Without collaboration and the support of producers and talented artists, though, technology is just that – technology. David was very helpful during the filming. Brian Eastman, the producer, and David Suchet, the actor who played Poirot – brilliantly, I might add – both agreed and gave me the green light. Making Poirot himself a bit of a puzzle seemed to describe the man and what he does. I liked the idea of the fractured, multifaceted Cubist style because it reminded me of a puzzle and this is of course what Poirot does – he solves puzzles. But I wasn't able to quite achieve that look, partly due to budget and partly to not having a clue! I had to find another way, so it became Art Deco–Cubism. I wanted to make it all look exactly like architectural photography from that time. I had some old architectural magazines with all those wonderful buildings of the ’20s and ’30s, with architectural plans, and that was my original inspiration. The late Mike Oxley – or “OXO” as we called him – was the production designer and we put our heads together and found we were both thinking about Art Deco as a stylistic theme. The idea for the titles was a portrait of a man and his time. It was my job to set the tone for the show. Following its initial launch in 1981, it revolutionised the production of television graphics. *The Quantel Paintbox was a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. However, they were the first titles that I conceived and designed on a Quantel Paintbox* and then put together on the system that became Animo. PG: The Poirot titles were the last ones I made for London Weekend Television, in 1988. Title Designer PAT GAVIN revisits his work on the opening titles and discusses their creation. Title Designer Pat Gavin puts order and method (and his little grey cells) to work for ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot. (In a fleeting reference to Poirot’s most famous case, Murder on the Orient Express, the smirking sleuth is glimpsed aboard the passing train that spells out his name.) Neat, tidy, and streamlined, the sequence evokes the ideals of the age and expose the fastidiously styled (and notoriously detail oriented) Poirot as very much a product of the era. The showering shapes arrange themselves, replacing Poirot with signs of his interbellum times: biplanes and speeding locomotives – Art Deco iconography in flight.
As the book folds open, the formerly silhouetted Poirot emerges from the page, the bow-tied Belgian smiling from behind a puzzling cascade of geometry.
#Agatha christie poirot crack
A plumb-bob and the moon framed in white? What does it mean? The distinctive profile (and moustache) of Agatha Christie’s famed detective Hercule Poirot is soon added to the mix, helping viewers to crack the case of this sparsely adorned dust jacket. A blue fog dances underneath a curious collection of shapes.