Recently, whenever life has seemed bleak and grey, I have deployed a method which is sure to bring consolation. I stare mistily into the middle distance and say to myself, “somewhere out there on the ocean wave, right this very minute, series three of The Good Ship Murder is being filmed”.
For those of you who don’t know, The Good Ship Murder is a Channel 5 drama that stars X Factor winner and ex-Corrie heart-throb Shayne Ward as Jack Grayling, a retired detective turned cabaret singer who solves the murders that happen on board, or adjacent to, a cruise ship that circles between the ports of the sun-kissed Mediterranean. At the end of each instalment, another case successfully cracked, Jack celebrates by singing a number that somehow reflects the episode’s plot and the characters involved.
Shayne Ward as sleuth-turned-singer Jack Grayling in The Good Ship Murder – Channel 5
This is all part of Channel 5’s sinister scheme, fairly unique in modern British television, to make the kind of shows that people actually like to watch. Unlike all the other terrestrial broadcasters, who are making swingeing cutbacks in the field, Channel 5 is actually increasing the amount of drama it makes. Could making programmes people enjoy possibly be the magic secret?
I sometimes find myself wishing that maybe The Good Ship Murder could be a little sharper, a little smarter. But no, it is pitched perfectly, with a firm hand on the tiller. Anything more adroit, or more knowing, would destroy its essential innocence, its precious status as the one ingenue in a sea of wiseacres.
It’s probably the maddest-sounding show on TV right now. It’s a bit like one of the TV ideas with which Alan Partridge fills up his Dictaphone at the Linton Travel Tavern, like Inner City Sumo or Monkey Tennis. But it’s just the latest in a long line of barmy formats that stretches back decades.
Perhaps the barmiest of the lot was NBC’s sitcom My Mother the Car, which ran for one series in 1965. Its jaunty theme song establishes its premise. “Everybody knows in a second life, we all come back sooner or later,” it begins. Do we? This seems a somewhat overconfident metaphysical statement, blithely putting to bed centuries of doctrinal dispute. If continues – “as anything from a pussycat to a man eating alligator. Well, y’all may think my story is more fiction than it’s fact. But believe it or not, my mother dear decided she’d come back…” Pause. “As a car!” Yes, the hapless hero is haunted by his sassy mom, whose spirit now inhabits the frame of a 1920s Tin Lizzie, her voice dropping zingers through its radio speaker. Cue gags of the calibre of “look at that old banger” and “her big end’s gone”, punctuated by flirtily dipping headlamps or an angrily honking horn.
The cast of My Mother The Car, 1965 – NBC Universal
This show never made it to the ITV region where I grew up, so when someone mentioned it in passing I flatly refused to believe it existed, until I checked on YouTube. There are an astonishing 30 episodes of this stuff. Even more weirdly, there is no canned laughter track on the early instalments, giving them an awkward and uncertain, indeed nightmarish, tone.
If something about this sounds oddly familiar to you, it may be because the premise was immortalised by the “Love-Matic Grandpa” segment in “The Simpsons Spin-Offs Showcase” episode.
My Mother the Car was probably an attempt to recreate the successes of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie; adding a spooky element to a domestic situation. More successful in the fray was The Flying Nun (featuring a very young Sally Field in a habit), which sells its offer in the title.
Other American strangenesses include spin-off cartoons from big franchises, where science fiction is added for no tangible reason. There was 1981’s The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, in which our friends from Milwaukee travel through time, and Partridge Family 2200 AD, in which the songbird siblings, with no explanation whatever, are living in the future. Weirdest of all was The Robonic Stooges, which saw the ancient slapstick troupe reincarnated as cyborgs with detachable heads.
The Fonz and his gang from Happy Days (1974) were the inspiration for an animated sci-fi spin-off a few years later – Bettmann
But we Brits shouldn’t look down our noses. In 1969, we produced The Secret Service, from the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson stable of Thunderbirds renown. This features a country vicar, who is really an agent of Bishop (British Intelligence Secret Headquarters – Operation Priest), and whose yokel gardener is miniaturised to carry out espionage missions. Disconcertingly, the vicar switches between being a puppet and a real human being, and he is played by that celebrated mangler of the English language Stanley Unwin. It’s one of the oddest things you will ever see.
But we should not think such madcap misfires are confined to the very distant TV past. Those of us who tuned in to the one series of the BBC’s Bonekickers (2008), the story of archaeologists unearthing lost relics – the True Cross, Excalibur – by the shedload, will forever be haunted by it. I occasionally have to go back and check that another show from this era, ITV’s The Palace, really happened. This was the story of a fictional royal family, with Jane Asher as queen. Sort of like The Crown, except with characters like King Richard IV and Princess Eleanor.
Garage Sale Mysteries is one of several TV movies that latched on to a trend for mash-ups of popular genres – Everett Collection/Alamy
Often, as with The Good Ship Murder, popular genres are smashed together. The viewers like crime and cookery? Why not have both at the same time? One of my YouTube obsessions is the trailers for Murder, She Baked, the TV movies made by the Hallmark Channel which feature baker-cum-sleuth Hannah Swensen. Titles include A Chocolate Chip Mystery, Pie to Die For, and A Sprinkle of Deceit. The same studio also creates Garage Sale Mysteries (bric a brac emporium owner), Fixer Upper Mysteries (home renovation expert), and Morning Show Mysteries (breakfast TV hosts).
It makes one want to stroll into Channel 5 and pitch one’s own genre mash-up – perhaps a Western makeover show, The Lone Rearranger. Or how about vets in sci-fi – All Creatures Space and Time? Long live bonkers TV formats, and all who sail in them.
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