If dramas like Adolescence are the rough televisual equivalent of whoever won the latest Turner Prize, then Midsomer Murders (ITV1) is David Hockney. The first category embodies the kind of worthy, tormented, agenda-pushing stuff we’re supposed to like; the second represents the sort of thing we actually like: undemanding, unpretentious, easy on the eye and brain.
The deaths serve as a plot device and as a source of macabre comedy but are most definitely not there to cause you any emotional distress
Even though Midsomer Murders has been going since 1997, I only saw my first full episode this week. Though I quite enjoyed it, I don’t feel any compelling need to catch up with its 140 odd predecessors because I think I’m now an expert on the formula: the person who committed the murder in the nice country house is the very last person you suspected; meanwhile, all the people you did suspect at various stages end up being murdered, one by one.
The genial detective who solves the murders used to be Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles). But when he retired in 2011, there was a remarkable stroke of nepotistic luck whereby his similarly genial cousin DCI John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) became available for the job. John has a wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) who gives off strong Nanette Newman in a Fairy liquid advert vibes. Though they have a daughter, you can no more imagine them having an active sex life than you could Fred from Scooby Doo engaging in a threesome with Daphne and Vilma. It’s just not that sort of show.
I mention Scooby Doo because the tone and style and plot trajectory are all quite similar. Plot wise there are lots of false leads (a character glimpsed kicking a dog, for example, or not saying thank you or reusing an unfranked postage stamp to gull you into thinking that they are definitely killer material), followed by a convoluted denouement in which the unveiled-at-last unlikely culprit expounds on how they dunit.
Sometimes, often in fact probably, the methodology can be implausibly overelaborate and impracticable. For example, the episode I saw (‘The Devil’s Work’) required the killer to lay down – and subsequently remove and conceal – about half a mile of plastic piping so as to poison someone with carbon monoxide in their yurt. The same killer then garotted a man with some cheese wire. When at the end the killer was revealed to be – spoiler alert – a woman of a certain age, the viewer might well have felt a little cheated. But fear not, the scriptwriters had found a way round. ‘Aha! Yes! You may imagine that as a woman I was incapable of such deeds!’, the killer explained [more or less; I paraphrase]. ‘But I’m more than normally fit and strong thanks to all the gardening I do!’
Somewhere in the region of 500 people have met sticky ends in Midsomer Murders, the most imaginative being death-by-being-pegged-to-the-lawn-with-croquet-hoops-and-then-being-pelted-with-wine-bottles-from-a-homemade-trebuchet. In ‘The Devil’s Work’, the grisliest was a young man being locked into a clay-firing kiln and incinerated. As murders go, this is right up there with the nastier serial killer movies. But Midsomer Murders gets away with it – or thinks it does – by reassuring us that this is just one of those unfortunate things that happens every now and then. There’s no dwelling on the horror, no raised eyebrow from Barnaby, no cut to a shot of his current sidekick DS Jamie Winter (Hendrix) vomiting in the undergrowth.
You might argue, as I nearly did myself, that there is something unhealthy about this trivialisation of violence. But on reflection, I think that is the key to Midsomer Murders’ enduring appeal. The deaths serve as a plot device and as a source of macabre comedy but are most definitely not there to cause you any emotional distress. More serious TV drama imagines that it is its job to put the viewer through the wringer. Midsomer Murders, however, understands that what we really want is what Aldous Huxley would have called ‘soma’ – stuff we can drift in and out of, easily, with nice looking rural exteriors and property porn interiors we can glance up at now and again, and characters who aren’t too complex. Why be tortured when you can lounge there feeling lulled, soothed and lightly amused?
One thing that puzzled me about this episode, as perhaps it was meant to do: the scene at the end involving what purported to be a bottle of Chablis. Except it obviously wasn’t Chablis because it was in a Bordeaux-shaped bottle, not a Burgundian one. So my question is: was this done deliberately to annoy pedantic viewers? Or to give them a warm glow of satisfaction for having noticed? Or is it just because, 24 seasons in, they really don’t care about getting this kind of detail right because the target audience – daytime TV viewers and foreigners – wouldn’t know the difference anyway? A mystery worthy of DCI Barnaby, I’m sure.
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