Free Poirot and Me by David Suchet, Geoffrey Wansell

it,
    but in my heart, I very much doubt it. I think
    it would have made continuing to play Poirot
    much more difficult for me, as I would not
    have been true to the man I had come to
    know so well.
    Yet the irony is that in the final cut of The
    Adventure of the Clapham Cook, the one
    that was eventually broadcast around the
    world, you only see Poirot, umbrella in hand,
    standing beside Hastings, who is sitting on
    the park bench. Poirot never actually sits
    down! The scene of Poirot wiping the park
    bench with his handkerchief ended up on the
    cutting-room floor. When I saw that, I
    allowed myself a wry little smile.
    I am not sure that it made the slightest
    difference to the audience’s enjoyment of
    the story and, if I am truly honest, I do not
    believe that it diluted my interpretation of
    Poirot, but, in spite of that, the ‘affair of the
    handkerchief’ mattered desperately to me at
    the time. Someone had to stand up for and
    protect Dame Agatha’s Poirot, and that
    person was going to be me, no matter what
    the consequences might be.
    I felt that responsibility more and more as
    the weeks passed on the first series,
    because I knew that by putting myself in
    that position, I was getting closer and closer
    to the character I was playing. The more
    that I knew about Poirot, the more I could
    protect him.
    What began as my exploring Poirot and his
    character gradually developed into a
    relationship in which we began to merge into
    one – so much so that by the end of the
    series, I knew that I could have gone out
    into the real world, rather than a television
    studio, dressed in his costume, and lived his
    life exactly as he would have lived it, and
    still have beeen myself.
    Poirot and I steadily became one and the
    same man. Suddenly it was Poirot and me.

    Chapter 4
    ‘I’M AFRAID THEY’RE
    GOING TO BE TOO
    TAME, OR TOO
    ECCENTRIC’
    The second Poirot story we shot, though
    it was the third to be transmitted,
    started exactly two weeks after our first. It
    was The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly – the
    case of an attempt to foil a threatened
    kidnap of the son of a wealthy landowner,
    Marcus Waverly, played by my old friend
    Geoffrey Bateman.
    Geoffrey and I had definitely worked
    together before – at the Connaught Theatre
    in Worthing in 1971 – when he played a
    Samurai warrior in a stage version of the
    classic 1950 Japanese film drama Rashomon.
    It was very early in my career, and I directed
    all the fight scenes, as well as playing the
    bandit. Now Geoffrey was playing the
    landowner whose huge country house seems
    to be falling down around his ears, while his
    son is in danger.
    For this story we had a new director,
    Renny Rye, who was then only forty and
    would go on to direct five episodes of that
    first Poirot series. Renny started his
    television career producing the children’s
    programme Blue Peter, before graduating to
    drama. He was to stay with Poirot until
    1991. Since then, he has gone on to direct
    episodes of the British television series
    Midsomer Murders
    and Silent Witness,
    among many other things.
    Because of the schedule, Ed Bennett,
    who’d directed Clapham Cook, disappeared
    into the cutting room to edit his film, while
    Renny worked on Johnnie Waverly. Then Ed
    would return to direct the third, while Renny
    went away to edit his. Alternating the two
    directors was the only way we could be sure
    to produce the films within the twenty weeks
    that we had been given by London Weekend,
    who were keen to transmit the series in
    January 1989, barely three weeks after we
    would finish shooting.
    Johnnie Waverly again reminded everyone
    how much Poirot loathed the countryside,
    especially when he is forced to walk across
    the fields after Hastings’ Lagonda breaks
    down just minutes before the threatened
    kidnap is about to take place. The resilient
    Chief Inspector Japp arrives with a team of
    constables in an effort to foil the crime, but
    to no avail, although Poirot realises that