Mad for Midsomer? Then you’ll love this skulduggery in Stratford
YOU can’t imagine Cagney and Lacey taking charge of The Generation Game, or Inspector Morse spinning the wheel on The Price Is Right.
But there’s a growing trend for TV detectives to moonlight as gameshow presenters. Mark Williams, star of Father Brown, also hosts The Link. Bradley Walsh, who was DS Ronnie Brooks in Law And Order: UK, asks the questions on both The Chase and Cash Trapped.
Now Mark Benton, whose last job on afternoon telly was as quizmaster on The Edge, is playing a sleuth in Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators ( BBC1). He’ll do fine, as long as he doesn’t give a new car or a washing machine to suspects who answer all his questions correctly. Old habits die hard.
This lightweight murder mystery is set in Stratford-upon-Avon, and never lets us forget it. Down-atheel private eye Frank Hathaway’s office is in a half-timbered, wattleand-daub building. There’s an outof-work actor behind the reception desk in blouson and striped pantaloons, and a lute under his arm, like an extra from Wolf Hall.
The first killing happened at a wedding where everyone wore Tudor costume, including a vicar decked out all in red like Cardinal Wolsey. Nobody bothered to explain this away: the story is set in Stratford, after all. They all dress like that.
Jo Joyner plays Lu Shakespeare, a hairdresser who decides she’d rather be a detective after her hubby is bumped off with a pair of stylist’s scissors within minutes of their marriage vows.
The duo’s chief rival is a police inspector called, naturally, Marlowe — as in Kit Marlowe, the playwright who enjoyed more fame in his lifetime than Will Shakespeare.
Marlowe works for Arden CID — so that’s the Bard’s mother (Mary Arden) and his wife (Anne Hathaway) all referenced before the first corpse is cold.
Luckily, the dialogue is much less laboured. A detective from Panama accepted Frank’s offer of a pint of bitter in the Mucky Mallard, pulled a face and said: ‘It tastes like your weather.’
There’s plenty of slapstick, too: Benton does it well, stumbling over his own feet and mugging madly when he doesn’t have a line. Fans of Midsomer Murders will settle in straight away and, with so many grim, grinding crime dramas clogging up the evening schedules, it’s worth setting the recorder for this one.
Only the most ardent fans of baseball will have relished-Electric Dreams ( C4), which returned with a story of an allAmerican boy whose father loved the sport as much as he did. The two of them played baseball, talked baseball, even woke each other up to test their knowledge of baseball stats.
That went on interminably, before Dad saw some strange lights in the sky and turned into an alien. His son, as any American boy would, responded by riding round the neighbourhood on his bike with three school friends, and then bashing his parent over the head with a baseball bat, before reaching for a flame-thrower.
This series has been a disappointment. All ten episodes are based on short stories from the Fifties by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick, creative inspiration for Blade Runner.
But many of these tales have dated badly. This one felt like a muddle of The Day Of The Triffids, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Stranger Things.
Philip K. Dick’s best stories make readers question the sanity of their characters. This just made me glad we don’t have baseball in Britain.