Murder She Wrote super-fan brings the series to the stage

A fun solve-along celebration of TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher heads to the Hawth, Crawley on July 17 and 18 and the Komedia Brighton on October 21.

Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote comes from super-fan Tim Benzie who admits he is obsessed with the original series which starred Angela Lansbury.

The night sees him turn a 47-minute episode into a two-hour fully-participatory theatre show including interval, with everyone getting the chance to work out whodunnit.

You get the episode but you also get games, prizes and audience participation, with special permission from NBC Universal Television. The show has played to sell-out audiences across the UK, Ireland, the USA and Australia, as well as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023-2025, Adelaide Fringe 2025 and the Murder, She Wrote Festival 2025 (California).

“I loved the show when I was a teenager,” Tim explains. “Marple and Poirot had not started but I'd actually read all the Agatha Christies before I was 14 and this show on TV really was my cup of tea.

“And then I was in a pub in 2018 and the name Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote just came to me. It just popped into my head. It took me a while to get the right people to ask for the permission and then I just put it on in a pub as a lark, and the audience went nuts.”

Two years ago Tim quit his day job and is now doing around 160 shows a year. So far, since 2018, he has done 48 different episodes but there are plenty more to go out of a total of 264. When he has done a venue before and returns for a second or third or fourth time, Tim changes the episode: “I reckon I have probably got about ten live episodes on the go at any one time.

The star of it all is Jessica Fletcher: “The producers of the series were wanting to do a Miss Marple series but couldn't so they made-up Jessica Fletcher. She was intended to be a cross between Agatha Christie herself and Miss Marple but when they started to do the show they didn't want her to be dowdy. They wanted her to be a physically fit older woman and it just took off from there but it is totally in the style of Agatha Christie.”

Tim is an award-winning playwright and co-writer of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern’s 2017-2024 pantos, including the Offie (Off West End) Award-winning Tossed in 2023. He is the co-producer of the camp club night PopHorror.