Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
The Telegraph

Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is a nice, cosy drama full of cliches: episode one review

Benji Wilson
Updated
Jo Joyner, Mark Benton and Patrick Walshe McBride - WARNING: Use of this copyright image is subject to the terms of use of BBC Pictures' Digital Picture Service (BBC Pictures) as set out at www.bbcpictures.co.uk. In particular, this image may only be published by a registered User of BBC Pictures for editorial use for the purpose of publicising the relevant BBC programme, personnel or activity during the Publicity Period which ends three review weeks following the date of transmission and provided the BBC and the copyright holder in the caption are credited. For any other purpose whatsoever, including advertising and commercial, prior written approval from the copyright holder will be required.
Jo Joyner, Mark Benton and Patrick Walshe McBride - WARNING: Use of this copyright image is subject to the terms of use of BBC Pictures' Digital Picture Service (BBC Pictures) as set out at www.bbcpictures.co.uk. In particular, this image may only be published by a registered User of BBC Pictures for editorial use for the purpose of publicising the relevant BBC programme, personnel or activity during the Publicity Period which ends three review weeks following the date of transmission and provided the BBC and the copyright holder in the caption are credited. For any other purpose whatsoever, including advertising and commercial, prior written approval from the copyright holder will be required.

Pity the poor writers landed with the task of making a daytime detective series set in leafy Warwickshire. How to avoid all of those clichés, not only of the setting – Shakespeare country, wood-beamed pubs – but of the genre?

How to get away from the dishevelled private investigator kicked out of the police force and now trying to make sprightly badinage with his perky new sidekick; how to make something other than the typical mildly escapist whodunit that needs to be wrapped up in 45 minutes before the afternoon school run?

In Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators (BBC One), the writers appear to have confronted these clichés by including every one of them – first and foremost by naming their private detectives Shakespeare and Hathaway. I won’t expand on the crassness of pairing a Shakespeare with his one-time wife in modern-day Stratford, other than to say that if they really had to do the whole Shakespearean thing then they should have called it Puck and Bottom.

Advertisement
Advertisement

Anyway, what we got was a nice, cosy drama in which Frank Hathaway (Mark Benton) teamed up with Lu Shakespeare (Jo Joyner) after she went to him with a case. Not only had she just sold her hair salon, but she had a good eye for detail and her fiancé had just been murdered. Peg, meet hole.

There was plenty to dislike about Shakespeare & Hathaway the programme, not least Hathaway’s secretary Sebastian (Patrick Walshe McBride), a bushy-tailed luvvie in a cravat. The running joke was meant to be his effeminacy – a seam of humour last mined in the Eighties and not hugely missed.

But given that daytime drama is not really the place for complexity or grit, the first episode of Shakespeare & Hathaway did at least set up two leading characters you’d want to see more of. Benton has pretty much got “likeable slob with soup-stain on his lapel” characters sewn up and here he was again the linchpin.

Joyner had the harder task, in that Shakespeare’s path from hairdresser to sleuth by way of murdered fiancé lay somewhere on the risible side of plausible. She just about pulled it off… apart from the daft name. Even now, that still rankles.

Advertisement
Advertisement