Death In Paradise (BBC 1)
Let’s make this clear, I’ve got nothing against Swindon. It’s a fine town, well placed on the M4, and you can be in Reading or Slough in no time. It gave us XTC, Diana Dors and Gilbert O’Sullivan.
But it isn’t paradise.
So the opening few minutes of Death In Paradise, set in a prefab unit on a Swindon industrial estate, lacked the Caribbean sparkle we demand from the show.
First, we attended an office meeting, with flickering ceiling lights instead of brilliant sunshine, and the only sound of lapping waves coming from a water cooler in the corner.
And when former commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington) turned up to investigate a murder, he was wearing an overcoat and scarf in place of his usual bemedalled police uniform.
No doubt there’s an audience for a light-hearted crime serial called Death In Swindon. I’m just not sure it’s a very large one.
So it was a relief when a body turned up, floating in a pool 5,000 miles away on the isle of Saint Marie. Better still, this pool belonged to the villa where four execs from that Swindon office were holidaying. And none of them had heard a gunshot.
The more impossible the killings, the more delightful this show is. And this 90-minute special served up a real puzzler… because while the corpse was in the Caribbean, the murder weapon was in Wiltshire.
This 90-minute special of Death in Paradise served up a real puzzler… because while the corpse was in the Caribbean, the murder weapon was in Wiltshire
Death in paradise, culprit just outside Cotswolds.
Better still, the crime was solved simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic, by Selywn in the UK and Inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet) in the West Indies.
Seasoned sleuths might have guessed, as soon as the office receptionist pulled off her winter woolly bobble hat to reveal herself as Josie Lawrence, that she’d be the killer.
There’s a convention that the best-known guest star gets to pull the trigger, and Ms Lawrence has been a telly treasure ever since Whose Line Is It Anyway? in the Eighties. The fact that her character, lonely Marjorie, was the one member of staff who didn’t join the office jolly to Saint Marie simply made the solution even more satisfyingly improbable.
DI Wilson, latest in a long line of neurotic British coppers who gradually learn serenity in the sun, has still to win me over. He lacks the self-deprecation of DI Parker (Ralf Little) or the distracted good humour of DI Mooney (Ardal O’Hanlon).
His self-obsessed melancholy went too far, when he ditched his duties as narrator at a nativity service and stomped out of church to take a call that wasn’t nearly as urgent as he’d hoped.
But Officer Seb Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah) took over with a genuinely joyful splash of yuletide spirit, before setting up the episode’s best joke — a song-and-dance TikTok appeal for a missing person.
Plus, Commissioner Patterson got his job back. Now that’s a proper Christmas treat.
