Grantchester, review, episode 1: 'delightfully neat'

Sometimes, resistance is futile. Much as I would love to come across as a sneering aesthete disdainful of cosy period drama like Grantchester (ITV), I just can’t. Because it’s good.

Part one, scene one showed a gorgeous, square-jawed young man (James Norton) larking about by a river with an equally gorgeous, dark-haired woman (Morven Christie) sporting a pastel blue tea-dress and sublime lipstick. It was 1953. They got wet. Perhaps they were in love, perhaps not; we needed to know more.

We were soon at a nice old railway station with some jolly vintage steam trains puffing about. There were sit-up bicycles, noble church buildings, timeless tones of russet brown, wistful autumnal green, soulful maroons. Oh, I’m such a pushover.

Turns out the fellow was a vicar. An adulterous solicitor was dead, supposedly a suicide but then maybe not. We needed to know more.

Lord, it even had Robson Green, the genius responsible for Extreme Fishing, as a hard-bitten police detective called Geordie. Stop it, I’m hooked. Sign me up. I’ll give you my cat and house to see what happens next.

Here’s some background. Grantchester is based on the stories of James Runcie, son of Robert, the late Archbishop of Canterbury. Its crime-solving cleric draws on Robert Runcie’s early career as a vicar. It’s Father Brown, but with the considerably better-looking Norton as a sleuthing man of the cloth.

Delightfully neat and economical of plot, it’s Cluedo with cassocks and just enough noir for the modern palate. Victoria sponge with a tablespoon of battery acid. Better still, the lawyer’s killing pretty much conforms to Orwell’s definition of the “perfect” English murder. Middle-class, professional, a whiff of sex, a crime that comes to light slowly. I’m weak and need salvation.

Oh, and the Rev and the woman, an heiress, are utterly besotted with each other, but their romance is doomed. James Norton and Robson Green by contrast, become pals for life, investigating far more foul play than ought to happen in such a sweet Cambridgeshire setting.

So resistance is futile. Much as I’d like to witter on about television drama needing to reflect real life, I can’t be doing with it.

It’s a grim October in the early 21st century. British warplanes are over northern Iraq. Newsnight is presented by a cadaverous Yoda in an inappropriate suit. You can’t buy a flat and apple crumble makes you fat. There could be a worse antidote than Grantchester.

– James Runcie: 'My father – the Archbishop of Canterbury – would have been bemused and amused by Grantchester'