{"id":549793,"date":"2026-07-20T01:10:23","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T01:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/549793\/"},"modified":"2026-07-20T01:10:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T01:10:23","slug":"sally-phillips-eventually-tv-will-be-wall-to-wall-cosy-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/549793\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally Phillips: “Eventually, TV will be wall-to-wall cosy crime”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.<\/p>\n

Sally Phillips may be new to the world of crime-solving, but she\u2019s been a detective for decades. \u201cWhen you\u2019re acting, you are basically a detective for the character,\u201d she explains. \u201cYou\u2019re given your clue, which is your script \u2013 and you have to construct the character from that. But there\u2019s something about playing detectives that can be quite difficult for comedians, because it\u2019s neither gritty nor really funny. There\u2019s still a murder. Someone\u2019s still dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Somehow, though, comedy stars keep ending up at crime scenes. Two of the past few years\u2019 biggest murder mysteries \u2013 Ludwig<\/a> and Bookish<\/a> \u2013 are fronted by Peep Show\u2019s David Mitchell and The League of Gentlemen\u2019s Mark Gatiss \u2013 not to mention Phillips\u2019 good friend and Austin co-star Ben Miller, who\u2019s played not one but two TV detectives in Death in Paradise and Professor T. Has he passed on any detection tips?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, we didn\u2019t really talk about that,\u201d she laughs. \u201cHe just talked about how lovely it is filming in Belgium\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of us would know Phillips, 56, from sketch-comedy classic Smack the Pony, but in the decades since you\u2019d be hard pressed to name a comedy series she hasn\u2019t cropped up in \u2013 from Miranda, Veep and Friday Night Dinner to Taskmaster, Green Wing and, more recently, Big Mood.<\/p>\n

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And in any case The Hairdresser Mysteries<\/a> isn\u2019t exactly Nordic noir. From her West Midlands salon, hairdresser detective Lily Petal runs into murders of the Father Brown or Shakespeare and Hathaway variety, with little blood, gore or traumatised relatives to worry about.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the bodies on our show have their eyes shut,\u201d Phillips says. \u201cI don\u2019t know that there\u2019s much blood. It\u2019s more like doing a sudoku. You get the challenge of a puzzle without anything to make you feel bad.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn cosy crime, the murder is basically a bit of a rupture in an otherwise orderly, tightknit, fun community. The detective\u2019s job is to solve it and restore the order, giving people the sense that good sense prevails, even if \u2013 as an example from our show \u2013 someone has been pushed over a banister after giving a bad haircut.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Sally<\/p>\n

Sally Phillips as Lily Petal in The Hairdresser Mysteries.\u00a0BBC\/Mill Bay Media\/Gary Moyes<\/p>\n

Hairdressing might seem an unlikely way into crime-busting, but as presented in the show, Lily and her sidekick Clary (Charlotte Jordan) are natural confidantes. \u201cI\u2019ve spent loads of time in the hairdresser\u2019s because my hair is basically wire wool, and you tell them everything,\u201d Phillips says. \u201cAnd they tell you everything. One hairdresser told me that they had ended up cutting the hair of the wife, the mistress, the mother and the mother-in-law in a love triangle. The stress of trying to remember who had told them what\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Like her bubbly, clumsy TV sleuth Lily, Phillips isn\u2019t always on-message. While she\u2019s clearly passionate about her new series, particularly its writer, Jim Cartwright, she balks at the idea of being a daytime TV detective for as long as some of her compatriots in the genre. \u201cI like to do lots of different things, so it\u2019s not a 12-year job,\u201d she says. Instead, she suggests, one day in the future another hairdresser could take up Lily\u2019s mantle, in a \u201cDoctor Who scenario\u201d.<\/p>\n

And while she\u2019s a passionate defender of the BBC, she\u2019s not afraid to critique some of its scheduling decisions. Take her sitcom Austin, also airing on BBC One on Fridays.<\/p>\n

\"WK<\/p>\n

Sally Phillips with Austin co-stars Ben Miller and Michael Theo.\u00a0BBC<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s series two, and it\u2019s a sitcom starring, obviously, me and Ben Miller, but also Michael Theo, an autistic actor who captured the hearts of Australians in Love on the Spectrum,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019ve done one series and got a really good response from the public, but series two has been shoved in the graveyard shift, like 10.40pm on a Friday. It\u2019s really a pre-watershed show.<\/p>\n

\u201cMichael\u2019s a great performer,\u201d she adds, then pauses. \u201cActually, he\u2019s now doing a cosy crime series as well. So all three of us are playing detectives! He\u2019s playing the head of the dog unit in a rural crime department in Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, it\u2019s the smart career move these days. Andy Warhol once wrote that in the future, everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. Perhaps today we can predict that one day soon, every single actor will have their own cosy crime vehicle.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat will be our response to a burning world,\u201d Phillips agrees. \u201cIt\u2019ll be, \u2018Give us something where everything is happy in the end!\u2019 Eventually, TV will be wall-to-wall cosy crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hairdresser Mysteries and Austin air Fridays on BBC One and are available now to watch in full on BBC iPlayer.<\/p>\n

The latest issue of Radio Times is out on Tuesday \u2013 subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"1-SE-31-1-Cover\"<\/p>\n

Check out more of our Drama<\/a> coverage or visit our TV Guide<\/a> and Streaming Guide<\/a> to find out what’s on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Sally Phillips may be new to the world of crime-solving,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-549793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}