Now this really was a weird one. A group of comedians play the famous inhabitants of the fictional town of Successville. The kind of place populated by familiar faces where Mary Berry runs a strip club called Soggy Bottoms.
Each week there is a murder and a real celebrity is plunged into the action as a rookie cop alongside DI “I eat crime…” Sleet (Tom Davis). They then have to improvise their way out of various scenes. It’s so preposterous as a TV concept it might just work…
In the first outing Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea was recruited to find the killer of Bruno Tolioli. Could it be veteran ballerina Darcey Bussell? (played by a pointy-nosed Cariad Lloyd), Maybe it’s a bunch of gangsters led by Harry Styles, aka Tony Paul Way from Game of Thrones and Inside No. 9 the other week. Or maybe the Carr brothers Jimmy And Alan….
The fun was watching Laing variously shit himself, panic, look blank and fumble his way through his ad libs. Sometimes he was actually very funny, sometimes he completely dried up. At one point he blurted out: "I've seen a pigeon eat a stone and it couldn't fly". It’s not the same as Made in Chelsea. Here he has real actors around him and he has to punch above his weight. Towards the end he does seem to have genuinely bonded with Tom Davis, which is rather nice.
There are comic moments, surprising moments and moments that don’t quite come off. I suspect this was pretty heavily edited to find enough scenes that worked. The 'ordinary celebs' aspect owes a bit of an accidental debt to Stella Street, while the dafter aspects of the spoof-noir script owe a bit of a debt to Airplane. The best moment by a country mile is Colin Hoult as a frankly terrifying Jimmy Carr, replicating the stand-up’s barking seal laugh. Alan Carr (Luke Kempner) is more cuddly, like a toothy cross between Dot Cotton and Simon Munnery.
The person who thought this up is either going to be running the BBC in a few years or out on the street on his arse selling the Big Issue in six weeks. Guests in future weeks include Greg James, Deborah Meaden, Dermot O’Leary, Kimberly Wyatt, and Louis Smith. Definitely worth watching. Though mostly through your fingers when the non-comics are on.
Murder In Successville, BBC3, Wednesdays, 10pm.
