Review of Agatha Raisin

Agatha Raisin follows a well-established but enjoyable tradition of the amateur sleuth outperforming the hapless police and finding murder here, there, and everywhere and is based on the adventures of a London-based PR star who relocates to the Cotswolds and finds the leafy and pastoral idyll to be a hotspot for all manner of deadly mayhem. This provides the backdrop in which Agatha solves (with the help of her former PR colleague, Roy, friend Sarah Bloxby, her cleaner, Gemma, the dashing military historian, James, and local aristocrat, Sir Charles) a number of murders in their village (and sometimes beyond, such as spars and rural cottages). The gang also continually come into contact (and conflict) with the sympathetic DC Bill Wong and the Clouseau-like DCI Wilkes (although how Wilkes attained this rank is anyone's guess). One issue with this type of show is that the formula is essentially repeated in every episode and to some degree the viewer accepts this (and it is part of the attraction), but there are instances in Agatha Raisin in which the episodes do feel very similar very quickly. For example, there are three episodes that basically repeat the same theme: an attractive vet, hairdresser, curate comes to the village and causes 90% of the women in said village to flock to them, but they all turn out to be swindlers and blackmailers (and are all murder victims due to this). So, the first series is very enjoyable, but the routine quality of the stories does soon set in, and a more serious issue is that the character of Agatha starts to become increasingly irksome. At one level, this is based on the slapstick aspects of her continually falling over, and this invariably just looks silly (in the Haunted House episode, why is she always stumbling and flailing about?), childish and tiresome (see Agatha climb over a wall and fall into a wheelie bin, oh, the hilarity! See Agatha misstep not once, but twice while simply walking along a garden path, ho, ho!). More substantially, as the series progresses, Agatha becomes more abrasive and rather rude at times and as such, is quite unsympathetic and even unlikable in some instances, which is a problem when the character is the central draw of the show. Furthermore, the cast dynamic changes, and this does alter the feel of the show. The relationship between Agatha and Gemma is a strength, but then Gemma inexplicably disappears to Ireland for a music festival (and gets value for money as it seemingly never ends) and sends her cousin, Toni, into Agatha's house to take her place and clean the gaff. Aside from the unlikely nature of this action. Toni's introduction is another example of the heavy-handed 'comedy' that progressively creeps into the show as she is shown to be an inept and destructive domestic force, but she nevertheless instantly joins Agatha's newly opened detective agency. However, in the space of a day Toni goes from being shown not knowing how to operate a vacuum cleaner or to possess the ability to wield a duster without destroying valuable PR award trophies to showing that she can expertly pick a lock with a hairclip and also possesses a very fortuitous photographic memory. So, Agatha Raisin is initially a good show, but the charm wears off as the recourse to having a central character continually falling over things and staggering around is not exactly the zenith of comedic sophistication and having Agatha make increasingly caustic comments to all and sundry is not a very good strategy to make her endearing.