Cracked mirrors

Over the past few days we have had the opportunity to watch both the Hickson and the McKenzie versions of Agatha's Marple yarn, 'The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side'. Then this morning, I have been taking a look at the authorised text.

It was interesting to see in the text that Gossington Hall was not the ancestral pile at all, rather an awkward and ugly Victorian house, bought by Colonel Bantry on his retirement. Passing through various incarnations on his death, before winding up in the (temporary) hands of a film star. And while Agatha, when she wrote the story, was interested in the way that village life was changing after the second world war, what with no servants and new housing estates all over the place, by the time the TV adaptations were made thirty and more years after that, the idea was to portray the timeless, cosy English village - which did not exist at the time of writing and certainly did not exist at the time of filming, let alone now. Nostalgia rules!

Not very healthy.