The odd couple: TV’s new crime-fighting duo. 22

A feisty Victorian lady and her Scotland Yard pal make for unlikely but effective crime fighters in Miss Scarlet And The Duke.

If it’s a bit of nostalgia and escapism you are after, then how about a cocktail of sleuthing and romance on the streets of Victorian London?

Miss Scarlet And The Duke,a sumptuous-looking six-part drama, focuses on Eliza Scarlet who ends up without money and needing income after her widowed father dies.

At a time when marriage is the main source of financial security, and without any such prospect on the horizon, headstrong Eliza is determined to find another way and boldly decides to take over her father’s private-detective agency.

But a 19th-century lady doing such a job is almost unthinkable to society and so she turns to her childhood friend, William ‘The Duke’ Wellington, now a Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard.

If she can help him, and also impress him, might they be able to form a crime-fighting partnership?

Above: Kate Phillips (Eliza) and Stuart Martin (William)

“What’s so brilliant about Eliza is that she gives this appearance of being a very refined Victorian lady and, to some extent, she is that, but she’s as scrappy and feisty as any woman today and I totally love her for that,” says Kate Phillips (Peaky Blinders) who plays her.

“She’s resilient and strong spirited and she’s making her way in a world where the odds are stacked against her. She has no family to guide her and Wellington is really the only person who can offer her support.

“But he doesn’t think she should be a detective. He thinks it’s dangerous for her and it’s no job for a woman and that infuriates her. She considers him to be a good detective and respects him, but she thinks that he’s lazy and wants to close cases really quickly.

“What’s great about her is that

she kind of whips him into shape and that’s the kind of tussle they have throughout the series, where she’s trying to prove to herself, and to him, that she’s capable.”

Wellington is prone to drinking, gambling and womanising and, having been mentored by Eliza’s father, Henry, in crime solving, he feels he owes it to him to keep his daughter from harm.

To complicate matters, this ‘fatherly’ concern co-exists with a sexual tension between them which they are doing their best to ignore.

“The Duke is a man of his time,” says Stuart Martin, who plays him. “He’s a bit of a rogue who drinks and gambles and likes the company of ladies but he’s also at the forefront of the relatively new Scotland Yard. He’s a very good detective but under pressure from the number of cases that come in.

“It takes time for him to accept Eliza but he can’t deny the fact that she’s got an incredible mind and, whereas he sometimes goes for a solution that just looks right to him, she has a different way of looking at cases and often proves him wrong.

“Theirs is a complicated relationship and that is heightened in the Victorian era because it was a time of protocol and customs about how you are with the opposite sex.

“People are a lot more tactile now, but back then there was no contact and people were reserved in saying what they really thought.

“Whenever Eliza and Wellington let their guard down and there seems to be a romantic moment between them, it is suddenly brought back up again. Also, they are both very opinionated characters and they bicker a lot, which is where much of the drama and comedy is.” The idea for the show had been kicking around in the head of the show’s creator and executive producer, Rachael New, for a few years before it was commissioned. “I am a costume-drama junkie really,” says New, who has written for such series as The Mallorca Files and Grantchester. “I was doing a lot of detective shows and I had just come off New Tricks. I had been thinking for a while about a female Sherlock Holmes. The idea was cemented when my niece asked me to read her dissertation for her history degree about women in 19th-century asylums. I was shocked by how few rights they had and that they could be thrown into an asylum for all sorts of trumped-up charges... “Often they were going through what today would be premenstrual tension or postnatal depression or the menopause. But the Victorians saw this as a sickness of the mind. And I thought, what a great time to put a progressive, ambitious woman at the centre of things, who wanted to pay her own bills and be financially independent and who wouldn’t toe the line. So that is the engine of the show – this woman surviving in a man’s world.” Miss Scarlet And The Duke

streams on Lightbox.