This week’s Midsomer Murders is set against a backdrop of competitive cycling.
With its mix of dodgy-dealings, infidelities and of course murders, ‘Breaking the Chain’ presents a far more dramatic view of the sport than we ever see in the real world. (Well, apart from that huge doping scandal a few years back.)
Unfortunately – and although entirely the wrong sporting metaphor – this week’s episode is a game of two halves. More specifically, there’s a very odd sense that all the business in the cycling camp is happening in an entirely different place to the village fair supposedly going on in conjunction with it.
Maybe it’s due to the real-world practicality of filming different locations on different days, but storywise there seems to be too little integration of the different characters and stories which has the unfortunate effect of leaving most of the red herrings to swim in a pool of their own.
For a Midsomer Murders story it’s an unusually young cast, which I suppose makes sense in a sporting environment (although the likes of Bradley Wiggins and Lance Armstrong would suggest competitive cycling isn’t exclusively a young man’s game). It’s also a less ‘starry’ cast than usual, and those ‘names’ that are present pretty much skirt the actual plot – most especially the storyline involving councilwoman Mary Appleton (Tessa Peake-Jones) and landlord Jez (a lovely performance by Joe McGann).
Don’t get me wrong, their side story is very neatly drawn, but for once it feels more like a means of padding out the running time than a genuine attempt to muddy the waters so as to put the armchair sleuth off the scent.
After the halfway mark, to be fair, the episode steps up a gear (no pun intended) and with various subplots already tied up, what has felt like a slightly meandering series of events begins to take shape and make sense. We see that what we’re really dealing with is a story about obsession.
It’s driven Des McCordell (Derek Riddell) to push both his sons in the competitive biking world: “I have tried to live my life through my kids” he admits, broken, apologising to one son after the death of the other. It’s driven Joanna Stockerton (Rebecca Grant) to sponsor the team, believing that a casual teenage dalliance was, and still is, something much deeper. And it’s what now drives the killer to remove any real or perceived obstacle between herself and her boyfriend.
The McCordells have quite a back story to them, one we never quite get to the bottom of. The father’s obsession with his sons’ success is sketched in with a reference to him taking them off to Norway for times trials when their mother died. And, which nobody seems to think at all odd, they live in a house that looks like a cross between an environmentally-friendly show house and a castle – there’s always just a nagging sense that either Kevin McCloud or Tony Robinson (or Lloyd Grossman) is going to pop up to start exploring it.
More relevantly, the cycle race itself never actually plays much of a part in the story. There’s always a feeling that it’s a question of which member of the McCordell team will win, rather than if any of them will. It’s hard not to think they missed a trick by not having a few competitors from other teams scattered about the story to add to the list of suspects.
So it’s a bit of an ‘also-ran’ in the Midsomer league – an enjoyable enough way to pass a couple of hours, but when it pops up on ITV3 in the years to follow it’s unlikely to be an episode greeted with too much enthusiasm.
Aired at 8pm on Wednesday 27 January 2016 on ITV.
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