“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy sojourn on coffee and cognac in Paris – “thoroughly French in every way,” he found it, with less originality than we might have expected – had been suddenly cut short too, and he was hot-footing it back to the waiting arms of Denise. The dramatic rapiers were drawn. More immediately worrying was that business at the Paradise was down, badly down. Not only because a rival emporium had opened on another channel in the meantime.
Writer Bill Gallagher has left part one’s fictional ancestry from Zola behind, and darker strains of human nature were on show (you don’t expect there to be many left after Zola, usually). He didn’t reveal anything about the courtship between Katherine (Elaine Cassidy) and her new husband Tom Weston (Ben Daniels), but she’s clearly been economical with the truth about that rejection. No less mysteriously, ex-military man Tom was already fending off her loving advances, though his eyes were roving freely elsewhere on the shop floor.
not only because a rival emporium had opened on another channel in the meantime
This couple (pictured, below right) clearly have their differences of opinion, not only about selling up shop, but if they’re going to be at loggerheads a lot, we suspect it’s because they like it that way. That moment with Tom shirtless is going to take a lot of explaining, and apparently answers aren't coming immediately. But then Katherine can clearly wait for her portion of the dish best served cold.
Which makes love’s course for Denise (Joanna Vanderham) and Moray (Emun Elliott) seem a breeze by comparison. She had all of series one to get used to his egotism, so closing the Paradise to mark the fact that Moray was back in town – to give customers something to gossip about – was just the latest turn. Luckily he’d brought exotic merchandise to draw them back across the portals once they re-opened – amazing only that it had survived the journey, given the slapdash packaging on view here.
Much more fun was being had in the downstairs kitchen, with the arrival of a new cook Myrtle (Lisa Millett). A cook with character, as we know from Downton, always helps, and Myrtle’s foul mouth received a lovely putdown from Miss Audrey (Sarah Lancashire, stuck up as ever), that she'd make her best friends in a farmyard after dark. Myrtle retaliated by telling the head of ladies’ bespoke she was so dry a stick she’d break in half if a man so much as touched her. Which achieved the miracle of getting Audrey to pop the question herself to Edmund that the latter had taken 27 years or thereabouts to get around to (not) asking. That’s called speeding up a story-line.
The Paradise took a bit of a critical bashing for its first series; this new run began briskly, and it certainly looks nice on the details. Every episode looks like it’s still going to have its minor denouement to be resolved before the hour strikes, here some amateur retail sabotage. Unlike its cousin in the capital Mr Selfridge, this shopfloor drama doesn’t really do events from the wider world. But somewhere behind its scenes there’s a cauldron with something malevolent bubbling away. I can’t wait for when it explodes.
