Why on earth did Rylan agree to this hot mess of a show?
If there is a lazier show than Hot Mess Summer (Amazon Prime Video), I’ve yet to find it. The producers have taken the base elements of Love Island and Geordie Shore and all those programmes about Brits behaving badly in cheap holiday destinations. They have thrown eight 20-somethings into a Greek villa and given them booze. The boys talk about “birds” and fighting. The girls wear false eyelashes with the density of those brush attachments you get on vacuum cleaners.
Rylan Clark is the host, and I love Rylan to death but his charisma can’t save this. The premise is that the participants have been lured to Zante under false pretences. They think they’re taking part in a show called “Party Summer”, which will involve getting drunk and getting off with each other for six weeks. On day two, Rylan does the big reveal: actually, they’ll be running a bar, doing everything from serving drinks to cleaning the toilets, and were secretly nominated for the show by friends and family who think they need to shape up a bit.
“I don’t even find this funny,” harrumphs Jay, a “snob” (everyone is given a one-word descriptor) who chooses not to have a job and is bankrolled by his parents. The other contestants are variously listed as a “player”, a “princess” and so on. Amin, learning that he will be required to work, says: “The only thing I want to be working is a girl’s behind.” People like this should be fired into the Sun, not treated to a sunshine holiday.
Depressingly, they all speak to the camera in snappy soundbites – “I’m just a horny beast that needs to be locked up in a cage,” says one girl – because they have been reared on reality shows that do this. It’s a new vernacular. There is a bar manager called Lee, who is a stickler for rules (or pretends to be, for the purposes of this show). This draws a predictable response from the participants:
“I never follow the rules and they’re there to be broken.” “I’m a rulebreaker, I’ll do what I want.” Bring on World War Three. Conscription can’t come soon enough.
The worst thing about Hot Mess Summer is that it’s not hidden away on some obscure digital channel but on Amazon Prime Video, a global streaming platform which should be several thousand per cent classier than this.
Who knew there was a Victorian detective drama on television, so popular that it’s now entering its fourth series? It’s called Miss Scarlet and the Duke, and you probably haven’t heard of it – I certainly hadn’t, until this week – because it’s not on one of the main channels or big streaming services, but on Alibi. Its popularity isn’t in the UK but in the US, where it is shown on PBS Masterpiece and was launched in a cosy Sundaynight double bill with All Creatures
Great and Small. It’s how the Americans like to view us Brits: bodices, bustles, and hardy chaps in tweed who have a calming way with sheep.
Miss Scarlet and the Duke follows the adventures of Eliza Scarlet (Kate Phillips), who has taken over her late father’s private detective business in 19th-century London. She faces various obstacles – the patriarchy! – but is capable and determined. At the start of this series we find her showing a journalist around the bustling new agency she has just acquired. But the “employees” are really actors she has paid to be there, because all of the old staff have left in protest and she doesn’t have a single client.
Meanwhile, the Duke of the title is William “Duke” Wellington (Stuart Martin), her childhood friend and now an inspector at Scotland Yard. The force is expanding its jurisdiction, and he doesn’t have the resources to solve all the crimes piling up at his door. Who could possibly help him, hmm?
A will-they-won’t-they flirtation bubbles under the action. The pair bicker and banter and pretend that there’s no sexual tension between them, although she’s perkily pretty and he’s craggily handsome – plus she’s the only woman in this episode, apart from a middle-aged housekeeper and some sex workers, so his options are limited. The mystery involved a robbery at a brothel – or “elite gentlemen’s club”, as the proprietress would have it. A government minister who was visiting the establishment was shot but he was reluctant to cooperate with the police.
It’s one of those detective shows in which the mystery is wrapped up with satisfying ease by the end of each episode. All the action takes place in dark rooms populated by people in dark clothes, so visually it’s lacklustre, but the tone is pleasingly light and the pacing is lively. There is comedy, in the form of Eliza’s hangdog accountant (Paul Bazely), and Eliza is a peppy presence who lifts the whole thing.