Faces of Successville
If, like us, you’re enjoying BBC Three’s new game-show sitcom whodunnit hybrid Murder in Successville, you’re no doubt already looking forward to this week’s episode on Wednesday evening.
Starring Tom Davis on magnificent form as rough-n-ready DI Sleet, the series recruits a special celebrity guest each week to act as a rookie cop in training, following Sleet around to investigate the death of one of Successville’s celebrity inhabitants, which has invariably been caused by one of the other residents.
With big name rookies including Dermot O’Leary, Greg James, Jamie Laing, Deborah Meaden, this week’s guest Kimberly Wyatt and next week’s Louis Smith, press attention has understandably been focused on their guest appearances, and reactions to the gallery of grotesques who inhabit MiS weird and wonderful, partially improvised world.
Not us, of course. As we’ve been telling you for weeks, this is a TVO show through-and-through. Joining Davis in the series have been a cavalcade of impressionists and comic actors, including the brilliant Liam Hourican as Gordon Ramsay (and a spot on Simon Cowell in last week’s episode), as well as delightful turns from Jenny Bede, Luke Kempner, Nick Mohammad, Tom Stourton, Jason Lewis, Marek Larwood, Rachel Paris, Frances Barber and Nico Tartarowicz.
But also along for the ride have been Cariad Lloyd (as Darcey Bussell, Justin Bieber, Cheryl Fernandez Versini and Miley Cyrus), Colin Hoult (as Jimmy Carr, Gary Barlow), Tony Way (as Harry Styles), Harry Peacock (as Niall Horan) and in this week’s episode: Dan Skinner as top-notch surgeon Bob Geldolf, and Gemma Whelan as Nurse Adele.
The TVO connections continue with Tom Meeten appearing as Richard Hammond in next week’s final episode, and the whole run having been scored by Waen Shepherd. And surely we don’t need to tell you how fantastic they all are, considering we’ve spent the last five and half years doing just that on a regular basis, but we’ll do it anyway: they’re amazing, and make an already superb show even better.
We couldn’t let all these connections go uncelebrated, and as the series approaches its conclusion, we’ve bagsied some exclusive shots of our regulars from the good folk at Tiger Aspect, who produce the show, which you can see below.
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
- © Tiger Aspect / Ollie Upton
So if you haven’t given Murder in Successville your full attention yet, we cannot recommend it highly enough, and urge you to take a look asap. All previous episodes are available on iPlayer now. The second, featuring Greg James, might be our favourite one to date – we’ll never look at jammie dodgers the same way ever again – but every edition has lots to enjoy, and as episode one is only available until 9th June, when the 30-day rule starts to kick in, we suggest you get into that one while you can.
Episode Five, Dr Death, airs at 10pm on Wednesday via BBC Three, with Episode Six, Orangefinger, airing next week at the same time. We’ll bring you an exclusive clip of that episode later this week, so don’t forget to tune in and keep peeling.
Tell us what you think!