The Marlow Murder Club, review: crime so cosy it’s positively soporific
The Marlow Murder Club (Drama), a crime drama from Robert Thorogood, the creator of Death in Paradise, is built to sell. To broadcasters and viewers in other countries it offers a setting of bucolic Britishness (Marlow), a series of brutal murders slapped on top of that setting (see also Midsomer), lengthy episodes so buyers get their money’s worth and precisely the sort of unlikely amateur sleuthing team that has made Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series a publishing sensation.
For all that, if you like your whodunits slow-cooked then The Marlow Murder Club may be for you. Everyone needs comfort food from time to time and this was a bangers and mash of a detective show. Samantha Bond played retired archaeologist Judith Potts, who lived in a fabulous house by the river and did crosswords until such time as her next-door neighbour was murdered.
She heard the gunshot as she happened to be swimming naked in the river at the time, and so began a tale of kook and whimsy that was somehow completely beyond Buckinghamshire police to even notice. Judith teamed up with vicar’s wife Becks (Cara Horgan) and local dog-walker Suzie (Jo Martin), and they soon forged an unlikely – yet somehow completely inevitable – friendship as amateur sleuths, racing against time to stop a serial killer who had something to do with the art market.
I say race. One of the hallmarks of Death in Paradise is just how slowly everything happens. The Marlow Murder Club took the same pacing and didn’t run with it, unspooling plot at a soporific rate, creating about as much tension as a wet rag. This again I suspect is deliberate – in a TV climate where most crime drama is hard and dark, mirroring American and Scandinavian imports, the best way for a British drama to stand out in the global marketplace is to be soft and light.
Many people do want cuppa-tea TV, where they can leave on a nice-looking show while they pop off for a brew, come back in five minutes and be assured they won’t have missed much. In this guise, The Marlow Murder Club ticked every box. But if you want something that grips, look elsewhere.
The first two episodes of The Marlow Murder Club are on UKTV Play now
