I FELT more than a touch of weary cynicism when I saw yet another so-called cosy crime series was coming to our screens (A Taste for Murder, ITV1, Wednesdays). It’s a genre that has been flogged to death, including by myself in this column. However! The setting for this six-part series (featuring a new suspicious death each episode) is a restaurant on sun-soaked Capri.
The aesthetic is everything you would hope for: a surfeit of lemons, Italian café music, glorious cobalt blue skies, and impossibly glamorous people. There is also a culinary theme as the background to every episode, riffing on the glories of Italian food. They do miss a trick by not including the Barese classic Spaghetti all’Assassina — quite literally, killer spaghetti — but at least Uovo in Purgatorio makes the cut.
Warren Brown (you may remember him from Line of Duty) stars as DCI Joe Mottram, a police detective and grieving widower, who arrives on the island with his teenage daughter to visit his in-laws. They run a restaurant, and I did have to smile at this family of feeders, who reminded me strongly of my own Italian in-laws.
The family drama, centred around Joe’s struggling relationship with his daughter, is almost secondary to the horrific hammer murder which happens at the start. A less than cosy beginning, but one which our hero Joe is determined to help solve, by assisting the Italian police inspector Lara Sarrancino, who is as beautiful as the sublime surroundings. Enjoyable and diverting — although it did make me exceptionally hungry.
World’s Tallest Man: The next chapter (Channel 4, 27 April) is the ongoing story of Sultan Kösen. At 8 feet 3 inches tall, and weighing 26 stone, he’s the current holder of the Guinness World Record, since 2009. This documentary provides an insight into how he has fared since then, and it is a sad story of deteriorating physical health and personal loss.
The tumour that caused his gigantism was treated in 2010, but he still struggles with multiple health issues, and is blighted by debilitating knee pain. “Only me and God know what I’ve suffered,” he says.
While the insight into his world is fascinating, I have ethical concerns about how his life has been made a spectacle, as if he were a P. T. Barnum exhibit. On the other hand, Mr Kösen himself feels grateful for the opportunities that his condition has given him. For much of his early life he was ostracised and shamed, whereas now he has status.
He is the tallest man in the world, and yet, “People looked down on me.” As the programme shows, the cost of holding the record is a heavy burden to bear.
