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No 3,213

Hercule Poirot: David Suchet's bottom-up approach to the part

Suchet clasped a coin between his buttock cheeks to perfect Poirot's 'rapid, mincing gait', the actor has revealed, as he is about to appear in his final ITV adaptation of the Agatha Christie murder mysteries
David Suchet as Poirot
David Suchet as Poirot: the actor has played Poirot, Agatha Christie’s punctilious detective, for 24 years. Photograph: ITV

Name: Hercule Poirot.

Age: Ageless.

Occupation: Former police officer turned private detective; peerless solver of mysterious murders.

Appearance: Short, mustachioed, fastidious; walks like someone with a coin up his arse.

He looks like the actor David Suchet to me. Fine: David Suchet with a coin up his arse.

I suppose so, figuratively speaking. No, literally. Suchet, who has played the cerebral little Belgian for 24 years, used a strategically placed coin to perfect Poirot's "rapid, mincing gait."

What denomination? What difference does it make?

It's just that I used to know a guy who worked in A&E, and he had some crazy stories. Apparently one time somebody turned up with an entire … Let me stop you there. Suchet merely clasped the coin between his buttock cheeks, a trick he says he borrowed from Laurence Olivier.

Is he still doing it? No. He has long since learned to clench his buttocks to loose-change-carrying tautness automatically, transforming himself into Agatha Christie's punctillious detective in the process.

Long may he continue. Sadly, he's about to appear in his final ITV adaptation, of Agatha Christie's 1975 novel Curtain, the last of 33 books and more than 50 short stories featuring Poirot.

Wow. She must have really liked him. On the contrary. She thought him a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep". The public loved him, so she carried on, but she was definitely among the haters.

Agatha Christie Agatha Christie: an early user of the term 'the haters'. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

The haters? How she would detest such slang. Actually, she used the expression herself, in her autobiography: "The minority of what I call 'the haters' is quite small but, like all minorities, it makes itself felt far more than the majority does."

True dat. Stop it.

So how does it all end? Does he retire? Or get sued? He dies: SPOILER ALERT.

You're supposed to say "spoiler alert" first. Oh. Sorry.

Do say: "Au revoir, M. Poirot! We'll miss you, you fussy, insufferable foreign twerp."

Don't say: "It's on the house, Mr Suchet. Your money's no good here."

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