CHRISTOPHER STEVENS WEEKEND TV: Cheers! It’s always wine o’clock in these soapy crime mysteries

Clean Sweep 

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Buckingham Palace With Alexander Armstrong

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Any time is wine o’clock in a good noir mystery. Whether you’re having dinner with the family or frantically scrubbing blood out of clothes, pour yourself a brimming glass of red.

Mother-of-three Shelly (Charlene McKenna) was dressed in just bra and knickers when we first met her, in Clean Sweep (BBC4). She was desperate to wash her blouse, which was splattered in gore, but she’d taken the time to pour herself a generous glug of vino first.

Clean Sweep is balanced at that satisfying point where crime drama tips over into soap opera. In a town outside Dublin, Shelly and husband Jason (Barry Ward) have money problems and marriage problems — she suspects he’s having an affair with his flirty colleague.

Shelly Mohan (Charlene McKenna) and Jason Mohan (Barry Ward) in Clean Sweep

She’s not above a bit of flirting herself with a dad from the parent-teacher association. That’s risky, because the other mums (and the teacher) are all agog for gossip.

Her older boy is smoking dope, her daughter is starting to discover boys, and her youngest has a debilitating medical condition. 

Scrap metal of the night 

Biker Guy Martin had to dodge holes in the Medellin streets, on Our Guy In Colombia (Ch4), because thieves steal the manhole covers and sell them by the ton to dealers. ‘Kids fall in and get washed out to sea,’ he said, wide-eyed. 

There’s so much going on that Shelly never gets a moment to herself — she can’t even clean the cooker without her husband pouncing and making love to her before she has a chance to take off her Marigolds.

All that domestic activity makes it easier to believe in the wild plot twist, when a mysterious man from Shelly’s past starts stalking her. She agrees to meet him at a seedy hotel, then shoots him (because, naturally, she keeps a revolver in her handbag).

That’s only half the plot twist: hubby Jason, a policeman usually working on domestic cases, is assigned to the investigation as lead detective. It’s his first murder hunt, and his wife’s the killer. That’s bound to be awkward.

Clean Sweep has its silly moments but, if you enjoy family thrillers, this one does everything the genre demands. It’s certainly better than that awful Danny Dyer serial on Ch5 earlier this month — I’m still recovering from the trauma of its endless sex scene with the Ed Sheeran soundtrack.

Shelly can count herself lucky she has only three children and not 13, unlike Louisa Thynne, daughter of an 18th-century Marquess of Bath. 

Her story was told by Alexander Armstrong in Buckingham Palace (Ch5), which traces the history of romances and intrigues at the royal abode. 

Alexander Armstrong in Buckingham Palace (Ch5) traces the history of romances and intrigues at the royal abode 

Bought by King George III for his bride Queen Charlotte in 1761, the pile was a snip at £28,000, or about £4.5 million in today’s money. 

Xander calculated it would now be worth £2 billion, though how that figure was arrived at wasn’t clear. It’s not as if he could check online to see what other palaces are fetching around Westminster and Belgravia this year.

He couldn’t suppress a grin as he described the royal wedding. Charlotte first saw her bridegroom just six hours before the ceremony, and she was so exhausted by seasickness after her voyage from Germany she could barely stand up. Her diamond-encrusted wedding dress was too big, and kept slipping down — so that, Alexander read, ‘spectators knew as much of her upper half as the King himself’.

Once she got her gowns to fit, Charlotte set about holding balls for aristocratic debutantes, which is where the 21-year-old Louisa snagged her husband. With a zebra and an elephant roaming the gardens, they must have been quite some parties.

Plenty more colour was shoehorned into this episode, the first of eight, though there was too much Horrible Histories emphasis on the palace plumbing. We did learn how to make ice cream with Parmesan cheese, a royal recipe I think I can live without.

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