Any other crime drama might open with its titular detective cradling a bottle of whisky as he or she listened to Wagner and mooned about a lost love. But this is Midsomer Murders, so the first scene of last night’s episode began with Britain’s best-dressed policeman, DCI Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), having a light-hearted breakfast with his wife and daughter before cheerfully heading off to solve yet another homicide.
Now on its 23rd series and 133rd episode (a good way ahead of its nearest rival, Death in Paradise), Midsomer Murders has none of the tropes beloved of the likes of Inspector Morse and its bedfellows. Barnaby has no character quirks or colourful habits – he just goes about solving crimes in an unfussy manner. That might make him seem boring but when the murders are this elaborately bananas, you need a straightforward copper. In the most recent episode, it was death by a boobytrapped self-inflating rubber dinghy.
Last night’s two-hour story, “The Debt of Lies”, was nowhere near as creative, settling for severed brake pipes that led to a car crashing into a tree. The victim was a newly retired senior police officer, Elaine Bennet (Sabina Franklyn) and it was clear from asides made at her farewell party that she wasn’t a popular woman. Elaine had just been accepted into an exclusive retirement home for police top brass – unfortunately writer Nick Hicks-Beach didn’t even begin to explore the comic or dramatic potential of such a setting. But in fairness, he did have an awful lot of whodunit plotting to plough through.
Among the suspects was Elaine’s surly alcoholic husband, Damian (Gary Beadle) who had been drummed out of the force for “malfeasance” and now worked as a private investigator. There was also an embittered ex-con gardener and a dodgy property developer.
In the meantime, Tom Conti played another resident of the police retirement home, Sebastian Cabot, a former mentor of “young Barnaby” (as he insisted on calling him). Cabot was now doing a Captain Tom-style marathon and shuffling up and down the garden for charity. Conti’s character was so twinkly and avuncular that you just knew he was secretly a bad’un – which he was, although he wasn’t the killer.
The whodunit element hung together reasonably well, the central mystery relating back to a major bank heist decades earlier. Light relief was provided by a village fete, where Barnaby’s sidekick DS Winter (Nick Hendrix) was persuaded to be put in stocks and have wet sponges thrown at him.
Cabot was finishing off his charity walk before he was cuffed but the fete-goers seemed entirely unfazed by the arrest of the star attraction and a chase in which the real murderer was apprehended with the help of a retired police dog. But then this is Midsomer – such dramatic scenes must be tiringly frequent.
There has been some amusement recently about ITV’s decision to give this 27-year-old drama a trigger warning – yes it “contains crime scenes and/or contains violent killing”, isn’t the clue in the title? Perhaps, given our preconceptions that fictional coppers are automatically either corrupt or damaged, a better trigger warning would be: “Contains a happily married policeman with no noticeable psychological and/or emotional problems”.
Writers struggle so much to give their TV detectives a point of interest (latterly, with Professor T and the like, by making them neurodivergent) that Barnaby feels refreshingly uncomplicated. Even so, this was minor Midsomer Murders – less triggering than mildly soporific.