With a title straight out of the Agatha Christie phrasebook, the beautiful island of Guadeloupe as a backdrop and a twist ending which is not so much unpredictable as too outlandish to be conceivable, Death in Paradise could almost be a modern-day sequel of sorts to A Caribbean Mystery – except the typically English hero isn’t an irrepressibly nosy spinster but a pernickety plod from Croydon.
D.I. Richard Poole (Ben Miller) is drafted, very much against his wishes, to the Caribbean island of St. Marie to investigate the death of a fellow British cop, Charlie Hulme.
Lester’s Poole – an officious-out-of-water, by-the-book copper pitched somewhere between a more likeable version of Primeval’s James Lester and a more fallible incarnation of Bough from the first Johnny English film – loathes everything about the sun-soaked island kingdom in which he finds himself: the temperature, the tree growing in his living room, the lizard which shares his house… and as for the local police, well, let’s just say they’re about as keen on him as he is on their laidback approach to law enforcement. ‘Pen-pusher,’ snorts Dwayne Dibbley (sorry, Dwayne Myers, but he’s a policeman played by Danny John-Jules… it had to be done) with contemptuous prescience. ‘This is not going to go well.’
He’s right. With only the suit on his back and a handy, multi-purpose laser tape measure, Poole does his best to find out who murdered Hulme whilst maintaining a pallid version of the slightly fuzzy, Englishman-abroad bewilderment of Denholm Elliot in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and battling against the problems that beset him from the offset: a cavalcade of cop-show clichés, plot-points signposted in GIANT CAPITAL LETTERS and a lot of familiar British actors doing their best Caribbean accents with varying degrees of success.
Sure, it’s visually wonderful – there are some great beach scenes, with one particularly gorgeous shot of Poole and Sergeant Lily Thomson (Being Human’s Lenora Critchlow) strolling along the seashore with a dramatic evening skyline hanging over the ocean – but so is an ITV1 travelogue; at any second, you expect Joanna Lumley to appear with a bottle of Malibu and a cautionary tale about the social problems lurking under the veneer of this island idyll.
Sadly, like a display wedding cake, Death in Paradise is impressive to look at but has very little of substance beneath the surface. Miller is amiable enough, but comes across as a Primark Hugh Grant, while the rest of the cast do their best with a script which is enjoyable enough if you like playing Predict The Obvious Next Line (‘We haven’t got a search warrant!’ – ‘We have now!’).
A surprisingly grizzled John-Jules and Sara Martins – who deserves praise for maintaining an icily superior demeanour throughout as Camille Bordey in spite of the heat – are the pick of the bunch. Less impressive is Sean Maguire, who spends the whole episode locked in a prison cell with only a goat for company. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but we’ve no idea what the punchline is.
Lavish but utterly inessential, there are seven more episodes of this to come. While Death in Paradise is certainly more welcome in the schedules than yet another ‘gritty’ London-based procedural cop drama, its pre-CSI simplicity and cosiness would perhaps be better suited to a Sunday evening slot.
Aired at 9pm on Tuesday 25th October 2011 on BBC One.