The Kidnapped Prime Minister

The Prime Minister is kidnapped in France, hours before an international arms summit, and the clock starts ticking: thirty-two hours and a quarter, which sounds precise until you think about how little that is. The kidnapping happens at the worst possible moment, because there is never a good one. A prime minister missing on foreign soil, with the world's cameras pointed at the summit, turns a crime into a diplomatic emergency with a timetable. Poirot is brought in, and the affair becomes a race through France with the peace talks riding on it.

What makes it work is the scale. The politics are delicate and the stakes enormous, and yet the case keeps coming back to people: Commander Daniels (David Horovitch) and his wife (Lisa Harrow), Sir Bernard Dodge (Ronald Hines), Lord Estair (Patrick Godfrey), Major Norman (Timothy Block), Egan (Jack Elliott). Everyone involved has something they are not saying, and the summit is due before any of them will be comfortable saying it. Poirot must be fast and exact at the same time, which is precisely the sort of unfair demand he seems to enjoy.

Clive Exton wrote it with Agatha Christie, and Andrew Grieve directed. The regulars are all present, Suchet's Poirot, Fraser's Hastings, Japp and Miss Lemon in support, and the story gives them a proper international stage to play on. Philip Jackson's Japp keeps the official end steady while Poirot does the thinking.

It is a political thriller that never forgets to be a detective story. The solution is satisfyingly neat, and the episode earns its suspense the honest way, by giving the detective a deadline and then respecting it. Thirty-two and a quarter hours sounds arbitrary. By the end you understand exactly why it matters. But the frantic pace suits the show well, and the quiet moments of deduction hit harder for being rare.