Sex and football makeover for Agatha Christie mystery

ITV is giving Agatha Christie a Footballers' Wives-style makeover in an attempt to update her for 21st-century audiences.

Viewers used to seeing Christie's genteel detectives Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot will be in for a surprise. An ITV1adaptation of her murder mystery Sparkling Cyanide is set in the world of professional football and will feature its fair share of sex and nudity.

Suzan Harrison, the executive producer, told TV Times: "We thought it would be fun to update Agatha Christie and give her work a contemporary edge. We've given the whole thing a kind of Hello! magazine glamour. In any modern drama there's usually an element of nudity and, without it being gratuitous, people are definitely going to take their clothes off."

In the 1945 novel, the victim, Rosemary Barton, is murdered at a dinner party in a restaurant where her champagne is laced with cyanide. ITV1's update makes her the young wife of a football chairman who dies in a glitzy London club as the team celebrates a victory.

The detective in the novel was Colonel Race, one of Christie's lesser-known sleuths. He is being replaced by a middle-aged couple, played by Oliver Ford Davies and Pauline Collins.