Benidorm is Murder review: John Hannah stars in a meta new crime drama that is weird enough to get away with murder
I blame Midsomer Murders for all this. Cosy crime, picturesque settings, guest stars whose faces are incredibly familiar but whose names never progress beyond the tip of your tongue – just like this week's new offering Benidorm is Murder (Channel 5, Thurs, 9pm).
These shows – Death in Paradise, Beyond Paradise, The Good Ship Murder, that new one set in Italy featuring her off Lovejoy – all follow a similar template and are only distinguished by the outlandish ways in which those guest stars are bumped off.
Each new iteration uses the same tropes, the same beats – and by now, even the same guest stars – to tell their tales of gruesome murders in the Caribbean, or Devon or Portofino.
And so does Benidorm is Murder, on the face of it. A sunny setting, bizarre murders involving English people abroad, crumpled copper looking for a quiet life.
The difference here is that Benidorm is Murder has decided to go the meta route – it knows it comes with all the same ideas we've seen before, so it decides to acknowledge them, even play with them.
John Hannah plays former detective Dennis Crown. Chucked off the force after 35 years when his boss – who happens to be having an affair with Dennis's wife – frames him for planting evidence, he has sunk his pension into a Benidorm pub and spends his days staring at the bottom of a pint glass.
You can tell he hasn't really let himself go though, because although he wears crew socks with sliders, those socks are sparklingly white, and it almost looks like the replica Scotland football shirt he wears has been ironed.
In short order, he gets a new barmaid, aspiring actress Rosa (Carolina Becquer), and a case to investigate – a member of a Take That tribute band has been thrown off a hotel balcony.
This brings him into conflict with the the local police inspector, an attractive brunette called Maria (Ariadna Cabrol) with whom Dennis is clearly doomed to have an on-off relationship.
It's all very familiar, but Rosa explains that she is a fan of detective dramas, referencing A Touch of Frost and Murder, She Wrote, and outlining all the beats these things use.
Like the 'brick wall', when the detective is stymied by stick-in-the-mud authorities and can't find the vital clue, or the 'anomaly', which Rosa describes as “the little thing in the room that only the detective notices”.
In this case, it's a missing bottle of gin from the minibar, a missing light-bulb and a trouser press in the wrong place.
All of which conveniently points to the killer and everything gets neatly wrapped up.
It gets so self-referential that by the end, Rosa and Dennis are congratulating themselves on a job well done.
“This is perfect,” gushes Rosa. “The anomaly, the brick wall, the classic eureka moment. And all solved in under two days.”
“Yeah,” scoffs Dennis, “that's never happened before.”
Meanwhile, it undercuts the usual idyllic views of life in these crime drama hotspots by painting Benidorm as a place where pensioners go to die, populated almost entirely by elderly, pink-faced, portly people in ill-fitting nylon, most of whom roam the sun-soaked streets on mobility scooters.
Dennis's pub is gloomy and rundown, it's kitchen a sandwich toaster, and only one person seems to be actually frequent the bar – and he seems to be a borderline alcoholic who regularly sleeps under the tables.
It should be a humdrum re-tread of things we've seen a million times before, but Benidorm is Murder has enough weirdness, enough humour and, let's face it, enough tongue-in-cheek chutzpah to almost literally get away with murder.