agatha christie – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Murder Death Kill

Mar 8, 2026MattLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

What does our reading, and especially the way what we read changes over time, say about us? In this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, that’s exactly what Melanie writes about. And (thankfully (ed.)) she brings up Murderbot in the process, so here’s a nice little trailer for the Apple TV adaptation.

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A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #102: Three Christies

Mar 7, 2026Mar 7, 2026The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

It’s been hinted at once or twice on A Damn Fine Cup of Culture: we do like a good whodunnit, and we especially like a good cosy – or sometimes less cosy – crime. So it’s high time we assemble all the suspects in the drawing room and pay our respects to the Queen of Crime: Agatha Christie. In keeping with our semi-regular series of episodes on noteworthy trios, our chief investigators Alan, Sam and Julie have rounded up three adaptations of Christie’s stories for the screen: Murder She Said (1961), starring the formidable Margaret Rutherford; Evil Under the Sun (1982), which not only features Peter Ustinov as Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, but a delightful cast that includes Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith; and the episode “Five Little Pigs” (2003) from ITV’s long-running Agatha Christie’s Poirot, in which David Suchet dons Poirot’s iconic moustache. Why do these stories have lasting appeal? How do Christie’s plots survive the adaptation into a different medium? And why exactly do they let Kenneth Branagh do those ghastly modern adaptations? (Now that is the real crime.)

P.S.: For more on iconic trios, make sure to check out these past episodes:

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #264: Agatha Christie’s Endless Night

Dec 12, 2025Feb 20, 2026samlinderLeave a comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Waves crash against anonymous moonlit rocks while the credits promise an eclectic mix of British and international talent: it’s Hayley Mills and Hywell Bennet (fresh off 1968‘s Twisted Nerve), Swedish actor/director Per Oscarsson (from 1966’s Hunger) and fellow countrywoman Britt Ekland (between her Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart relationships and soon to be Bond Girl). There’s eternal Miss Moneypenny Lois Maxwell and All About Eve‘s George Sanders, and it’s directed by Sidney Gilliat (author/producer of Hitchcock’s early British films) and, unmistakeably, scored by Bernard Herrmann – its ondulating, dramatic main theme reminiscent of the perturbing romanticism of Vertigo and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Have I gone to cinematic heaven? How could I have missed a film like this one, the 1972 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s late novel Endless Night?!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: You know how to whistle, don’t you?

Nov 3, 2024MattLeave a comment

We all love a good Agatha Christie yarn here at A Damn Fine Cup – but they’re not all cosy and twee. There’s plenty of Christie beyond Death on the Nile and Murder, She Said, and in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Matt writes about the darker sides of cosy crime.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #206: Cosy? Dark? Why not both?

Nov 1, 2024Nov 8, 2024Matt3 Comments

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Agatha Christie, her stories and her characters. Somehow, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot have always been around, much like modern mythology. Settings such as the manor house, scenes where a sleuth has assembled all the suspects and lays out all the clues, feckless local law enforcement: I knew all of these – without ever having read a single one of Christie’s novels or short stories or having seen any of the numerous adaptations. Again, I was aware of Margaret Rutherford in black-and-white movies and of Peter Ustinov in glamorous locales, sporting a silly moustache and a sillier accent. But the actual thing passed me by for the longest time.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #205: Witness for the Prosecution

Oct 25, 2024Nov 1, 2024Julie3 Comments

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #204: The Best of Maggie Smith in two Christies

Oct 18, 2024Oct 30, 2024samlinder5 Comments

The passing of Dame Maggie Smith in late September has caused an outpouring of appreciation and love by film critics, movie buffs and the stage aficionados alike. Rarely has there been in the loss of an actress such a display of a wide-ranging fan base, from the Harry Potter kids to the Downton Abbey addicts and from silver-age Hollywood connoisseurs to the West End audiences and independent cinemagoers, everybody seems to have harboured a deep respect and admiration for her unique talent. Channels and feeds were crammed full of shorts and reels for days, with no real end in sight.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #125: The Mirror Crack’d

Apr 14, 2023Feb 28, 2026Julie3 Comments

“After that, I didn’t care if I was ever again anyone’s favourite actress.” ~ Gene Tierney (Self-Portrait, 1979)

Caution: here be spoilers for the novel The Mirror Crack’d from side to side, and its adaptations.

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A Damn Fine Espresso: April 2022

Apr 30, 2022Jul 16, 2022The Barista Collective1 Comment

We’ve now been doing monthly podcasts for almost five years at A Damn Fine Cup of Culture – and today we’re starting A Damn Fine Espresso: shorter, more impromptu small doses of all the cultury goodness you’ve come to expect from us! To launch the new smaller cups of culture, join Julie and Sam as they have a chat about what they’ve checked out recently. From Parisian getaways and serendipitous record stores to bad moustaches, worse CGI and films that can’t decide what they want to be…

Starting with this episode, you can get your monthly espresso where you get all of your Damn Fine goodness – so indulge in a tiny cup of our pop culture musings and let us know what you think!

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: The moustaches have it

Apr 3, 2022Apr 3, 2022MattLeave a comment

Is there a correct version of Hercule Poirot? And, if so – who is it? If you haven’t already done so, make sure to check out Alan’s Six Damn Fine Degrees post on just this question!