Murders, boozing, an affair? It shouldn’t happen to a vicar!
The Reverend Sidney Chambers is cut out to be a vicar in the same way Stevie Wonder was born to be a cricket umpire and 6 ft 5 in John Cleese ought to have been a jockey.
James Norton’s brooding, chiseljawed cleric in Grantchester (ITV) has no business in a dog collar.
he’s bored to tears by his own Sunday sermons. Whisky goes down his neck like weak tea and, after years of flirting with a married woman, he’s sleeping with her.
So, when Sidney lost his temper with the Archdeacon and flung down his cassock on the altar steps, he was waking up to what has been staringly obvious for ages: almost any job would suit him better than being a clergyman.
how about working in a kipper factory? he smokes enough.
What he should do, of course, is set up a private detective agency.
The police would never let him join their ranks: he’s upset too many of the top brass by solving their crimes. But a desk in a blackand-white office, behind a rippled glass door, with an overflowing ashtray and a chipped crystal tumbler — that’s his natural habitat.
Sidney wasn’t the only character questioning his destiny. The whole cast reached simultaneous crises, as their lives fell apart in a synchronised display of disasters. Repressed curate Leonard (Al Weaver) tried to slash his wrists, after telling his fiancee he thought sex was ‘disgusting’.
Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Geordie (Robson Green) saw his marriage disintegrating — it wasn’t clever to buy a diamond necklace for his mistress and leave the receipt in his sock drawer.
even tight-laced Mrs Maguire (Tessa Peake- Jones) was reeling, after her long-lost husband turned up to steal her life savings.
This has been Grantchester’s best season. The plots are taut, the period atmosphere absorbing.
In theory, the show sounds like an ecclesiastical version of James herriot’s nostalgic world — It Shouldn’t happen To A Vicar.
In a long-ago english village, a group of eccentric men have mad adventures and rackety love lives, while the housekeeper keeps them fed. But the show is much darker than All Creatures Great And Small, and not just because of the weekly murders.
We’ve been watching the tensions increase to breaking point. And now, everyone has snapped. It’s hard to see how Grantchester can continue as it has, with every life so changed.
The Island (C4), on the other hand, could go on for ever. As long as presenter Bear Grylls doesn’t tire of smugly explaining what the castaways are doing wrong, this survival show will run and run. All Bear needs is a maniac with some bongos to supply the soundtrack and a few miniature caiman crocodiles for the islanders to slaughter.
Killing a croc is an obligatory part of each series. It’s supposed to epitomise the moment when these modern humans rediscover their primitive hunter instincts.
however, this year’s lot have been so incompetent, they could barely ambush coconuts. The production crew’s medics were flying in almost daily to patch them up.
So it may not have been entirely a coincidence that, when the hungry campers went to check their crab traps on the final day, they found a semi- conscious caiman just waiting to be killed.
This animal was so groggy it couldn’t move, even when the hapless hunters tickled its nose with a lasso.
Of course, I’m not suggesting it had been drugged insensible and dumped there by Bear, to be found, killed and eaten.
More likely, it had been out boozing with Sidney Chambers the night before. Cause of death: monster hangover.