Hairdresser? Not on fire.

 The Hairdresser Mysteries is, I'm sorry to say, not very good. 

I'm a big fan of the BBC's mid-afternoon cosy crime strand: Father Brown, Sister Boniface and, of course, the daddy of them all, Shakespeare and Hathaway. Shakespeare and Hathaway is a miracle of perfect balance: good cast, strong stories, bucolic setting, occasional peril, bad puns. It's camp, but perfectly judged camp. Funny scripts that don't forget they're also part of a crime show. 

Father Brown is fine. There are a couple of actors in it who can't quite do their own accents, but it's fine. Sister Boniface, a spin-off, is a little too bright and pantomimic. It seems a bit forced. There's no air in it. 

Hairdresser Mysteries, though, suffers from a surfeit of camp. And I never thought I'd ever write that. It's brimming with choreographed disco interludes and colourful Northern characters doing whacky stuff. The women are shrieking matrons, festooned with the vomited up contents of Dr Who's dressing up box, or they're young and clueless. There's a Viking who runs a fish and chip shop. Cilla Battersby's in this, hair the colour of meths, running an Ice Cream Parlour called Knickerbocker Gloria's. Her character name is Gloria. There is a local lord called Lord Rupert. Because posh people are called Rupert. Lily Petal's assistant - after we've taken a moment to think about the name Lily Petal - is presented as having, I guess, O.C.D. which means she gets anxious when pictures, or fringes, aren't straight and sometimes solves crimes because of her eye for detail. It also means she walks stiffly, and doesn't notice when men fall in love with her which is all the time. 

Heather Small does a cameo. Does this place The Hairdresser Mysteries in the extended Miranda Universe? In the same episode Lily mimes in slow motion to Bette Midler's The Rose. Her careful hair gently buffeted by hair dryers. 

None of it really works. There's no real sense of place. Its filmed in the Midlands but set in Yorkshire, meaning Sally Phillips is burdened with an ill-fitting Yorkshire accent throughout. She underplays Lily where everybody else in the cast overplays to the point of hysteria. Sally Phillips is my age (slightly older) but Lily is represented as being actually a hairdresser from the 70's. In her first scene, she displays locks of hair she swept up, her favourite being David Bowie's "from his Ziggy Stardust period". Even if she were a 16 year old Saturday girl in 1972, that would make her 70 today. I've watched three episodes. Maybe this is all explained in the final episode. So far, in the show, they've explained away her miraculous youth as a byproduct of being a hairdresser. Right. 

There are a lot of very long scenes where people give you a lot of information and nothing else happens. Chat after chat after chat. I'm a writer. I love writing dialogue. I over-write dialogue. And then I have to cut that dialogue, because something needs to happen. On camera. It rarely does here. Sunetra Sarker's character seems to exist solely to drop massive gobbets of exposition throughout the show. Characterising her as the town gossip isn't quite the handy get-out the writers think it is. Its as gusty as the Moors we never see, because we're always in some unconvincing interior listening to T-Rex on a dancette. Everything is bright and garish - another sot to Lily's 70's obsession - and there are regular dance routines as the hits of the 70's play, but they're not integrated. They're just bits. Just fun vignettes because of all the fun, the brightly coloured fun. 

It's just made me laugh. A man comes to declare his undying love to Lily's assistant while she's affixing balloons to the ceiling and standing on a stepladder, with Lily holding it. Lily deadpans: "I can see this is a private moment but I can't leave. For safety." 

It has its moments, and Sally Phillips, whom I adore, can always deliver a gag. But where are the rest of them? 

John, the builder from Alan Partridge, turns up in episode 3 playing a man who used to blow up hot water bottles like Jon Mikl Thor. After he leaves, a woman in the hairdresser's chair gives us three paragraphs of back-story about him while everyone sits around and listens. He dies because he's horrid. The murderers are uniformly far more sympathetic and rounded than the murderees. All the people who die in this are nasty people. I guess the moral is: don't be nasty or you WILL be killed. 

How's that for escapism. Come on, Farage: cut the ribbon on the grand opening of Knickerbocker Gloria's.