Sally Bretton on Beyond Paradise, Not Going Out and the one thing about Death in Paradise that made her scream

Detective drama Beyond Paradise is back for a fourth outing, continuing the adorable love story between Martha Lloyd and Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman that began on Death in Paradise in 2016.

The pair, played by Sally Bretton and Kris Marshall, finally tied the knot in the Christmas 2025 episode, and are now beginning married life together. However, it’s not plain sailing for the newlyweds, as the new season opens with them waking up to discover their houseboat home has drifted away from its moorings and is ominously taking on water.

For Bretton, moving the Goodmans off the boat and potentially into a home on dry land was something of a mixed blessing. “I do love the boat, and it is fun, but it’s so hard to film inside it,” she says. “I did like sitting on the deck and doing the scenes there, but it is a bit clustered inside. So it’s bittersweet.

“We were also at the mercy of the tides. Sometimes, that beautiful vista outside Anne’s [Martha’s mother] cottage that looks so idyllic would just be mud flats. You’re trying to fit filming in when the water’s high enough, as well as the weather being in the right place and all of that stuff.”

Another challenge for the Beyond Paradise cast and crew is the growing popularity of the series has meant that their shooting locations in and around Looe in Cornwall – doubling for the fictional town of Shipton Abbott – are often filled with fans wanting to sneak a look at the cast while they are filming.

“Now people know that Shipton Abbott is Looe, and because it is so beautiful, I think there has been an uplift in tourism,” Sally says. “There are more people around, they know what we’re up to, there’s more interest in the show. If Kelby (Dylan Llewellyn) and Humphrey are filming on the beach, then you will get quite a lot of people looking over.

“But it’s a warm-hearted, gentle show, and so people just come with that energy. They are often families, and they just want a quick picture and they’ve just seen it on the telly and thought they’d have a look. It’s a very gentle interest, as opposed to anything that feels overwhelming or crowded.”

Sally understands that the sweet relationship between her character and Humphrey is one of the reasons fans love the show so much, and why it’s so popular with people of all ages. “They genuinely love each other, they’re thrilled to be around each other,” she says. “You don’t often get to see that in a main pair on screen, because often this happens, or that happens, to make it dramatic.

"Instead, Martha and Humphrey are very respectful, but still have lots of fun. I’m relieved that they have found their person, and their person is as wonderful as they think. I think watching that is lovely.”

Of course, the now-married Goodmans have had some difficulties over the first three seasons of the show, including the looming presence of Martha’s ex-fiancé, Archie (Jamie Bamber), and the couple experiencing fertility difficulties that eventually led them to explore fostering.

While Sally can’t reveal whether their fostering continues in the new season (“I can’t say, it’s on my ‘do not reveal’ red list,” she laughs), she is pleased with how the fertility storyline has been handled in the show so far.

“Often on the television there’s a big fertility journey, but with a happy ending,” she explains. “What happens when there isn’t [a neat ending], and the choices you make then? Is two enough, and how does two feel? And that story, which is less seen than the happy ending one, I thought it was really interesting and liked that a lot.”

There will still be some ups and downs in this season – “we go house hunting and the place we settle on needs a worrying amount of work, so they get stuck into that with various capers and disasters” – but fans can be assured that Humphrey and Martha’s strong relationship remains the beating heart of the show.

It’s all the more impressive when you realise that Martha was originally brought into Death in Paradise simply as a device to explain why Humphrey was leaving the island of Saint Marie when star Kris Marshall wanted to exit the Caribbean-set series.

“I did two episodes in series 5, and I’m not sure, but I think I was being tested to see if I was a good exit storyline,” Sally says. “I was brought in for that purpose. I did the two episodes and then I was called back to do more for the next series to finish Humphrey’s story.”

The Hertfordshire-based actress loved her time filming in Guadeloupe. “I never understand anyone who comes back and says, ‘I didn’t like it very much. I didn’t really like the weather.’ For me, I couldn’t believe I was working somewhere so beautiful. I thought it was unbelievable and stunning.

"They do have those Scolopendra things [giant centipedes], you scream a lot with them. But you can get by with a few millipedes to look at, can’t you?”

The longevity of Death in Paradise – it’s now been on air for 15 seasons – raises the question of whether Sally would like Beyond Paradise to run for as many years as the show it was spun off from.

“I love this job. I would be extremely happy for that to happen. The show is right up my street. My children watch it, not because I’m in it, because they don’t watch other things I’ve been in, but because they genuinely love settling down and watching something so heartwarming,” says the mum of three daughters. “So yes please!”

Even if Beyond Paradise continues for more than a decade, it wouldn’t be the longest-running show Sally has worked on, as she has played Lee Mack’s wife Lucy in the BBC sitcom Not Going Out since the second season of the series back in 2007. With a 15th on the way this June, Sally admits that she shares some characteristics with both her most famous roles.

“I think I’m more like Martha than Lucy,” she says. “Maybe I would be a bit exasperated at times like Lucy if I was living with Lee’s character and all the scrapes we get into. But I think Lucy is a bit harsher than me. If she can skip out of any responsibility, she will, and she’ll put it onto him. She doesn’t mind having confrontation with him but she can’t bear it anywhere else, so she tries to get him to fix everything like that.

“I think Martha takes responsibility for more things in her life, though she does freak out sometimes. So I’d say I am probably more Martha.”

While both roles have made Sally a household name, the 45-year-old actress already had an impressive list of film, TV and theatre credits that stretches back to her first performance, aged just seven, in the mini-series Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story, in which she appeared alongside Jacqeline Bisset as Josephine’s young daughter.

After training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, Sally honed her comedic timing on shows with Harry Enfield and Armstrong & Miller and on the medical sitcom Green Wing, and won acclaim for her stage performances in productions including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, In Extremis and King Lear.

Theatre remains a passion but one of the roles Sally is most proud of is that of Donna, a new employee at the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg in The Office, in which she starred alongside Ricky Gervais, Mackenzie Crook and Martin Freeman.

“I really love that I got to be part of something as incredible as The Office, and I got to be in that set with all these people who weren’t very well known at the time, who were all being brilliant, and we were all just hanging out in an office in Slough, creating something that ended up being quite amazing,” Sally says.

“I’m not taking any responsibility for that, but to have been part of it and to have seen it, I think that is pretty special.”

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Beyond Paradise season 4 begins on BBC One and iPlayer on Friday 27 March at 8pm.

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