Death by Paradise

The BBC's new fish out of water drama is called Death in Paradise. Like all new series, when I sit down to watch I really, really, really want to love it it. I do. Honest. But...ten minutes in and in our house it was being referred to as Slow Death in Paradise.

Ben Miller is the dark suited New Scotland Yard cop sent to the Caribbean to solve the murder of another British cop. It's a 'locked room' puzzle, the sort usually left to Jonathan Creek to unravel.
But all is not well on the Paradise Island which, since watching the show, we've been calling St Cliche. It really is depressing when something new hits the airwaves with a first episode so weighed down by the well worn.

Our hero, the fish out of water detective, is an asshole, or at least anal - both. No sooner has he landed then he's on the phone to his neighbour asking him to put out the bins. His luggage hasn't arrived and he had no idea that it would be hot in the Caribbean(what?), hence the charcoal-grey suit and lack of sunglasses. Hang on, a Scotland Yard detective who is so stupid he doesn't know that it's hot in the Caribbean? The sound you just heard was my head exploding. There's a goat in the lock-up at the police station, the island force has only one car and the police uniforms are being inhabited by comedy cops.
I don't mind that Miller is the sort of detective Scotland Yard would rather have stranded on on Island a long way away - actually I like the thought - but the idea that he's been posted there without his knowledge - duh! - is as unbelievable as most of the rest of the set up.
This is the crime equivalent of Doc Martin - lots of 'funny' characters surrounding a curmudgeon. Actually what it is is the kind of show that used to play on kid's tv when I was seven. "The Freewheelers" - the show I used to rush home to watch when I was seven (look it up) had better plotting, characters and dialogue. And yet this sits in prime-time on BBC 1.
Why does everything that has a comic twist have to be dumb? Because this truly is. With it's faux Poirot plot and it's achingly stupid colourful characters and a blurred flashback device that was used on The Last Detective - and it didn't work then. The only vaguely interesting character in the piece was carted off to jail at the end of the episode. (sod the spoiler alert).

Ben Miller may look like an attractive proposition for a BBC1 audience given the popularity of his sketch show Armstrong and Miller but every time he plays a character in a drama it's the same character. Sorry Ben, but by the end of this I couldn't give a flying fig about your detective  - or the CGI lizard you're about to spend another seven episodes living with.

Anyone who tells you that it's just a bit of harmless fun and sunshine to brighten a British winter should be stoned.

It IS possible to do cops and funny and colourful and bright and sunny without the cliched and the moronic.

Watch Justified.