Murder In Successville: the new Mighty Boosh or a freshened up Star Stories?

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/06/murder-in-successville-filipa-jodelka

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Even with all the chatter about “falling standards” and “TV going down the pan”, few would ever have imagined that, one day, McVitie’s heir and Made In Chelsea star Jamie Laing would be standing over the body of Darcey Bussell, pretending that he’s murdered her. She was an innocent woman, too, he admits. “It happens” says DI Sleet, a detective stuffed into a trench coat. “Don’t let it weigh on your conscience”.

They say that a society gets the BBC3 sitcom it deserves, but I’m not totally sure what to make of Murder In Successville (Wednesday, 10pm, BBC3). Essentially, it’s a confusing mix of semi-improvised comedy and murder-mystery pastiche, centred on comedically incompetent copper Sleet (Tom Davis). Each week, faced with a high-profile murder or kidnapping, Sleet recruits a real-life celebrity as his crime-solving partner and a show-within-a-show concept begins to fold in on itself. Together the pair collect evidence and, by the end of the show, make a judgement as to who the perp is. What this translates to in reality is DI Sleet and Jamie Laing – or Dermot O’Leary, or Deborah Meaden, or Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt – prancing round in aviator shades and fake moustaches interrogating a host of comedians pretending to be celebrities about a crime that never actually happened.

“This is Jamie Laing. He hasn’t got a fucking clue what’s going on,” says police chief “Gordon Ramsay” (AKA Liam Hourican). He’s not wrong. Jamie was last seen doing wheelies on an adult scooter down the King’s Road to impress a bird in a stupid hat; who knows what was going through his blissfully uncluttered mind when he signed up for this? Any celeb TV appearance contains an element of humiliation nowadays, but Tom Davis has a knack for pushing his celebs, perhaps encouraged by social awkwardness and possibly the legal bounds of their contract, to meet his inane and arbitrary demands. Cue Jamie Laing self-consciously French kissing his own fist (“Police protocol”). At the same time he takes care to place himself at the butt of the joke too, his gravel-voiced performance (“Like a rundown fairground, there wasn’t much to go on”) heavily farcical.

Murder in Successville, I suspect, will be compared unfavourably to The Mighty Boosh, as that was the last successful example of weird-slash-stupid humour. This would be an unnecessary shame, because it actually owes more to Star Stories, still regarded Chez Jodelks as the best example of the saying “crap celebrity impressions are always inherently funny”.

The first episode sees Sleet and his celebrity sidekick trying to crack is the murder of Bruno Tonioli, the Strictly judge now a local restaurateur. “There are only two units who could have pulled this off, The Harry Styles Gang and the Carr twins, Alan and Jimmy,” says head of ballistics Taylor Swift (Jenny Bede), suspecting a gangland hit. “Bruno’s used to be a nice little cafe. Two-course lunch for under a tenner,” concurs Niall Horan, seasoned gangster.

As actors corpse under terrible wigs and Sleet and his spluttering, red-faced straight man sleuth about, Tom Davis gives the air of a man still bemused they’re doing any of this in the first place. In an otherwise sterile comedy landscape of 2 Broke Girls and Russell Howard reading the headlines over audience laughter, God bless the commissioner who wasn’t too scared of his audience to risk something this weird.

Murder In Successville isn’t always a barrel of laughs, and it can skit around quite dramatically, all Darcey Bussell’s dalliance with Adrian Chiles (“She always did like a bad boy”) one minute, the finer details of Harry Styles’s food poisoning the next. On one shoulder, an angel is telling me I’m above such puerility. On the other, a devil is PMSLing at 6′ 7″ Tom Davis undercover, disguised as a cocktail waitress.