on the 'biggest screen in Parramatta'. Whether it was known as a cinema or for Friday drinks, the Roxy holds an important space in the memories of many who grew up in Sydney. But for Parramatta's youngest residents, the heritage-listed theatre is known as one thing: the empty building on George Street with locks on its doors. For more than a decade, the now-95-year-old theatre has remained shuttered and in a state of disrepair, in stark contrast to the buzz of action taking place around it. Running alongside the venue by 2032 will be the Civic Link, a $21 million pedestrianised boulevard that will connect Parramatta Square and the river. To its right sits the future Parramatta metro station, a 'once-in-a-generation' project that recently received concept approval for four high-rise buildings on top of the station itself. It's also due to open by 2032. But instead of the transport project being an opportunity to revitalise the Roxy Theatre, the building's owner believes Sydney Metro is the reason the theatre has been stuck in limbo. In May, K Capital Group's David Kingston, who owns the theatre, began legal action against Sydney Metro, accusing it of blocking access to the Roxy site, preventing restoration. 'Without access, Metro has sterilised the Roxy and prevented its renovation and reopening,' Kingston told The Daily Telegraph. The statement of claim, lodged in the NSW Supreme Court, comes after Kingston submitted a development application to City of Parramatta Council in 2024 to transform the theatre into a nightlife, restaurant and bar precinct. It was refused in February this year, partly because Sydney Metro denied access to the land surrounding the Roxy, which was compulsorily acquired in 2019. Kingston declined to comment on the legal proceedings.
