Death by self-inflating dinghy? Yes, Midsomer Murders is back!
EVERYONE jokes that Midsomer has the highest murder rates on earth, worse even than Mexico or Haiti. What they forget is that it also has the world’s best crime clear-up statistics.
There’s a simple reason for that: sartorial standards. Detectives on Midsomer Murders (ITV) still know how to dress properly.
DI Barnaby and his sidekick Winter are the last two policemen on earth who wear a suit and tie, with the top buttons of their shirts fastened.
DS Winter even favours a waistcoat, and lace-up shoes that he keeps shiny with polish. In most other British forces, the threepiece suit is as outdated as a bowler hat and furled umbrella.
young Morse in his scruffy cords, vera in that awful mac and shapeless hat, even Jimmy Perez with his Shetland knitwear, they could all learn something from Midsomer. Smart suits are the only plausible explanation for the swiftness with which Barnaby (neil Dudgeon) solved a mystery that appeared to satirise Britain’s lockdown panic.
At its root was a cover-up, folcaused lowing the escape of a pandemic virus from a bio-research lab, deep in the english countryside. An infected scientist drowned herself, rather than spread the sickness. Her body was buried in the woods by conspirators who lived in perpetual terror of the end of the world — until they were murdered one by one.
Here’s the punchline, delivered by the lone scientist who survived: said virus turned out to be no more dangerous than the common cold.
If the backstory sounds bonkers, the murders made even less sense... though Midsomer plots are paced so briskly that it really doesn’t matter.
When the local GP shut himself in a sprawling underground bunker, the killer closed the air vents — and the man suffocated within a minute. How all the existing oxygen instantly vanished was not explained.
His fellow survivalist, who was sleeping with the GP’s wife, went for a walk in the woods and died after triggering a tripwire. This a dinghy to self-inflate so rapidly that the bloke was bounced 20ft into the air and headfirst into a treetrunk.
When a third body was discovered, it was immediately obvious that his injuries couldn’t be fatal — in Midsomer, that occurs only through incidents which defy the laws of physics. As it turned out, the victim wasn’t dead, just dead drunk.
Pathologist Fleur (Annette Badland) had the best lines, as ever. Admiring the bunker, she said: ‘Food, medicines, toilets, beds. It’s better stocked than a rock star’s tour bus. And I should know, I’ve been on a few.’
The sky-high mortality rate does mean police tend to ignore other crimes. When Winter almost stumbled into the iron teeth of a spring-loaded mantrap, set by an over-zealous poacher, he merely tutted.
Worse still, no one even flinched at the shelves of fake books in the GP’s house, an illusory library made of wallpaper. Decor like that merits a stiff prison sentence.