No expense is spared, and the lawn is soon bustling with visitors keen to have their fortune told, to compete in the fancy dress and to try their hand at the coconut shy
And then there is the ultimate challenge: a fiendishly complicated ‘murder hunt’ prepared by the famous mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Zoë Wanamaker).
After being commissioned to stage a fictional murder, her intuition tells her a real one is about to happen.
Convinced that someone is ‘jockeying her along’, she insists on the presence of her old friend Hercule Poirot (David Suchet), who reluctantly agrees to apply his uniquely analytical mind to a crime that, as yet, only exists in Ariadne’s imagination.
Wednesday 30 October at 8pm on ITV