Angela Merkel is now a detective -- in German TV show

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel is now a small-town detective after her retirement but in a popular German TV show which is making its debut in Italy. Miss Merkel reimagines Angela Merkel as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple -- with all her characteristics including het jacket and hair.

Katharina Thalbach played the role in the show which in the German production begins shortly after Merkel retired as chancellor. In the show, Ms Merkel gets bored after retirement and decides to solve crimes in northern Italy. “I was successful as a politician, why can’t I do the same as a detective?” the fictional Miss Merkel says in the trailer for the first episode, titled Death at the Castle.

Based on the bestselling novels by German writer David Safier, the show has a retired Merkel who moved to Uckermark, her home region north-east of Berlin, with her husband and a bodyguard.

Financial Times reported that the tone is light, but there are occasional allusions to Merkel’s time as a senior stateswoman, such as when she sits down to watch a local amateur drama. “Compared to six hours of Peking opera with Xi Jinping, everything else is a piece of cake,” Miss Merkel said.

In an interview last year, FT reported, Thalbach said she had leapt at the chance of playing Germany’s former chancellor. “This mutation of Angela Merkel to amateur sleuth — I found it such a stroke of genius that I said: ‘I have to do it!’, she told the Neue Presse.

“I’m the same age as her, also from the GDR [former East Germany], I also love physics, I also love hotpots. So we’ve got a lot that connects us,” she said. Thalbach admitted she had actually only met Merkel once, just after she became chancellor in 2005 — at the hairdresser.