Murder Before Evensong, Acorn TV review - death comes to the picturesque village of Champton

Rockin’ vicar the Rev Richard Coles is not only a C of E priest and former member of Bronski Beat and The Communards, but also a purveyor of crime fiction in the shape of his Canon Clement mysteries. The first of these was Murder Before Evensong, and now it has arrived on Acorn TV, where they do a lot of this sort of thing.

As its title might suggest, Murder… is rich in echoes of classic British crime-and-detection stories from way back when. There’s plenty of Agatha Christie in the mix, some Midsomer Murders, maybe a bit of Morse and perhaps a shaving or two of M R James’s celebrated ghost stories (frequently involving clerics and antiquarians). And is that Father Brown just peeking round the door?

As befits a familiar genre which pivots around the notion of a gifted amateur who always manages to keep a step or two ahead of the local coppers, the leading character is Canon Daniel Clement, played so self-effacingly by Matthew Lewis that it’s surprising people don’t keep tripping over him, having not noticed that he was there. However, in his quiet way, he’s shrewd and observant, and more likely to winkle out the truth than Plod, in the person of DS Neil Vanloo (Amit Shah, pictured below with Lewis). Vanloo is inclined to be abrupt and to leap to conclusions, which are inevitably wrong and have to be gently modified by Canon Clement.

The action, or at least the gentle trickle of events (interrupted by the occasional corpse) that winds unhurriedly towards its conclusion, is set in the bucolic village of Champton, a sort of inland Walmington-on-Sea. The population is small and everyone knows everybody else, but the village has plenty of accumulated history, not least in its antique church. Also it seems that in World War Two, Champton was a base for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill’s secret guerrilla army, and it’s the murky backwash from this that underpins the unravelling of this particular murder mystery.

While the denouement is the obligatory riddle wrapped inside an enigma, much of the show’s entertainment value stems from its very watchable cast and knowing sense of its own heritage. The story is set in 1988, so a stroll round Champton might involve sightings of such period-pieces as the Rover SD1 or the Austin Allegro. While décor and furniture are suitably Eighties-esque, you might spot Bob Monkhouse on the telly in the background, or hear The Cure’s “Pictures of You” on the soundtrack. When Canon Clement’s mother Audrey has a go at dusting a piece of paper with talcum powder in a search for fingerprints, she reveals that “I saw it on Juliet Bravo.”

And Audrey, played robustly and with foghorns blaring by Amanda Redman, is another of the show’s treasures. A redoubtable battleaxe, she perambulates around Champton like the Queen Mary under full steam, making sure everybody else knows their place. Among those whose feathers are unsurprisingly ruffled is Stella Harper (a rather majestic Tamzin Outhwaite), who may well be preparing a right royal revenge. Meanwhile she runs the local ladies' fashion shop Stella, where customers may find such venerable brands as Jaeger or Country Casuals.

The chaps have a job keeping up with such forceful women, though Adam James delivers an impeccably suave turn as Bernard, Lord de Floures, inheritor of the titular estate but plagued with troublesome and rebellious relatives. Meanwhile, behind the Canon’s mild facade lies a steely moral sense, thoroughly becoming of a good clergyman. The late-Eighties setting places the action amid the developing Aids crisis, and Clement’s high-profile support for Aids sufferers and the gay community upsets not only some of the locals, and exasperates his mother, but also offends Bishop Creggan (Ken Bones). It even earns him a string of menacing notes promising that “it’s God’s will you should burn in hell” and “the plague comes to everyone.” How times have changed… or have they?

• Murder Before Evensong is available on Acorn TV

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