The Hairdresser Mysteries, starring Sally Phillips as amateur sleuth Lily Petal, is an audacious daytime drama that even by cosy crime standards is an unyielding slab of snuggle. The show aired on BBC One and is now available on iPlayer.
Plot and Setting
Lily Petal arrives in the fictional village of Blossom Vale armed with a blow-dried backstory—she worked with fancy types in London but now wants peace, quiet, and 'a place of me own'. She purchases the high street's dilapidated salon, which her assistant Clary (Charlotte Jordan) describes as 'like a time capsule'. The salon hasn't been touched since the 1970s, and Lily herself, with her corduroy flares and diaphanous headscarves, is something of a time capsule.
Soon, a local busybody is found squished next to her stepladder. Lily lunges for a magnifying glass, and when Clary asks if she has solved crimes before, Lily responds with a twinkle: 'Let's just say I used to help sort things out sometimes.'
Bizarre Elements
The first episode, Storm in a Teacup, is mainly about a missing teacup. A later episode is called Gym and is about a gym. Characters include a flamboyant celebrity weatherman called Jonty Starr, a sparky called Parky, and Mrs Crudd. The show features a Viking-themed takeaway called Valhalla With Chips!, where wardrobe-size men in horned helmets serve battered sausages in tiny cardboard longships. Lily and Clary discuss a brutal bludgeoning while dancing to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.
The mood is harrowingly relentless cheer. Even by cosy crime standards, The Hairdresser Mysteries is an unyielding slab of snuggle, like being body-slammed by a Womble. Each episode ends with a window-rattling singalong to 70s pop staples such as Sister Sledge's We Are Family or T-Rex's I Love to Boogie. Everyone keeps laughing, and even the murderers are essentially good eggs, each expressing remorse over a mug of tea before promising Lily they'll never do it again.
Cast and Performances
Guy Henry turns up as a twitchily eccentric antiques dealer and is magnificent, his eyebrows rippling in the breeze generated by his enormous false moustache. Characters include vicars everywhere, and there are iced buns, cheap wigs, and influencers in sunglasses being hurled from minstrels' galleries. The discovery of a corpse in a belfry is greeted by police with the words: 'Bloomin' 'eck!'
The show is both brilliant and awful—'brawful', as one might say. It is the strangest daytime TV drama in living memory, effectively placing a whoopee cushion under sanity's buttocks then running away laughing.
The Hairdresser Mysteries aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now.
