The absolute highlight of this one was Mrs C's take on poetry!
I studied at Cambridge in the 60s, and there were more aspiring undergrad poets than you could ever poke a stick at. I was often invited to poetry readings, and attended occasionally rather than regularly. Some were good, some were indifferent, and rather too many were direct precursors of the Vogons - shall we say "the ones that came before".
So there was a lot of "emperor's new clothes" stuff about someone getting up, reading turgid prose at a strangely staggered pace, and calling it "poetry", which we were all supposed to appreciate and applaud. Old Mrs C went straight through it.
Apart from that, the detective plot has now taken absolute second place to the low-budget soapie story about the central characters, which occupies most of the air time. Some preciously thin plot is just allowed to squeeze in edgewise here and there. Sad-act Geordie just shuffles around in his dirty raincoat in a season of the year when the women are all wearing summer dresses, and as for Will, his name seems to be a contraction of Be-Will-dered, as he tries to cope with the world all around him.
Just think of how, when we watch a great detective story such as Morse, things like his relationships with Lewis and Strange, the absolute tangled messes he so frequently gets into with women, his crosswords and opera, his red Jaguar, and of course his beer, these all form a colourful and characterful backdrop, while the plot remains front and centre. In Grantchester the plot is now somewhere lost in the lost grass, all but forgotten, not that it ever was much of a plot. Instead we worry endlessly about Will, and will he or won't he?
And the early 60s was an era when the Church of England was still very much adamant that sex outside of marriage was a terrible sin, and here is Will - well, I won't make a spoiler of it, but we have seen it all from previous episodes.
So it continues to stumble on, as our Will to live steadily fades before it.
3/10 this week, and only because of Mrs C.