The fur is set to fly in Midsomer Murders.

The fur flies when death comes to a rabbit show on this week’s episode of Midsomer Murders. Jim Maloney reports.

Arabbit and guinea-pig pet show in the grounds of a stately home sounds peaceful enough. But this is Midsomer, where no one is quite how they seem.

In this week’s episode of Midsomer Murders, Susan Hampshire guest stars as lady of the manor, Delphi Hartley, who holds a pet show on her grounds to bring in much needed income.

But when local estate agent Seb Huntingdon is found dead in the marquee with rabbits scrambling over him, the fur flies. Was he killed trying to sabotage the show in a bid to get Delphi to sell him her property?

High on the list of suspects is Best In Show defending champion Timothy Benson, played in typically creepy fashion by The League Of Gentlemen star Steve Pemberton.

“The idea for this story came from somebody who had stayed in a hotel when there was a rabbit and guinea-pig convention in town,” says Neil Dudgeon, who plays DCI John Barnaby.

“It was an annual event and it always caused so much trouble with the animals escaping or being taken back to the hotel by their owners and running amok.”

This is Dudgeon’s sixth year in Barnaby’s shoes and he continues to be delighted with the quirky charm of the storylines and characters.

“I get little headline descriptions of what each episode is going to be about and some of them do make me chuckle,” he says.

“In the second episode of this series, for instance, I was told, ‘It’s about extreme neighbourhood watch and there’s an

S&M

“Once you have killed one person, it gets a bit ‘more-ish’, doesn’t it? You think, ‘Well, I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’.” – Neil Dudgeon (above) pictured with Steve Pemberton and Nick Hendrix

story as well’. I thought, ‘Great. What’s not to like?’ “Part of the joy of the show is that it’s heightened realism. The characters are slightly eccentric and you get some slightly unlikely scenarios, and then people are killed in rather exotic and extraordinary ways. We pride ourselves on the quality of our murders. “I live in London and I think that sometimes you watch police dramas that are set in threatening urban environments where you think, ‘Oh, this is a bit close to home for me. This could be me walking back from the Tube station on a dark alley one night when a mugger attacks and I get stabbed’. “But you don’t really get that in Midsomer. You get a man crushed to death by a gargoyle falling off his castle. It’s not the sort of thing that keeps you awake at night thinking, ‘That could happen to me’. “When I was first offered the job there was no script. They just said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ and it was all very gentlemanly. I was a big fan of the show and I said, ‘Yes, OK’. It was only later that they started talking about the script and I was told that the first episode was going to be about a vintage car rally in a girls’ school. I thought, ‘Ah yes, this is Midsomer’.”

Dudgeon believes that the format for the series has enabled it to keep going over the years and retain its enormous popularity.

“The fact that the show had been going with John Nettles for 13 years showed that it had a broad, rich format. There’s this huge county of Midsomer with all these different, funny little places within it and there’s always going to be people in tight-knit communities who get a bit stressed or over-excited or who have tremendously high stakes and cause to kill somebody.

“And then, inevitably, once you have killed one person, it gets a bit ‘more-ish’, doesn’t it? You think, ‘Well, I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Why not bump another couple off whilst I’m at it?’

“It’s such a big, open, rich area and I think that’s why it still continues to go on. With a lot of series you have the same characters in the same place and so they will eventually run out of steam after maybe two, three or four series.

“But with Midsomer they are all independent stories with different writers and guest stars.”

The good news for fans is that Dudgeon has no plans to walk away from the show ... willingly, at least.

“I can’t imagine that I will ever get to the point where I will want to retire before they got to the point where they wanted me to retire,” he laughs. “There’s not much to not enjoy about it. It’s only six or seven months of the year and we film through the summer in the most beautiful locations. And I get to work with the lovely crew every year and we always get such wonderful guests in, and they are great stories. It’s all just very nice.

“If you are an English-speaking actor in Britain and you are going to work in TV, this is the place to be.”