Five witnesses remember the same afternoon. The same dead man. The same woman condemned for his murder.
And yet they remember five different stories.
In this episode of The Saturday Night Theatre Companion, Chesterton Radio returns to Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs and the superb 1994 BBC Radio 4 Saturday Night Theatre production starring John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot.
This is one of Christie’s most unusual mysteries. Sixteen years after the crime, there is no scene left to investigate and almost no physical evidence to examine. Poirot must solve the case by doing something deceptively simple:
He listens.
We explore memory and prejudice, the five competing versions of the past, John Moffatt’s beautifully controlled Poirot, and why radio may be an especially powerful medium for a mystery in which voices—and what lies behind them—matter so much.
And beneath the detective story lies a larger question: Can objective truth survive when every person remembers it differently?
🎧 HEAR THE ORIGINAL BROADCAST
We encourage you to hear the complete BBC production discussed in this episode. The surviving recording is available at the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/agatha-christie-five-little-pigs
Then come back and join us for the conversation.
The Saturday Night Theatre Companion is a Chesterton Radio series rediscovering remarkable productions from the BBC’s legendary Saturday Night Theatre through conversation, history, criticism, and appreciation.
The original broadcast is the play. Chesterton Radio opens a door into it.
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