This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Sally Phillips may be new to the world of crime-solving, but she’s been a detective for decades. “When you’re acting, you are basically a detective for the character,” she explains. “You’re given your clue, which is your script – and you have to construct the character from that. But there’s something about playing detectives that can be quite difficult for comedians, because it’s neither gritty nor really funny. There’s still a murder. Someone’s still dead.”
Somehow, though, comedy stars keep ending up at crime scenes. Two of the past few years’ biggest murder mysteries – Ludwig and Bookish – are fronted by Peep Show’s David Mitchell and The League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss – not to mention Phillips’ good friend and Austin co-star Ben Miller, who’s played not one but two TV detectives in Death in Paradise and Professor T. Has he passed on any detection tips?
“No, we didn’t really talk about that,” she laughs. “He just talked about how lovely it is filming in Belgium…”
Most of us would know Phillips, 56, from sketch-comedy classic Smack the Pony, but in the decades since you’d be hard pressed to name a comedy series she hasn’t cropped up in – from Miranda, Veep and Friday Night Dinner to Taskmaster, Green Wing and, more recently, Big Mood.
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And in any case The Hairdresser Mysteries isn’t exactly Nordic noir. From her West Midlands salon, hairdresser detective Lily Petal runs into murders of the Father Brown or Shakespeare and Hathaway variety, with little blood, gore or traumatised relatives to worry about.
“All of the bodies on our show have their eyes shut,” Phillips says. “I don’t know that there’s much blood. It’s more like doing a sudoku. You get the challenge of a puzzle without anything to make you feel bad.
“In cosy crime, the murder is basically a bit of a rupture in an otherwise orderly, tightknit, fun community. The detective’s job is to solve it and restore the order, giving people the sense that good sense prevails, even if – as an example from our show – someone has been pushed over a banister after giving a bad haircut.”
Hairdressing might seem an unlikely way into crime-busting, but as presented in the show, Lily and her sidekick Clary (Charlotte Jordan) are natural confidantes. “I’ve spent loads of time in the hairdresser’s because my hair is basically wire wool, and you tell them everything,” Phillips says. “And they tell you everything. One hairdresser told me that they had ended up cutting the hair of the wife, the mistress, the mother and the mother-in-law in a love triangle. The stress of trying to remember who had told them what…”
Like her bubbly, clumsy TV sleuth Lily, Phillips isn’t always on-message. While she’s clearly passionate about her new series, particularly its writer, Jim Cartwright, she balks at the idea of being a daytime TV detective for as long as some of her compatriots in the genre. “I like to do lots of different things, so it’s not a 12-year job,” she says. Instead, she suggests, one day in the future another hairdresser could take up Lily’s mantle, in a “Doctor Who scenario”.
And while she’s a passionate defender of the BBC, she’s not afraid to critique some of its scheduling decisions. Take her sitcom Austin, also airing on BBC One on Fridays.
“It’s series two, and it’s a sitcom starring, obviously, me and Ben Miller, but also Michael Theo, an autistic actor who captured the hearts of Australians in Love on the Spectrum,” she says. “We’ve done one series and got a really good response from the public, but series two has been shoved in the graveyard shift, like 10.40pm on a Friday. It’s really a pre-watershed show.
“Michael’s a great performer,” she adds, then pauses. “Actually, he’s now doing a cosy crime series as well. So all three of us are playing detectives! He’s playing the head of the dog unit in a rural crime department in Australia.”
Clearly, it’s the smart career move these days. Andy Warhol once wrote that in the future, everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. Perhaps today we can predict that one day soon, every single actor will have their own cosy crime vehicle.
“That will be our response to a burning world,” Phillips agrees. “It’ll be, ‘Give us something where everything is happy in the end!’ Eventually, TV will be wall-to-wall cosy crime.”
The Hairdresser Mysteries and Austin air Fridays on BBC One and are available now to watch in full on BBC iPlayer.
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