Since Death in Paradise began in 2011, every broadcaster has tried their own sun-drenched homicide format – but The Good Ship Murder misses by thousands of nautical miles. All jokes aside about Saint Marie being a dangerous place to live, this really pushes the geographically based murder mystery premise far, far out to sea.
It revolves around handsome ex-police detective Jack Grayling (former X Factor winner and Coronation Street star Shayne Ward), who has taken a job singing on a cruise ship on which the passengers are regularly murdered.
In this festive special, first officer Kate (Corrie’s Catherine Tyldesley) is pining for Jack, her on/off love interest, who fled the ship at the end of last series. Or rather he was fired for working a side hustle as an amateur detective who is necessarily quite rude to the passengers when he is accusing them of murder.
A colleague asks her, why so sad? “Because Christmas was always Jack’s favourite time of year,” she says, gazing sadly out to sea. Another colleague called Jamil shortly reveals that her lost love is half a mile away, singing in a dive bar in Alicante. He doesn’t say why he kept this information to himself, but it works for the plot.
The cast have no chemistry, the scripts are weak (Photo: David Laposi/Mark Cassar/Clapperboard Productions/5 Broadcasting Limited)Kate goes to said bar and offers Jack a dry slap for not contacting her. He has no good reason why he put himself in seedy exile for six months and agrees to come back and help Kate investigate the latest killing. A passenger has been found bludgeoned and the thinly drawn suspects need questioning.
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One thing particularly irked me. When Kate is aboard ship, she’s in full first officer uniform, hair tightly plaited. When she goes ashore, she apparently requires a total costume and hair change, even when she’s in a hurry or following an important lead. The corpses will have to wait.
Anyway, back to the “plot”. Terminally ill social media influencer, Donna (Joelle Dyson), arrives aboard the ship with best friend Bernie (Rebecca Harland) for the Christmas trip of a lifetime, crowd-funded by her thousands of followers. She is already embroiled in a fledgling romance with fellow passenger Jason (Gary Lucy), who is on a stag holiday. At Christmas. Because those happen…
The passengers go ashore to visit a monastery where a young nun is being held against her will by an ambitious cleric who hopes to make monsignor. “This child belongs to Christ now,” he says, putting a possessive arm around the young novice. It’s never mentioned again.
This really pushes the geographically based murder mystery premise far, far out to sea (Photo: David Laposi/Mark Cassar/Clapperboard Productions/5 Broadcasting Limited)When someone is found bloodied and unresponsive in the monastery chapel, the gang investigates. Are there no police around? “We sail at eight o’clock sharp,” says the captain, whom Kate has persuaded to allow Jack back on board. “Which only leaves you five hours to find the killer,” he adds helpfully for those not paying full attention.
What with introducing the characters, multiple filming locations and Ward’s contractual end-of-episode song (he gives a slightly-too-high-pitched rendition of “Stay” by East 17), the murder mystery itself only gets about 15 minutes. The eventual confession from the killer is delivered with the kind of apologetic shrug you’d offer if you scraped someone’s Yaris in Lidl car park.
The plot is a puzzle a three-year-old could solve, the cast have no chemistry, the scripts are weak and it’s all lit like Cruising with Jane McDonald. Presumably it’s hard to achieve any other lighting effects on a cruise ship.
Either a bunch of self-satisfied TV execs put this together as a deliberately awful nod to Victoria Wood’s satirical Acorn Antiques and missed, or money has been spent on an absolutely dreadful idea. Worse, the viewers are showing up anyway. I can’t fathom it.
‘The Good Ship Murder’ is streaming on 5
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