Say what you like about Channel 5 (or 5, as it has recently rebranded), but it certainly knows its viewer demographic. From the rebooted All Creatures Great and Small to countless documentaries about royalty and Yorkshire, the channel provides a safe haven for audiences alienated by other broadcasters’ more outré, headline-grabbing ideas. You could call it the anti-Channel 4.
The Madame Blanc Mysteries is a case in point. Created and written by former soap actors Sally Lindsay and Sue Vincent, this fluffy crime drama is back for its fourth series while Channel 4’s gritty and critically lauded (rightly so) Get Millie Black, written by the Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, was swiftly deserted by audiences and ruthlessly pushed from the prime time slot. Make of that what you will.
But back to the fictional and perpetually sunny village of Saint Victoire in southern France – or rather, the more reliably sunny Maltese island of Gozo, where The Madame Blanc Mysteries is actually filmed. But if it’s authenticity you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place. After all, nearly all the French people in Sainte Victoire seem to speak English (not my experience in small-town France), while the police procedural elements are decidedly fanciful.
Sue Holderness as Judith Lloyd James, Steve Edge as Dom Hayes, and Robin Askwith as Jeremy Lloyd James (Photo: Clapperboard/Channel 5)In the new series opener, in which a company chief executive is discovered hooded and seemingly dead in a rowing boat with coins placed over his eyes, our titular amateur sleuth, ex-pat Cheshire antiques dealer Jean White (Sally Lindsay), is allowed to sit in on police interviews and question suspects. And when Jean believes that “les flics” (French slang for the police) have arrested the wrong person, she naturally heads off to investigate it herself.
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This underpowered whodunit storyline ends with an unexciting – even with a knife being held to Jean’s neck – showdown in the killer’s house. The financially embarrassed chief executive has faked his own death with the help of a phony doctor and ambulance crew. But then I suspect that the murder mystery element is the least of the programme’s attractions.
So what have viewers come for? Well, there’s some agreeable light comedy performed by reassuringly familiar actors. Sue Holderness (Marlene in Only Fools and Horses) and former Confessions of… stud Robin Askwith play the most overtly comic characters, Judith and Jeremy. Their aristocratic lineage is signalled by forever calling each other “darling” in an exaggerated fashion. And in the great British sitcom tradition, being nobs means they have the piss taken out of them. It’s Judith and Jeremy who discover the body while out jet-skiing (“a great way to get over a hangover, darling”).
Sue Vincent as Gloria and Tony Robinson as Patrick (Photo: Clapperboard/Channel 5)A gentler vein of comedy is provided by Jean’s attempt to keep secret her romance with taxi driver Dom (Steve Edge), and Lindsay and Edge share a genuine rapport that apparently stems from a long-term real-life friendship. Then there’s Baldrick himself, Blackadder’s Sir Tony Robinson as Dom’s dodgy Uncle Patrick, who suspects that Jeremy and Judith’s bar is being ripped off by their wine supplier.
The Madame Blanc Mysteries is escapism of the most undemanding variety, a sort of Place in the Sun with added murder and a side-order of Benidorm. But I’m not really interested in repeatedly escaping to this colony of ex-pat Brits – mainly because I don’t really believe in them or the France they purportedly inhabit.
It would seem I’m in the minority. More than two million viewers are regular visitors to Sainte Victoire, however, so kudos to Lindsay and Vincent for creating a hit TV show and for 5 in recognising its broad appeal. Perhaps I’m the one missing something.
‘The Madame Blanc Mysteries’ continues next Thursday at 9pm on 5
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