Caravanning with Inspector Lynley

On Friday night we watched the Inspector Lynley Mysteries, episode 'One Guilty Deed'.


It was a fairly boring episode, although I was relieved that the natural order had been restored, i.e. Linley was back and dire comedian/celebrity golfer Jimmy Tarbuck’s offspring wasn’t going to be a regular.


The episode was set in a typical English seaside town, the sort always brings to mind the lyrics from the Morrissey song ‘Everyday is Like Sunday’

‘This is the coastal town,

That they forgot to close down'

Most seaside towns in England are like this – my hometown is, the Norfolk coast where I frequently visited as a student is littered with them, and so it would seem is Kent (or the Kent Badlands as my OH described both this and last week’s locations).

The writers got a bit carried away with their ‘class-differences’ fixation this week. “Wouldn’t it be funny to make the upperclass Lynley have to stay in a caravan!’, they must have thought. Not especially. (My family used to have a caravan and as much as I hated it, I don't like to see other people being snobbish about it).

One of the guest stars was Ester Hall, who was recently in 'Waking the Dead' as the new pathologist and in the BT adverts as the single mum starting a new relationship (or in my OH's view, a desparate woman who will have any man so that she can dump her kids on him). Anyway, it made a change to see her looking haggard and poor as a woman who had spent most of her life on a caravan park.

The 'mystery' was a bit harder to solve than last week's, where I had guessed the culprit and motive within about 10 minutes (so it didn't matter so much that I fell asleep long before the end). But it still didn't leave me feeling that satisfied, which might explain why we then tried rather desparately to watch the last series of 'Waking the Dead' which my OH was convinced we couldn't have seen every episode of, but which in fact we had and fairly decently too.