The Yellow Iris (radio play)

The Yellow Iris is a radio play written by Agatha Christie and broadcast on the BBC National Programme on Tuesday 2 November 1937 at 8.00pm. The one-hour program was broadcast again two days later, this time on the BBC Regional Programme at 9.00pm.

The script was based on the short story, Yellow Iris, which had been published in issue 559 of the Strand Magazine in July of the same year. The main part of the story takes place in a London restaurant and the play was unusual in that the producer, Douglas Moodie, interspersed the action with the performances of the cabaret artistes who were supposedly on the bill at the restaurant.

The cabaret artistes were compered by Cyril Fletcher, later famous for his appearances on the television consumer programme That's Life!. The artistes were Hugh French, the singer Janet Lind, "The Three Admirals" vocal group and Inga Anderson.

The lyrics to the songs featured were written by Christopher Hassall while the music was composed by Michael Sayer and arranged by Jack Beaver and played by his orchestra (Beaver is better known as the soundtrack composer to several of Alfred Hitchcock's 1930 films).

Poirot was played by Anthony Holles and The Yellow Iris marked the debut of the character on radio (he had already been portrayed on stage, film and television).

This unusual experiment was not deemed a success by some of the critics. Joyce Grenfell reviewed the play in The Observer's edition of 7 November 1937 when she said, "I had hoped to say such nice things about Agatha Christie's Yellow Iris" but found that Holles was, "the only happy thing in the broadcast". Overall she said that, "The play itself turned out to be a ten-minute sketch padded with cabaret and dance music, and made to spread over forty minutes. When the sketch was playing my interest was sustained. But the sequences were so brief and the intervening music – though good in its proper place – so prolonged that my attention wandered. Much better to have treated the piece as the short sketch it really was."

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