Forget rebooting Poirot – there's an entirely different direction the BBC should pursue with Agatha Christie's detective ...Middle East

Crack open the moustache pomade – Poirot is back. News has broken that the BBC is in the process of selecting a star to fill the shining patent leather shoes vacated by David Suchet. But with his portrayal still considered definitive, the inevitable question arises: why bother?

Recent history offers something of a warning. Both Kenneth Branagh and John Malkovich have taken their shot at Agatha Christie’s fastidious Belgian, and neither has managed to eclipse Suchet. So, is the BBC embarking on a hiding to nothing in resurrecting Hercule? As the man himself might say, it all depends on their method.

Mesdames et messieurs, consider this: instead of timetabling another excursion aboard the Orient Express – a journey whose destination most viewers can now anticipate – might it not be wiser to take Poirot in an entirely different direction?

There is, after all, a precedent. Endeavour successfully rewound the clock on Inspector Morse, charting the early career of Colin Dexter’s cerebral copper across nine highly successful series. Why not attempt something similar here? A Young Poirot perhaps – or, more enticingly, The Early Labours of Hercule.

Christie herself left much of Poirot’s past intriguingly hazy. We know he served as the Chief of Police in Brussels, that he fled Belgium during the First World War and arrived in England as a refugee before establishing himself as a consulting detective. It’s a backstory that can be summarised in a sentence, but one that offers fertile ground for expansion. There is texture here, and tension – the making of a man rather than just the reiteration of a legend.

Inevitably, there will be purists who will baulk at the idea of stories not drawn directly from Christie’s pen. But that Rubicon has already been crossed. Writer Sophie Hannah has produced a successful run of Poirot continuation novels, while Lucy Foley is now set to do the same for dear Miss Marple. The appetite is clearly there, provided the execution is right.

Crucially, this approach would also swerve the most obvious pitfall: comparison. Attempting to replicate Suchet invites failure, but reimagining the character’s formative years allows for reinvention. It opens the door not just to fresh mysteries but to a richer context. What shaped Poirot’s obsession with order? Why did he choose his career over romance? How did displacement and exile shape his worldview?

Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Europe – and later, a Britain toying with political extremism – the series could even carry a subtle contemporary resonance. A young Poirot navigating a society in flux feels like a story with something to say and not just something to solve.

The challenge facing the BBC is not to find the next David Suchet, because such a quest is doomed from the outset. The real question is how to make Poirot matter again. The answer lies in following the evidence, which leads us not to imitation but to an origin story. Use those little grey cells, and the ideal solution presents itself.

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