Murder in Successville, TV review: A mash-up of real and fake celebrities makes this spoof cop show weirdly fun to watch
BBC3's spoof cop show mash-up has weird chemistry and lots of laughs
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Your support makes all the difference.If I was one of those techy wags who do things like rejigging the party leaders' speeches with songs on YouTube, I'd probably call Murder In Successful "a mash-up". And, like some of those videos doing the rounds, this new spoof cop show/whodunit/impressionist sketch show/sitcom is pretty funny, actually. You could say, like the leaders lip-syncing to Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get It On', it's so wrong it's right.
The premise is this: each week there's a new case to solve in Successville, a town populated by familiar celebrities doing unfamiliar jobs, all played by impressionists. So, the likes of sweary celeb chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay recast as a sweary chief of police, played by Liam Horican (Very Important People).
Leading the investigations is DI Sleet (Tom Davis), a sort of 6"7 Kojak on Jaegerbombs. He talks in cop clichés with a surreal edge - "I eat crime, I drink justice and I shit myself"- and has a real-life new recruit to "help" each week mentor and apparently humiliate each week. The rookies are where the real celebrities come in. In this week's first episode it was Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea (pardy, not party, yah?) who was left to improvise - and corpse frequently - amid the madness.
Jamie was tasked with solving the murder of local restaurateur "Bruno Tonioli", with the help of ballistics expert "Taylor Swift", while being hinded by the "Carr Twins" and the "Harry Styles Gang" -you get the picture. Future episodes feature "Mary Berry" as a strip club owner and "Boris Johnson" as a Scout master being investigated by the likes of former X Factor host Dermot O'Leary and Dragon Deborah Meaden.
You can see why Laing's episode was given the first slot; his presence will have lured the channel's young audience, plus, he's game for anything, including showing DI Sleet his pardy kissing technique (with tongues) using his hand and coming up with some gems: "I'm from the north but I have a southern accent…I sell exotic fruit (long pause) like papaya", he told "Darcy Bussell". There was lots of corpsing - and occasional descent into confused farce - but there was also a lot of laughing from both Jamie and this reviewer.
The BBC has hailed MIS as "ground-breaking" but I reckon it's just weird chemistry, like a silly YouTube mash-up (ref: the party leaders' Friends-inspired video) that unexpectedly goes viral.
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