Miss Scarlet and the Duke: What ’ave we ’ere then? A feminist crimebuster in a bonnet and bodice

This genre piece stays expertly on the chaste side of parody
Will-they-won’t-they: Kate Phillips stars as Eliza Scarlet with Stuart Martin playing Inspector William Wellington (
Alistair McKay31 March 2020

Ah, the comfort of period drama. We are in foggy London. There are cobbles and doorways and a virtual St Paul’s. There are ’orses ’ooves clip-cloppin’, and urchins in the shadows.

We are in an ’ouse, pullin’ back the curtains to reveal a woman who is not in the best of ’elf.

Before the woman stands our heroine, Miss Scarlet (Kate Phillips), soon to inherit her father’s private detective agency and pursue a will-they-won’t-they odd-couple Mulder-and-Scully corseted professional romance with William “The Duke” Wellington (Stuart Martin) of the Yard.

But at this moment, she is being rather more mercenary, pocketing the glass eye of a dead wench.

Except the wench is not dead, merely drunk, and now is up and about, an angry Cyclops tart. It is, to be fair, a breach of Victorian manners to steal a lady’s peeper, even if the lady is a tramp. A fight ensues. Surprisingly, Miss Scarlet, the lady detective, is skilled in combat, subduing the wench, before chiding the urchin. “I want them dead,” she says. “Not drunk. Next time, check for a pulse.”

Kate Phillips plays detective Miss Scarlet
Bernard Walsh / Alibi

It is quite the set-up, but the contextual development doesn’t stop there. Miss Scarlet returns home and finds a rude woman and a nervous man in her drawing room. The rude woman scolds Miss Scarlet for taking to the streets of London on her own. London is no place for an unaccompanied lady.

“The streets have changed since I was a girl,” she says. “The crime. The filth. A general miasma of loose morality. And those contraptions, what are they called?”

“Is it bicycles, mother?” says the nervous man. What ’ave we ’ere, then? Created by Trollied writer Rachael New, Miss Scarlet Etc is that very modern thing, a genre piece in a feminist bonnet, delivered in a tone that stays expertly on the chaste side of parody, while not taking itself entirely seriously.

Television shows in 2020

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A more po-faced production wouldn’t start out with a case in which the identity of a protagonist is shielded by an obviously fake beard, or take quite so much relish in its portrayal of the cesspits of Soho, a den of iniquity that is more like the Wild West, with a hellfire preacher ranting about Sodom, Gomorrah and Babylon, while inside the saloon birds in bloomers tempt an audience of rowdy inadequates with the very notion of their voluminous under-crackers.

And Miss Scarlet wouldn’t keep greeting the gold-toothed West Indian criminal pimp kingpin as “Mr Moses” every time, if not to prompt the punchline: “It’s just Moses.”

So yes, there is a joke, and the characters are in on it. But they keep a straight face, mostly, even when a ghost appears, even when the one-eyed woman appears in the cesspit winking behind an eyepatch, even when every character Miss Scarlet meets feels the need to suggest that wherever she is going is no place for a lady, even a Scarlet one with a working knowledge of laudanum.

Miss Scarlet and the Duke airs tonight, 9pm on Alibi

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