Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reported on my experience of seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a nearby park. Marg reviewed The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson, a book that I also enjoyed.

In September, for the last several years, I’ve celebrated the life and work of Agatha Christie in honor of her birthday, on the 15th. This is the first of three Christie-themed posts.

In 1922, after Agatha Christie published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, but before she was properly famous, she joined her husband on a mission to promote the British Empire Exhibition held in London in 1924. The Exhibition needed this preparation to recruit exhibits that showed off the agriculture, industry, and artistry of the components of the British Empire around the world.

Sir David Suchet, who played Hercule Poirot for 25 years, followed in the footsteps of Agatha Christie’s journey around the world. His adventures were released as a docuseries called Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet.

The first country that the Christies visited was South Africa. I learned about Christie’s visit last year when I read The Man in the Brown Suit, her adventure novel set there. From this documentary, I learned just how much the plot of the book followed the itinerary of her travels.

I complained about the racism in The Man in the Brown Suit in my review. Suchet gets to compare what it was like when Agatha Christie visited and the present. Christie met Cecil Rhodes during her time in southern Africa. Suchet interviewed the founders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement.

The second destination was Australia, starting in Tasmania where Christie and, now Suchet, visited a jam factory and a hydroelectric plant. Both still exist, but with new purposes. Tasmania is currently powered entirely by renewable energy, a process that can be traced back to Christie’s time.

Sir David Suchet found himself in New Zealand for his third stop. That was particularly interesting to me because I visited there in the 1980s. Like him, I saw Wellington (the capital city at the southern end of the North Island) and I took the ferry across to the South Island.

Suchet said it’s considered one of the roughest ferry crossings in the world. I had nothing to compare it to, but I definitely had to spend my time up on deck. When I was sitting on the inside, the horizon moved from the bottom of the window to the top! That was too much for my stomach to handle.

This was a good moment for us to learn that Agatha Christie suffered from seasickness and that she gave that trait to one of her most famous characters — Hercule Poirot who would one day be played by Sir David Suchet.

In episode four, the Christies got a vacation from their tour of the British Empire. They broke their trip across the Pacific Ocean with a stop in Hawaii. Hawaii was not a British colony because it was an American one. Christie engaged in an unusual activity for women in the 1920s — she surfed!

I appreciated that Sir David Suchet visited with indigenous people everywhere he went, making a richer, but sadder, journey than Agatha Christie.

Suchet was interviewed a couple of months ago on ITV about this trip. You can tell from both the interview and the show that he loved this project. For me, the docuseries on BritBox was a lovely way to travel to all of these places.

This is the second documentary about Agatha Christie that was hosted by Sir David Suchet. The first was a more general biography of Agatha Christie’s life: The Mystery of Agatha Christie.