Personal Call - Background

Background

Christie’s official biography states that the play was written after she and her husband, Max Mallowan, returned from their annual summer season at the archaeological dig at Nimrud in 1952. The producer of the play, Ayton Whitaker, found the script to be "first rate" saying that it made, "full use of radio techniques and possibilities." It appears that Christie either did not specify Newton Abbot as one of the locales in the play or was happy for it to be changed, saying, "Any station will do. Newton Abbot telephone boxes and station geography would have to be vetted, of course."

In 1960, the BBC remade the play, this time produced by David H. Godfrey, and it was again transmitted on the Light Programme, this time at 9.30pm on Tuesday, November 29. No cast members from the 1954 production took part in this later version which was reviewed by Frederick Laws in The Listener who said it, "worked as neatly as those alarm clocks which also serve you with a cup of tea. It also did a bit of dodgy problem-solving solving of the sort psychologists allege that the mind does in sleep. And it only cheated, supernaturally, a little bit. It seemed, you see, as though a ghost was using the telephone service. Confident that neither the PMG (Postmaster General), the powers above, nor Miss Christie would permit this, one waited, and the disclosure was suitably remarkable." He concluded, "The detective story, against all probability, seems to be coming back to radio."

The play has never been commercially published and received its first production since 1960 as part of the Agatha Christie Theatre Festival in 2001 at the Palace Theatre, Westcliff-on-Sea and has occasionally been performed since as a special event. The play was included in Murder on Air, a special production from April 22 to May 3, 2008 by the Agatha Christie Theatre Company of three of Christie's radio plays (the other two being The Yellow Iris and Butter In a Lordly Dish) at the Theatre Royal, Windsor.