Latest Poirot - shoot the colourist!
 

I'm a bit of a Poirot fan (have the boxed DVD set) and was eagerly awaiting "Appointment with Death," the latest offering from David Suchet on ITV on Christmas day.

The cast were up to the usual high standard, but I found the colouration intrusive and inappropriate with a kind of OTT super-vivid effect at times (market place exteriors) and nearly blown whites and excessive shadows throughout. I consider that some shots (which surely would have been exposed correctly during production) were ruined and made to look like the work of an amateur cameraman. Any interior shot with an exterior view was made to look simultaneously underexposed on the interior and overexposed on the exterior portion. I couldn't see any detail at all on either extreme.

I'm not all that knowledgeable on the mystic arts of the postproduction colourist, but I would suggest that the general rule is that it is another of these areas of cinema/tv where if it's well done the viewers should not be aware of it at all. The rest of the series was much more subtle - in fact I'd never really noticed the work of a colourist on the DVD boxed set. That's how it should be.

Hope I haven't personally insulted someone on this list who did this gig.

Haven't seen that episode yet, we get Poirot episodes much later in the US. Alan Almond and Cinders Forshaw have DP'd a few Poirot's that turned out nice. Almond did a lot of "Foyle's War" and I believe both Almond and Forshaw worked on one of my favorites, "Jericho", a short-lived series about a detective in the 50's. Some of my favorite stuff; Cinder's work on the episode that takes place in London during a 'black fog' warning is a 'desert island' video for me.