Hercule Poirot's Christmas

The Lee family gathers for Christmas at the old man's invitation, and the old man is Simeon Lee, a tyrant with a house full of children who have learned to flinch when he speaks. Before the festivities can properly begin, his throat is slashed, apparently by one of his own. It is the sort of family Christmas that makes you grateful for your own.

The murder sits at the centre of a crowded, resentful holiday, and Poirot has to pick his way through a family that has spent years practising how to hate each other. Everyone was there, everyone had a grievance, and the dead man had the gift of making sure nobody left empty-handed. And the attack before Christmas and the death after it do not quite line up, and Poirot is a man who notices when things do not line up. The solution is the kind that makes you want to go back and watch the first half again.

Agatha Christie and Clive Exton wrote it, Edward Bennett directed. David Suchet is Poirot, with Philip Jackson as Japp, and Vernon Dobtcheff gives Simeon Lee the right mixture of charm and cruelty. Simon Roberts plays Alfred, Catherine Rabett Lydia, Eric Carte George, Andrée Bernard Magdalene, Brian Gwaspari Harry, Sasha Behar Pilar and Mark Tandy Sugden.

It is a proper festive mystery, all roaring fires and bad family feeling, and it went out on New Year's Day 1995, which is exactly the right time for a murder in a country house. The title promises Christmas and the episode delivers a body, which is the genre's idea of a present. Poirot, who has no family of his own to argue with, solves it with the patience of a man who finds other people's relatives endlessly interesting. The family does not get to keep its secrets, which is the only Christmas gift Poirot has to offer.