It’s hard to disagree with Phyllis Logan’s feeling that the body that is TV cosy crime dramas should be taken out the back, shot through the head and buried in a shallow grave.

Well, she doesn’t quite say those actual words. But ask the Downton and Lovejoy star to sit in front of a show which features a crime solver protagonist who answers to the name of Vera, Blanc, Hetty, Agatha, Marple, Poirot, Judith, Jessica – and either a Rosemary or a Thyme, or a Dalziel or a Pascoe – and the actor’s most likely reaction will be ‘Over my dead body.’

Now, despite this disliking of the soft crime genre, Logan is set to star in her own series Murder Most Puzzling. This suggests two things. She fancies the idea of fronting a telly series for the first time more than she dislikes the conceit. And you don’t need to be a TV sleuth to work out that having your name on top of the titles guarantees a nice little earner.

Phyllis Logan in Downton Abbey with Jim Carter (Image: free)We don’t know the specific reasons why the one-time head housekeeper Mrs Hughes in Downton doesn’t like cosy crime drama, as she said in the Radio Times, but surely she suspects the genre to be an oxymoron. As we all know, crime isn’t cosy at all. It’s horrific, often featuring acts of evil. Yet, television insists on re-producing nonsensical daftness, knowing that some (OK, some millions) of viewers buy into a formula that’s older than Agatha Christie’s........

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