M.C. Beaton

Agatha Raisin creator M C Beaton dies at 83

Prolific writer M C Beaton, creator of the much-loved Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth crime series, has died.

Benedicte Page, The Bookseller, 31st December 2019

One sitcom I won't be sticking with is Sky One's Agatha Raisin and in fact I'm surprised I made it through the first episode. I have to say I didn't have a lot of knowledge of the central character played by Ashley Jensen as I missed the pilot episode 'The Quiche of Death.' But I was intrigued enough to give the first episode partly as I believed it to be a pastiche of Agatha Christie whodunnits and Midsomer Murders-esque small town crime shows. How wrong I was, as instead of giving us a gentler A Touch of Cloth, writers Stewart Harcourt and M.C. Beaton seem more focused on concentrating on their heroine's love life. From what I could ascertain from this first episode Agatha was a rather ditzy PR woman who people believed had a good ability to solve crimes. However a lot of what happened in this instalment saw Agatha stumbling around in the dark for the majority of the time before realising that the answer was under her nose from the outset. In fact Agatha's main aim throughout the episode seemed to be to snag James Lacey (Jamie Glover), the attached man of her dreams who was posing as her husband as part of an undercover operation to root out the murderer of the head of the local rambling society. I personally feel as if crime shows such as Midsomer Murders are in need of some sort of spoof but Agatha Raisin doesn't even attempt to do that. I found it instead to be a strange mix of crime drama, romantic comedy and full on slapstick humour with none of these elements really being given time to breathe. In fact I would go as far as to say that the funniest sequence in this first episode of Agatha Raisin was the sequence in which Agatha was trapped inside a Wendy House with several other characters. It's a shame that the show is such a dud as I'm a fan of Ashley Jensen but she's ill-served here by a rather annoying character and a poorly written script. The rest of the cast don't fare much better with Matthew Horne being given a one-note character as Agatha's camp assistant from London. In fact it's only Katy Wix as Agatha's formidable cleaning lady Gemma who's able to rise above the awful material and produce something vaguely resembling comedy. Apart from Wix's performance there's very little positives that I can bestow on Agatha Raisin and between this show and Rovers it seems that Sky One has currently gone off the boil when it comes to producing decent comedies.

Matt, The Custard TV, 12th June 2016