AI Agatha

Agatha Christie has been resurrected using AI to lead a BBC Maestro course that aims to share the Queen of Crime’s writing secrets with budding authors – but it could also be a watershed moment for the use of technology in television production.

Among the numerous learning courses already on the BBC Maestro service – from Delicious Vegetarian Cooking with Marco Pierre White and Music Production with Mark Ronson to Acting with Brian Cox – subscribers can now follow Writing with Agatha Christie, an 11-part course that offers users the chance to learn how to craft the perfect murder mystery from the Queen of Crime herself.

Christie’s novels are frequently adapted for the screen, from David Suchet’s acclaimed run as Belgian detective Poirot to Sarah Phelps’ BBC adaptation of And Then There Were None and a screen version of Partners in Crime featuring detective duo Tommy and Tuppence. Most recently, a new take on 1944 novel Towards Zero aired on the BBC earlier this year.

Maestro doesn’t air scripted TV dramas, but the use of AI to resurrect Christie as the presenter of its latest writing course means it’s easy to imagine how the technology might be employed on future scripted productions featuring the stars of yesteryear.

But with so much debate across the global industry about how best to apply AI and its increasingly advanced capabilities in the creative arts, it’s easy to understand why BBC Studios and Agatha Christie Limited maintained “incredible care and craft” when developing Writing with Agatha Christie, as well as “great thought and the utmost respect” to all the contributors involved and the underlying IP – Christie herself.

“Agatha Christie was an icon of British storytelling, and to be able to deploy this technology in a way that is ethical and thoughtful to both honour her legacy and bring her genius to a new generation in a fresh and different way is a great thing to be able to do,” says Michael Levine, CEO of BBC Maestro, who notes that the author had often been mentioned as a Maestro from history that users would like to learn from. “But of course we would never even have started on this endeavour without the blessing of James [Prichard], Agatha’s great-grandson, and the Christie estate. They have been deeply involved from the beginning.”

A team of Christie experts led by Dr Mark Alridge was assembled to compile the material from Christie’s own words – in her autobiography, interviews she gave and notes for books – which would serve as the foundations for the lessons. At every single stage, the Christie family saw and signed off on what was being developed.

But rather than use an actor or Christie scholar to lead the course, the decision was made to have Christie herself front the series – despite the fact she died in 1976. Actor Vivien Keene was cast to play Christie on screen, reading the finished script straight to camera on a purpose-built set complete with a replica of the author’s typewriter. AI technology was then used to impose Christie’s likeness and voice onto Keene’s performance.

Prichard, CEO of Agatha Christie Limited, says that from the beginning, “it was imperative to get it right.” And while he was initially sceptical that there was enough material around which to build the lessons, he says the resulting script “has blown my brain.”

“My dad was a big litmus test for this. He knew her better than anyone who’s still alive,” Prichard continues. “At the start of the conversation [with Levine], I was relaxed about it because I had given my dad the power of veto. So I could lead Michael on for as long as I wanted in the knowledge I had this trump up my sleeve,” he jokes. “Dad slightly surprised me by going, ‘No, actually I think that’s really quite interesting.’ From then I was in real trouble.”

Describing it as unlike anything she’d done before, Keene worked on matching the same speaking cadence as Christie, while getting into costume also helped “embody” the character.

“It was all extraordinary,” Keene says. “It started right at the beginning when the casting process went through probably hundreds of actresses, looking at the facial biometrics. So I literally got the job on the shape of my face. That was the initial thing – it had to be able to fit the AI – and then after that I had some speeches to learn, did a self- tape and then we all got into testing the AI.”

One of the biggest challenges was how still Keene had to keep her head while speaking to the camera. “Agatha Christie hadn’t been filmed from the sides very much,” she explains. “Nearly all the film – and there’s very little film, hardly any at all – it’s from the front, and so the AI couldn’t cope with anything from the side. So I had to do it right down the barrel of the gun the whole time, and yet try to make it animated and interesting.”

Keene’s costume and hair were designed to look like Christie, but “my voice isn’t anything like Agatha Christie,” she admits. “I tried to just get the cadence of the time. You listen to her voice and it’s very distinctive, actually. She’s very shy and feisty and she doesn’t really like being interviewed, so I just started to put the voice on, thinking that they weren’t going to use my voice in the final edit, but then they did.”

In post-production, Keene’s face was changed and her voice was amended using a programme called Respeecher. But where no sound recording exists of some of the words and syllables Keene performs, the actor’s voice has been merged with Christie’s. “So it’s a mishmash of me and Agatha. We are one,” Keene says. “But it’s the best job I’ve ever had.”

But why recreate Christie in the first place? Levine says she was the first author he ever read, and that the decision was made partly because the technology is now available to do it.

“That fascinated me because you had someone who was able to take microscopic parts of the facial construct and actually map them precisely to the same in Agatha,” he says. “Vivien’s quite right, there’s a fractional amount of usable content [of Christie], and if you’re going to train AI properly, you need to have as much visual representation in motion as you can. The technology was changing even as we were developing, so this has been two years since I very first sat down with James, and in that two years the technology has got exponentially better to allow us to do much more.”

He continues: “James was very clear from the very first time I met him that if this doesn’t hold muster, particularly with his dad, then we abandon it. By that time, we were already into tens of thousands of pounds [of development], and there was a real risk probably up to the first year that, at any stage, if it didn’t hold muster, we would stop it. That was the arrangement James insisted upon, entirely correctly.

“If I’m honest, all of us involved in the process, not just James, were waiting to see whether it would land properly. When we saw it finally, and we went, ‘Oh my god, that is Agatha Christie,’ that was the moment when we all felt this was a go.”

Keene believes Christie is worthy of the Maestro tag thanks to her analysis and understanding of the human condition. “So in her books, she brings what motivates us. It might be hate or love or revenge or jealousy or poverty or whatever,” she says. “She travelled well and she observed [people] and she had a social conscience, which is a surprise because she was fairly privileged, and people often think those sorts of people are removed from the real world. Yet she wasn’t at all. She understands that, and then she manages to encapsulate all of that in a thrilling story.”

Aspiring authors can now take notes from the most successful novelist in history, while Maestro is proof that with a limited amount of archive footage, familiar faces from the past can now be brought back to life. Looking to the future, the only question is to what extent creatives in film and television might be willing to utilise this technology – and which stars might be resurrected.

tagged in: Agatha Christie Limited, BBC Maestro, BBC Studios, James Prichard, Michael Levine, Vivien Keene