Secret Hair Review – Sally Phillips gives us a lot of bananas on TV all afternoon | TV & radio

Gather you rosebuds and clench you bumcheeks, for there is a rumbling in the villages of Crimeshire. A hairdresser has arrived in the fictional village of Blossom Vale with a set of hair dryers (used by top brands in London but it seems they now want peace, quiet and “my own place”) and the keys to a rundown high street salon. Lily Petal (Sally Phillips) is cock-a-hoop and her shopping. “It’s like a time capsule!” wears new assistant Clary (Charlotte Jordan), who is surprised at the amount of browns and oranges. “It hasn’t been touched since the 1970s,” laments Lily, who, with her watches, hoodies and music lovers Hot Chocolate collection, is something of her time.

But it’s true! A busy man is found, a squid, near his stepladder. Danger? Or the most disgusting murder? Lily’s lungs to the magnifying glass.

“Have you solved any cases before?” Clary asked as her boss examined the evidence and told the villagers where he lived in the morning. Lily’s eyes narrowed. Take a break. “Let’s just say,” he says in a loud voice, “I helped sometimes to fix things . . .”

Therefore. The Hairdresser Mysteries is a simple crime series about a mysterious hairdresser who solves mysteries. The first episode is called Storm in a Teacup and is mainly about a rare teacup. The other section is called Gym and it is about the gym. Characters include a famous weatherman named Jonty Starr, a clown named Parky, and Mrs. Crudd. If your bag is your bag that likes to destroy the ball, the desire to hold and the uncomfortable people who are beaten by household appliances, you have come to the right salon. Four sugars, dear? Amazing. Now crack open this cap and prepare to have your powers approved by what is, without a doubt, the oldest TV drama of living memory.

“Extraordinary?” you grab the bottom of your hair dryer with the caps. It’s true that it’s amazing. Good point, I reply. But the strangeness on display here isn’t the everyday wonder of, say, Father Brown or Doctors (RIP). The Hairdresser Mysteries is banana.

Where do we start? How about a few minutes into the opening scene, when we go to Valhalla With Chips!, a Viking-themed place where costumed men in horned helmets, breastplates and bearded hammocks deliver battered sausages in tiny cardboard boats? Or maybe the bit where Lily and Clary discuss the merits of brutal bludgeoning while dancing the Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep?

The heart is one of constant joy. Even by good crime standards, The Hairdresser Mysteries is a solid piece of snuggle. It’s like being attacked by a Womble.

Each episode ends with a soundtrack to 70s hits like Sister Sledge’s We Are Family or T-Rex’s I Love to Boogie. Everyone just laughs and even though the killers are good eggs, everyone shows their sympathy with a cup of tea before promising Lily that they won’t do it again, miss, honestly.

When you are caught up in these nightmares, you realize that you are starting to have fun. And why, eh? There are frosted buttons, cheap wigs and glass pullers thrown from the minstrels’ glasses. There are worshipers everywhere. There is a line: “I’m sorry I’m late, I was beating my lashes.” When the police found the body in the cobblestones, they said: “Bloomin’ ‘eck! Guy Henry looks like an antiques dealer and he’s handsome, his eyebrows fluttering in the wind from his fake moustache.”

Summary: The Hairdresser Mysteries is both brilliant and sinister. It’s an insult. God knows what it thinks it’s playing. But then, we don’t have to think about it. Ours is to marvel at the audacity of a series that has successfully placed a whoopee cushion under sanity’s ass and then run away laughing.

What is that, Lily? A corpse found in the hermit’s freezer? Bloomin’ ‘eck!