Here’s to the beer-boiled monk – pity about the rest
There’s been 20 years of Midsomer Murders (ITV). Twenty years of chocolate-box locations, glib humour and famous names slumming their way to ever more baroque demises. Twenty years of a series which, at it its considerable worst, has boasted episodes that themselves seemed to last two decades. And yet, the script for last night’s episode The Ghost of Causton Abbey felt a little sharper, the mysteries a tad more inventive and the gambits a touch bolder than in the past. Faint praise perhaps, but the striking opening was more reminiscent of Cadfael, as a 16thcentury monk at the aforementioned abbey was boiled in beer, having been accused of poisoning the ale, cursing the site in his death throes.
It was a surprisingly effective sequence, instantly undercut by that benighted clarinet striking up its baleful theme and ushering in another tale of homicidal japery. The monastery was now long gone; in its place stood a microbrewery opportunistically peddling “Cursed IPA”. Once the first contemporary corpse (of only two, which felt unusually restrained) had turned up, inevitably boiled in beer, the story ground into action, enveloping reformed East End gangsters, sisterly rivalries, celebrity ghostwriters and the warring factions representing craft beer and real ale.
This week’s game guest stars included Angela Griffin’s sullen care nurse, Tony Gardner’s chippy local councillor and Elaine Paige’s catty grande dame of the theatre. Annette Badland was a sound addition as the acerbic new pathologist, a welcome contrast to Neil Dudgeon’s hammy DCI Barnaby and Nick Hendrix’s colourless DS Winter. I even cracked a smile a couple of times, not least when Mrs Barnaby silenced a room by musing, “I always thought real ale and craft beer were the same thing.” By past standards, this was positively Wildean stuff.
Regardless of the series’ apparent elevation to mere mediocrity, I found myself increasingly distracted by Dudgeon’s resemblance to David Cameron; the vocal cadences, the hairstyle, the sadness in his eyes. Perhaps our erstwhile PM has shelved his memoirs to work up a new detective franchise in his shepherd’s hut, or is considering a second career busting crime on the mean streets of Chipping Norton? It was something to ponder as the action on screen slowly dribbled to an anticlimactic reveal. Twenty years has been a good innings. Perhaps it’s time for DCI Barnaby retired to his writing hut as well?
Over on BBC Four there was an altogether more absorbing take on the Great British countryside. The BFI has made a habit in recent years of opening up its archives for ambitious filmmakers to recut and score with the help of indie music royalty. Penny Woolcock deployed British Sea Power’s roiling soundscapes in From the Sea to the Land Beyond, King Creosote brought aching whimsy to Virginia Heath’s From Scotland with Love and surely only Mogwai could have soundtracked Mark Cousins’s remarkable Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise.
Paul Wright’s Arcadia was a fascinating, provocative addition to the cannon, scored by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory and Portishead’s Adrian Utley and ruminating on our relationship to the countryside. The truth, we were told, was in the soil, and so this mysterious, elliptical audiovisual collage started and finished with seeds sprouting and flowers erupting from the earth.
Framing the British countryside as a land of both sinister savagery and bucolic idyll is not new, but Wright’s rhapsodic montages nurtured rural traditions while picking away at them. His selections ranged from short films to Pathé newsreel to local news reports and covered a remarkable amount of ground. From the Hovisland with its milkmen and applescrumping scamps, we took in hippies, graveyards, murmurations of starlings ( jaw-dropping, these), solvent abuse, cheese-rolling, punks, foxhunting and ravers through to the creeping impact of mechanisation and industrialisation. A vague sense of unease persisted due to Wright’s fascination with paganism and the unsettling, surprising blend of original compositions and traditional songs on the soundtrack.
For what it was worth, either side of the Brexit debate could probably have found fuel for their arguments here, especially during a frantic sequence lamenting the march of “progress”. But for Wright, timelessness felt more important. At once a celebration and elegy, warning and fairy tale, this was a striking, troubling and above all intoxicating film.
Midsomer Murders ★★ Arcadia ★★★★