Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Ralf Little, Don Warrington, Tajh Miles, Elizabeth Bourgine, Danny John-Jules, Josephine Jobert, Matthew Baynton, Tessa Bonham Jones, Anthony Calf, Jocelyn Jee Esien, Tariq Jordan, Elizabeth Tan, Stanley Townsend, Juliet Stevenson, Sara Cox.
You can only be someone else for so long before your old life comes back to haunt you and the person from whose life you lead wants it all back.
If paradise lays at the feet of your parents, then to be rejected by them is one that leaves the child in living purgatory, unknowing of their history, unable to grasp what they did wrong, and when someone else is in the place where they should be, when the natural order of succession is supplanted by a cuckoo from another nest, it is only natural to wonder where life would have taken you if the rejection had been replaced with love and affection.
To have a 90-minute episode of any detective series is to wallow in a sense of deductive cool, but to be treated to the sun, the sea, and murder in the Caribbean whilst wondering just how the powers that be will allow its citizens to stay warm in the midst of a cold, possibly brutal winter, is maybe a Christmas Special that gladdens the heart, if not heats the soul.
If someone takes over the life that should have been yours, then to receive wisdom from an unexpected source, the return of an old friend, is feel a glow of satisfaction, and if the near complexity of the murder at hand, the puzzle for the team under D.I. Neville Parker, is the main reason to enjoy the episode, then the return of Danny John Jules in the role of Officer Dwayne Myers is cause celebre, and the insertion of a Christmas message in the form of the excellent Matthew Baynton as down on his luck Colin Babcock is one of the highlights of the long running series.
The issue with Death In Paradise is always in its running time, an hour is simply not enough to fully allow the writer enough scope to flesh out the characters within, nor the procedure of investigation; in an hour it becomes the television fluff of afternoon filler, the equivalent of The Bill being compared to Morse, Poirot, or Tennyson.
By making 2021’s Christmas special, by trusting completely in the writer, James Hall, to bring a substantial offering to the armchair detective, the show blossoms in ways that a mere hour is insufficient to cope with. It can only be hoped that in the future this long running drama could be allowed the same privilege of its peers, it has the capability, it has the attitude, it just requires trust and assurance that it can be held up as pleasurable fair; after all it doesn’t need to be gritty, violent, or off the wall, it is purely enough to bathe in the reflection of innocent investigation.
Ian D. Hall