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 reviewed two different TV adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder, the final Miss Marple story that she published.

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie was published in June 1944. Readers would have been absorbing news of D-Day while reading the first edition of this book.

The novel has been adapted for film and TV several times in both French and English. In 2025, BBC One aired this three-episode series based on the novel. It is currently streaming on BritBox.

I watched Towards Zero to see my new favorite British actor, Anjana Vasan (Wicked Little Letters, We Are Lady Parts). Her part is small but she plays a crucial role in bringing a suspect from another continent to the place he would need to be to commit the crime.

Many people might be more interested in the performance of Anjelica Huston who plays an archetypal role in British stories that feature class. Camilla, Lady Tressilian, is the elderly invalid who manages to control every person in the household from her bedroom.

Towards Zero needed two major film locations.

Gulf’s Point is a country house with a view of the sea. It was played by Neston Park in Wiltshire, built in 1790 by John Fuller. Neston Park still remains in the Fuller family who are best known as the producers of Fuller’s London Pride cask ale. The house is not open to the public, but is available as a film location. An annual music festival was hosted on the grounds in July 2026 and is expected to continue at that location. Several public paths cross the grounds as does part of the ancient Roman road from London to Bath.

Neston Park by Stephen Richards, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Easterhead Hotel is a nearby entertainment spot, an annoyance to Lady Tressilian. It is played by Burgh Island Hotel, a grand hotel built in the Art Deco style on a tidal island in Devon. Although Burgh Island Hotel is not known to be an inspiration for Towards Zero, Agatha Christie was familiar with it and used it as a model for locations in And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun, a Hercule Poirot mystery. The Burgh Island Hotel is a popular film location and has appeared before in television adaptations of Christie novels. If you’re willing to pay $600 and up per night, you can book a stay in Agatha’s Beach House on the grounds of The Burgh Island Hotel.

The Burgh Island Hotel in 2009 by Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link