Have you ever wondered what became of Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman after he followed Martha back from Saint Marie to London to declare his undying love for her?
Six years on from that emotional finale in Death In Paradise, now is your chance to catch up with the pair in their new life, not in London, but on the beautiful Devonshire coast.
“I think both of them found the pace of life in London and with the Metropolitan Police a bit daunting, a little too chaotic and crazy,” explains Kris Marshall, who plays the likeable cop. “He is more suited to a bucolic lifestyle, rather than the gritty backdrop of policing in London.
“Martha always had the dream to open up her own restaurant. So they made the decision to move back down to where she was born and grew up.”
Here, Martha sets out to pursue her dream of running her own restaurant and Humphrey joins the local police force where he meets his team – ultra-smart DS Esther Williams (Zahra Ahmadi), slow but dedicated PC Kelby Hartford (Dylan Llewellyn) and sharp-tongued office support Margo Martins (Felicity Montagu).
“I got the phone call in the middle of the pandemic saying, ‘We’re thinking about making this series’ and I was so happy,” recalls Sally Bretton, who plays Martha.
“Humphrey was a very popular detective and people care about him. I got asked a lot about what happened and whether they lived happily ever after. It’s lovely to watch how their holiday romance has deepened into a relationship which is now more grown-up and real. Hopefully, people will enjoy coming on that journey with them.”
However, moving in with the mother-in-law is not easy. She finds Humphrey awkward and he thinks she is domineering.“Having moved in with his mother-in-law, there are certain challenges,” acknowledges Marshall.
“Wherever he goes, he leaves a sort of mini tidal wave of madness behind him and he’s causing that to ripple through the village of Shipton Abbott.”
Each week, Humphrey and his team have a bizarre and baffling case to solve including an entire family disappearing without a trace, a serial arsonist with a mysterious penchant for nursery rhymes and, in this first episode, a woman claiming she was attacked by a suspect from the 17th century.
“It was very easy slipping back into Humphrey’s character,” says Marshall. “He’s a comfortable, lovely old friend. It’s just delightful to play him again.
“The reason I left Death In Paradise was because my kids were starting school and their home is in England and I would have loved to have stayed out there filming in Guadeloupe (which doubles for the fictional Saint Marie) but it’s been absolutely brilliant being so close to home.
“I got to go home at weekends to see my family and during the school holiday they came down to visit me. The fictional Shipton Abbott is supposed to be in Devon but we filmed in Cornwall.
“This show shares the DNA of its stablemate – Death In Paradise – and obviously there are parallels, as there should be, because we still want to retain the feel-good factor that that show has and makes it so popular, but also it would be very lazy to make a carbon copy and just transpose it to Devon. And it wouldn’t necessarily work either.
“This is a completely different show. I would say it’s maybe a little quirkier. In Death In Paradise it was always about murder but in this we don’t have so many deaths. We have more kidnapping, sheep rustling, art thefts, ghostly apparitions... It’s great because it’s revisiting a lot of the same feelings and processes, and the structure of the show is very similar, but it’s fresh. It retains the brilliant sort of ‘whodunit?’ element.
“When I was in Death In Paradise, I always tried to give it a bit of a human element. It wasn’t too gruesome or gory. Not everything has to be shot down a dark alley in Sweden. As great as those sort of shows are, you need the Yin to that Yang. With there being many gritty and brilliant cop dramas out there, I think our kind of shows sail down a different path and make it more fun and more tongue-in-cheek.
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