Gather ye rosebuds and clench ye bumcheeks, for there be rumblings in rural Crimeshire. A hairdresser has arrived in the fictional village of Blossom Vale armed with a blow-dried backstory (worked with fancy types in London but apparently now wants peace, quiet and “a place of me own”) and the keys to the high street’s dilapidated salon. Lily Petal (Sally Phillips) is cock-a-hoop with her purchase. “It’s like a time capsule!” hoots capable new assistant Clary (Charlotte Jordan), boggling at the salon’s abundance of browns and oranges. “It hasn’t been touched since the 1970s,” grins Lily, who, with her corduroy flares, diaphanous headscarves and penchant for the collected works of Hot Chocolate, is something of a time capsule herself.
But hark! A local busybody has been found, squished, next to her stepladder. Accident? Or murder most foul? Lily lunges for a magnifying glass.
“Have you solved crimes before?” asks Clary as her boss chirpily examines evidence and grills villagers regarding their whereabouts on the morning of. Lily’s eyes narrow. A pause. “Let’s just say,” she says with a twinkle, “I used to help sort things out sometimes …”
So. The Hairdresser Mysteries is a cosy crime series about a mysterious hairdresser who solves mysteries. The first episode is called Storm in a Teacup and is mainly about a missing teacup. A later episode is called Gym and is about a gym. Characters include a flamboyant celebrity weatherman called Jonty Starr, a sparky called Parky, and Mrs Crudd. If wrecking-ball literalism, catch-all nostalgia and visibly uncomfortable character actors being battered to death with household implements are your bag, you’ve come to the right salon. Four sugars, dear? Marvellous. Now plonk this cape on and prepare to have your senses permed by what is, without doubt, the strangest daytime TV drama in living .
“Strange?” you snap from under your hooded hairdryer. “Of course it’s strange. Daytime TV dramas are by their very nature strange, untroubled as they are by ‘normal telly’ notions of believability.” Fair point, I reply. But the strangeness demonstrated here is not the everyday strangeness of, say, Father Brown or Doctors (RIP). The Hairdresser Mysteries is bananas.
Where to begin? How about a few minutes into the opening episode, when we pay a visit to Valhalla With Chips!, a Viking-themed takeaway in which wardrobe-size men clad in horned helmets, breastplates and beard-hammocks serve up battered sausages in tiny cardboard longships? Or perhaps the bit where Lily and Clary discuss the finer points of a brutal bludgeoning while dancing to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep?
The mood is one of harrowingly relentless cheer. Even by cosy crime standards, The Hairdresser Mysteries is an unyielding slab of snuggle. It’s like being body-slammed by a Womble.
Each episode ends with a window-rattling singalong to a 70s pop staple such as Sister Sledge’s We Are Family or T-Rex’s I Love to Boogie. Everyone keeps laughing and even the murderers are essentially good eggs, each expressing remorse over a mug of tea before promising Lily they’ll never do it again, missus, honest.
Caught up in this waking fever dream, you realise you’re beginning to enjoy yourself. And why not, eh? There are iced buns, cheap wigs and influencers in sunglasses being hurled from minstrels’ galleries. There are vicars everywhere. There is the line: “Sorry I’m late, I was worming my whippets.” The discovery of a corpse in a belfry is greeted by police with the words: “Bloomin’ ’eck!” Guy Henry turns up as a twitchily eccentric antiques dealer and is magnificent, his eyebrows rippling in the breeze generated by his enormous false moustache.
In summary: The Hairdresser Mysteries is both brilliant and awful. It’s brawful. God knows what it thinks it’s playing at. But then, ours is not to reason why. Ours is to marvel at the audacity of a series that has effectively placed a whoopee cushion under sanity’s buttocks then run away laughing.
What’s that, Lily? A corpse has been discovered in a hermit’s freezer? Bloomin’ ’eck!
