The Good Ship Murder ★★★

When it comes to television shows that focus on the catching of murderers, there are, broadly speaking, two schools. The first is the school that leans hard into the depravity of mankind and the brutal reality of humanity’s capacity for violence, laying out the details of various gruesome atrocities and giving us an insight into the traumatised minds of those whose task is to nobly, but grimly, seek justice for the fallen.

The second is the school that believes that murder in fiction should, above all, be fun, and uses violent crime as a launching point for jolly romps as the distinctly un-traumatised detectives treat the horrors of human savagery as the delightful puzzles they are. Call this the “Midsomer School”, or even the “Agatha Christie Club”: these whodunits are set a long way from reality, but they’re a far more relaxing watch.

It is into this second category that we can sort The Good Ship Murder, a show that combines bouncy British quirk, glorious Mediterranean scenery, and reliably peculiar deaths in the best tradition of ludicrous tele-mystery.

The vessel of the title is a cruise ship tooling around the Med, offering bountiful entertainment, luxurious accommodation, day trips to various gorgeous seaside locations, and the odd breezy murder in case things get monotonous. It’s not the first to combine ocean-going leisure and homicide: both Columbo and Hercule Poirot, to name but two, encountered death on the high seas.

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But those sleuths solved the murders on one particular cruise and then moved on. The Good Ship Murder keeps the murders flowing to the point where you start to wonder if it might impact the cruise company’s share price. “How many murders can a travel business sustain before revenue dips?” is a question that might occur to you, but this is a whodunit and only a spoilsport would want realism to intrude.

Of course there’s not much point having a murder on a cruise without a charismatic genius to unlock the mystery, and the main man here is Jack Grayling, the ship’s resident lounge singer (played with easy charm by one-time X Factor winner Shayne Ward).

Again, you might think it’s absurdly unrealistic for a lounge singer to be a brilliant detective, but you see, this lounge singer is a retired policeman, thus making it believable. As a sexy easygoing crimebuster, Grayling naturally has a more uptight offsider to bicker and banter and have sudden epiphanies with. Here we have First Officer Kate Woods (Catherine Tyldesley), a witty Watson to Grayling’s handsome Holmes.