Gadzooks! A crime show so twee it makes Miss Marple look gritty
Midsomer murders a bit too realistic for you? miss marple a shade more urban and gritty than you can stomach? daytime telly has the answer . . .
Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators (BBC1) is easily the most improbable, twee, stylised crime show on TV. it makes death in Paradise look like a grisly documentary.
if you enjoy the ritual of murder and mystery in a rural english setting, it’s thoroughly amusing — with smart quips and imaginative plots delivered by a likeable cast.
Now in its second series, running every afternoon this week and next, this tale of mismatched private detectives in stratford-upon-Avon is guaranteed to leave the most sensitive feathers unruffled.
The latest adventure, featuring a feud between fantasy game-players in medieval costumes, didn’t even involve a murder . . . just a couple of flesh wounds from a crossbow.
mark Benton and Jo Joyner play sleuths Frank Hathaway and Lu shakespeare, working out of a halftimbered office around the corner from the Bard’s birthplace. most of their clients wear doublet and hose. After all, this is stratford — where a man is not properly dressed without his codpiece.
To solve the case, and discover whether the ‘Queen of engelworld’ was having an affair with the ‘duke of Yorcastria’, Frank had to disguise himself as davey the ogre, complete with a set of shrek’s false teeth.
it’s all too silly for a monty Python sketch, never mind a detective serial. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by the misery and sadism in Baptiste, Luther and a catalogue of other bleak dramas, this little show might supply the antidote.
i won’t be watching though. There’s something about shakespeare And Hathaway i simply cannot bear.
it’s the cuts between scenes. every time the action switches to another place, the picture does an old-fashioned roll or side-shift. one frame pushes the other offscreen, like the switch from one slide to the next in a Kodak film projector.
The effect was popular in the seventies, on American shows such as The rockford Files and The dukes of Hazzard. Classic it may be, but i also find it horribly irritating — the TV equivalent of nails on a blackboard.
This show is already stuffed with shakespearean names and quotes. one of the characters has a pair of spectacles with a built-in spy camera. it couldn’t be more selfconsciously playful if you gave it a puppy and a toilet roll. Cheesy editing techniques are just a whimsy too far.
some of the zooms and jumpcuts on Inside The Factory (BBC2) might be a bit annoying, too, but that’s all right because this show is fronted by Gregg Wallace, a man beside whom all other irritations melt into insignificance.
This time, he and co-presenter Cherry Healey were emptying sackloads of statistics over us while they discovered how Birds eye makes frozen potato waffles — those portcullises of fried mash that are ‘waffly versatile’.
right at the start, Cherry made an alarming claim. she said we Brits eat 18 million kilos of potatoes every day.
That sounds a meaningless number, like most of the other statistics in this type of conveyor-belt telly. But there’s only about 66 million people in the UK.
if Cherry is right, we all eat more than half a pound of spuds every day. That’s a lot of chips.
maybe she’s right. But if this statistic was just a load of King edwards, could other numbers be wrong? did the potato harvester dig up 130,000 tubers an hour? do taties really contain three times as much vitamin C as carrots? Can we believe a single word of it?