Finding a winning formula is the holy grail for TV producers. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
NOT MUCH goes on in Shipton Abbott, the fictional Devon fishing village where DI Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall) and his colleagues spend as much time buying ice creams in the harbour as they do solving crimes. Since Humphrey packed up the contents of his Saint Marie beach hut, followed his f iancée Martha (Sally Bretton) back to the UK and joined the local constabulary, he’s been more likely to be caught in a hot-air balloon hanging from a tree than in pursuit of a drug ring.
When crime does come calling, it’s invariably of a gentler variety than the many stabbings we’ve seen in Saint Marie, or the comic brutality closer to home in Midsomer Murders. Why, then, has this most conventional crime drama drawn audiences of six million upwards since its debut a year ago?
Those ice creams have a lot to do with it. Just as Midsomer’s makers pioneered the trick of tracking down all the best Farrow & Ball exteriors and creeping ivy from Bristol to Basingstoke and presenting the results as just three Cotswold villages, so Beyond Paradise producers cherry-pick the most scenic locations from all over Devon and Cornwall, serving up a bucolic feast of bobbing boats, market stalls, clotted-cream fudge and lots and lots of cobbles.
Anybody who lives in south-west England or has watched documentaries by the likes of Simon Reeve will know that, in truth, the region faces more economic and social challenges than Beyond Paradise would have us believe. But like Doc Martin and Midsomer Murders before it, BP offers us a dappled slice of our sceptred isle as we would wish it to be. Shipton Abbott – does that really not exist? It sounds as if it should.
Each episode brings a deceptively simple mixture of the comfortingly familiar and the quirky. There’s textbook crime drama, with a quiet police-station house, where four fulltime staff seemingly play cards until called upon to solve a heinous crime, all with regional HQ breathing down their necks.
Transgressors are caught, justice served and storylines tied up with a neat bow in time for a drink back on the boat and a chat with Selwyn the duck instead of DiP’s Harry the lizard – a neat touch.
But we also get novelty – whodunnits explained by the detectives stepping back in time, a creative touch all the more eye-catching in a show so proudly conventional in other aspects.
Away from the cops, there’s plenty of life – Martha’s battles with her mother Anne (played by Barbara Flynn) could have their own show, and my favourite scenes are those where Humphrey faces h
