Sally Phillips may be new to the world of crime-solving, but she’s been a detective for decades. “When you’re acting, you are basically a detective for the character,” she explains. “You’re given your clue, which is your script – and you have to construct the character from that. But there’s something about playing detectives that can be quite difficult for comedians, because it’s neither gritty nor really funny. There’s still a murder. Someone’s still dead.”
“No, we didn’t really talk about that,” she laughs. “He just talked about how lovely it is filming in Belgium…”
Most of us would know Phillips, 56, from sketch-comedy classic Smack the Pony, but in the decades since you’d be hard pressed to name a comedy series she hasn’t cropped up in – from Miranda, Veep and Friday Night Dinner to Taskmaster, Green Wing and, more recently, Big Mood.
“All of the bodies on our show have their eyes shut,” Phillips says. “I don’t know that there’s much blood. It’s more like doing a sudoku. You get the challenge of a puzzle without anything to make you feel bad.
“In cosy crime, the murder is basically a bit of a rupture in an otherwise orderly, tightknit, fun community. The detective’s job is to solve it and restore the order, giving people the sense that good sense prevails, even if – as an example from our show – someone has been pushed over a banister after giving a bad haircut.”
Like her bubbly, clumsy TV sleuth Lily, Phillips isn’t always on-message. While she’s clearly passionate about her new series, particularly its writer, Jim Cartwright, she balks at the idea of being a daytime TV detective for as long as some of her compatriots in the genre. “I like to do lots of different things, so it’s not a 12-year job,” she says. Instead, she suggests, one day in the future another hairdresser could take up Lily’s mantle, in a “Doctor Who scenario”.
And while she’s a passionate defender of the BBC, she’s not afraid to critique some of its scheduling decisions. Take her sitcom Austin, also airing on BBC One on Fridays.
“Michael’s a great performer,” she adds, then pauses. “Actually, he’s now doing a cosy crime series as well. So all three of us are playing detectives! He’s playing the head of the dog unit in a rural crime department in Australia.”
“That will be our response to a burning world,” Phillips agrees. “It’ll be, ‘Give us something where everything is happy in the end!’ Eventually, TV will be wall-to-wall cosy crime.”
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