A curious fact of life is that while it has been illegal on and off for the past few years to for example go to a coffee shop and sit inside of it and eat a croissant, it is not just legal to buy pot but little else is sold in much of Toronto. This is lost on me, someone who has not only been pregnant or nursing for the last 500 years, but also whose drug of choice is, as we have well established here, sleep-inducing British television programs.
Drugs are, however, the theme of the “Hetty Wainthropp Investigates” episode, “Childsplay” (1998). Drugs-drugs, no mere cannabis this. The show has an occasional tendency to dip into afterschool special mode, and here it does so with a vengeance. The plot: Hetty has a relative, an early-adolescent boy named Tom. Tom has just started at a new school, where he is bullied for having moved from the south of England, which is apparently the crime of the century, and Hetty is brought in to sort this out. There’s even a gym teacher who, with a tinge of homophobia, taunts the boy for being from the soft south. Like I said I have no idea. Bournemouth is where “Waiting for God” is set, whereas some other shows are set in the north, I generally but clearly not always like the north-type ones more, but as for the non-television aspect of this I cannot say.
Crucial to note: Tom’s mother is played by Siobhan Finneran aka Janice Garvey from “Benidorm” omg. Janice but young! Yet already the mother of a son the age of Michael on “Benidorm.” Wild! And do you know who plays her husband? The actor who plays the gay bookseller on the third “Midsomer Murders,” the one who has an affair with, gasp, a woman. This is particularly incredible because he is the exact opposite of Steve “Mick” Pemberton, her “Benidorm” husband (and, as regular readers know too well, my “Benidorm” crush).
But guess who plays the school principle?
None other than the vicar from “Waiting for God”! What’s he doing there? Not a whole lot, it’s a small role.
I don’t really like the expression, so bad it’s good, but how else to describe the episode “Childsplay”? In the process of figuring out how an ecstasy tablet ended up in Tom’s pocket, Hetty uncovers a sinister all-the-drugs gang at the school Tom attends. She figures this out by, I’m not even kidding, posing as a lunch lady and noting that some impolite boys are wearing leather jackets indicative of gang membership. The ringleader’s jacket has an image of a bomb on the back of it. His super-secret gang code name? “Bomber.” Good detective work Hetty!
By Season 3 it’s like the show has given up any pretence that Hetty isn’t Hyacinth. It’s not just that both have permanently offscreen adult sons, or that they never bothered giving Hetty even slightly different hair. It’s her mannerisms on the phone. Something seems to have happened where her husband isn’t onscreen anymore either. Is the actor unwell? I need to google this. Why? It was 1998, why do I need to know this? I do though.
Anyway the pretense that Hyacinth Bucket dismantles a drug gang is sublime. The inadvertently (?) campy gym teacher, the overall casting, the striking resemblance between Tom and the boy on “Fawlty Towers” who doesn’t like the chips, the enviable rich-person’s house that Janice and the not-actually-gay bookseller are living in, I mean, I mean. The dorkiest episode of the frumpiest show. If you’re going to go to sleep early do it properly.