Beyond Paradise Christmas Special, BBC One, review: if only life in Britain was really this cosy
Marvel has its cinematic universe, Star Wars its multi-billion dollar franchise, and Doctor Who has expanded into the Whoniverse. To those entertainment behemoths we can add… Death in Paradise, which has now spawned two spin-offs and probably won’t stop there.
Last month the BBC announced Return to Paradise, in which an Australian detective goes back to her childhood home – Dolphin Cove, how lovely does that sound? – after time spent working for the Met. And before that they gave us Beyond Paradise, which became the UK’s most-watched new drama of 2023 with an audience of more than nine million for its launch episode.
Cosy crime is made for Christmas, so the Beyond Paradise Christmas Special (BBC One) is just what we need right now. No depraved serial killers here, just a white-gloved intruder breaking into homes and – instead of stealing something – leaving gifts.
The good thing about this show is that it isn’t overly saccharine. It easily could be, with its chocolate-box setting and gently comic supporting characters. But Kris Marshall undercuts that with his performance as the socially awkward DI Humphrey Goodman. And there are regular reminders that the Devon village of Shipton Abbott isn’t entirely twee: see local petty criminal Josh Woods, who drunkenly sleeps through the break-in with a kebab box balanced on his belly.
Another storyline involved a young boy, caught stealing a sausage roll, who told a story about being separated from his beloved grandfather. It could also have been too cutesy in the wrong hands – I have a low tolerance for this sort of thing, my least favourite character of all time being that kid in Love Actually – but here the episode stayed on the right side of sentimental.
The plot was throwaway but it was all grounded by a nicely understated turn from James Fleet (The Vicar of Dibley, Four Weddings) as the mystery intruder, who had burgled those same houses decades earlier and now wanted to right the wrongs. “One day you go to sleep a boy of 19 and you wake up a 70-year-old man looking back on all the stupid things you did,” he explained.
If only real-life police forces had this level of crime to deal with, Britain would be a happier place. The one note that rang depressingly true was the prospect of the Shipton Abbott station being closed as part of a nationwide value-for-money review. “The overall aim is to identify the SOPS ratio: successful outcome per pounds spent. It’s an algorithm that sets performance against cost.” Nothing cosy about that.
