‘“Marriage is like a deckchair,” says Roy Reeves, master of entertainments at Merrie’s holiday camp. “Very comfortable at first … but impossible to get out of.”
Minutes later, understandably, Roy is found dead, killed by 1958’s murder weapon of choice, a pint of poisoned stout. Whodunnit? As in Agatha Christie, everybody is in the frame. His long-suffering wife, Babs, his long-suffering staff, and anybody who had to sit through his set.
But Roy’s murder is not the real mystery. Those of us who think that ITV’s Grantchester, like life, is not worth living without James Norton as the sexy vicar, are mystified. How can it be that Grantchester is starting not just its sixth series but that a seventh has already been commissioned?
All the show’s regulars (vicar, detective, his wife, devout housekeeper, gay curate and his lover) have decamped to what looks like a mash-up of Hi-de-Hi! and Mrs Maisel’s camp in the Catskills. Anyone who’s fist-fought their way out of a Center Parcs flume or done time at Butlin’s in Minehead will doubt the authenticity of this depiction of a British resort. British holiday camps are really much more like a horror movie. Grantchester, like so much of our nation’s TV falsification industry from Downton to Heartbeat, pretends otherwise.
In this opening episode, our surrogate James Norton has whipped off his dog collar and squeezed into his jeans to find a holiday romance. I wasn’t around in 1958, but I find it hard to believe that there was ever an Anglican clergyman in those days who looked so buff or so Brando-esque on a motorbike. And yet, when he removed his helmet, Tom Brittney as the Rev Will Davenport looked capable of winning a hot priest-off with Fleabag’s Andrew Scott.
But instead of finding love Will and his foil, Robson Green’s off-duty DI Geordie Keating, find themselves investigating a murder. It turns out that Roy employed one of his staff, Margie (Rachael Stirling), to seduce male campers and blackmail them with the photographic evidence taken by another member of staff. Maybe Roy was offed by blackmailed campers or their wives? It’s a theory that held until the third commercial break when the truth emerged, involving a fat man, a woman scorned and the local plod looking quite the plum.
All very satisfying apart from one thing. Witless Will manages to implicate an innocent camp employee in Roy’s murder, which put quite the dampener on their romance. “Shame,” Sunny West tells Will after a lingering farewell kiss as he pulls on his helmet. “I think I could have fallen in love with you.” We all could, Sunny, we all could.
But all this unremittingly heteronormative fluff was less interesting than the subplot simmering on the back burner. Gay curate Leonard Finch befriended Bryan Stanford, the closeted photographer at the camp. But when he refused a kiss, scorned Bryan took his revenge by photographing Leonard with his secret lover, photographer Daniel, and threatening to publicise the pictures. A year after the 1957 Wolfenden Report concluded that the criminalisation of homosexuality undermined civil liberty and nine years before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act followed that report’s recommendations (at least in England and Wales), blackmailing a man with photographic evidence of a gay relationship could result in the victim being prosecuted.
As the credits rolled, any viewer with a heart empathised with Leonard, who knows that at any moment Bryan’s photos may be used against him and so is doomed to a life yet more furtive and fearful than it already was. At last, Grantchester took off the rose-tinted glasses to show us what England in 1958 was really like.
