In AGATHA'S footsteps

SIR DAVID SUCHET on a special adventure celebrating the crime writer's 1922 grand tour

- CAREN CLARK

TRAVELS WITH AGATHA CHRISTIE & SIR DAVID SUCHET NEW WEDNESDAY, 9PM, MORE4 TRAVELOGUE

Sir David Suchet cannot wait to show TV Times a souvenir from his new More4 docuseries, in which he re-creates a globe-trotting expedition undertaken by Agatha Christie.

Meeting us in a London office on an April afternoon for an exclusive chat about Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet, the always-charming actor - who played the Queen of Crime's dapper Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot on ITV from 1989 to 2013 - proudly lets us hold a stunning greenstone necklace, which a group of Maoris gifted him on the New Zealand leg of his epic trip.

"The journey was an eye-opener,' he smiles. 'And being given the necklace, I was overcome. It's a spiritual object, and they told me to wear it as often as I could, so that it absorbs part of me.'

As well as New Zealand, the five-part travelogue sees David head to locations in Southern Africa, Australia, Hawaii and Canada that Agatha, then 31, visited when she accompanied her first husband, Archie Christie, on a 1922 mission to promote the 1924 British Empire Exhibition. And he learns about the lasting impact the excursion had on the novelist's life and career.