Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators is a nice, cosy drama full of cliches: episode one rev

Pity the poor writers landed with the task of making a daytime detective series set in leafy Warwickshire. How to avoid all of those clichés, not only of the setting – Shakespeare country, wood-beamed pubs – but of the genre?

How to get away from the dishevelled private investigator kicked out of the police force and now trying to make sprightly badinage with his perky new sidekick; how to make something other than the typical mildly escapist whodunit that needs to be wrapped up in 45 minutes before the afternoon school run?

In Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators (BBC One), the writers appear to have confronted these clichés by including every one of them – first and foremost by naming their private detectives Shakespeare and Hathaway. I won’t expand on the crassness of pairing a Shakespeare with his one-time wife in modern-day Stratford, other than to say that if they really had to do the whole Shakespearean thing then they should have called it Puck and Bottom.

Anyway, what we got was a nice, cosy drama in which Frank Hathaway (Mark Benton) teamed up with Lu Shakespeare (Jo Joyner) after she went to him with a case. Not only had she just sold her hair salon, but she had a good eye for detail and her fiancé had just been murdered. Peg, meet hole.

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