It struck me during ‘A Dying Art’ that it would save an awful lot of trouble if they employed more than two policemen at the Causton constabulary.
Most other crime dramas would leave a police liaison officer with the grieving relatives of the murder victim – partly as a point of contact, but also because in many cases the prime suspect is one of those relatives.
In Midsomer, however, such trivial, ‘real-life’ concerns are as naught, meaning that it’s perfectly natural for someone to be widowed in the morning and yet still be off to their cleaning job or nipping out for a chat down the pub in the afternoon.
This week in particular every conceivable suspect on the police list was left free and unhindered to go about their (potentially murderous) business. It’s hardly appropriate for me to criticise the detective chops of Messrs Barnaby and Nelson, but to be fair murders #2 and #3, not to mention attempted murder #4, could certainly have been avoided if they’d just kept a closer eye on people.
It’s not a valid criticism, of course. Midsomer Murders belongs squarely in the Agatha Christie rather than the Broadchurch camp, and above all it’s driven by the riddle, the ingenious mystery, the trick of fooling the audience. It’s not concerned with applying for search warrants or logging evidence (which is why, for example, Barnaby is able to wander around with what could well be a necklace of vital importance to the case in his jacket pocket).
Judged on its own rules, the show has done the audience proud this week. Having been left a little cold by last week’s bicycling effort, it’s a real return to form. The ‘theme’ is art, with much of the action revolving around a newly-opened Sculpture Park in yet another quaint corner of Midsomer County.
Not for the first time in this show the villagers are up in arms, and in due course (in between murders one and two in fact) there’s the reliable old staple of the village meeting. These are always a good opportunity to gather the whole cast together, and for somebody to either be killed or to be inflammatory enough to ensure they’re next on the killer’s list.
This time out it’s the latter option, with Tony Pitt (the marvellous Adrian Scarborough) managing to offend virtually the whole village in a very few moments. Sure enough, before another set of adverts arrive he’s lying dead under a gigantic concrete boulder, for all the world as though he’d just failed the audition for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Although ‘art’ is probably overstating it for a midweek police drama, there are nevertheless some nice directorial flourishes early on: Barnaby is woken up by his mobile during the opening titles, and the phone’s buzzing is neatly fitted to the beats of the theme music.
Before we overinflate the production team’s ego, however, there are also a few oddities that probably crept in during the edit – most glaringly, when Clemmy Staples (Cat Simmons) leaves her ex-lover to stomp the ten minutes home, she doesn’t turn up until the next day, during which time her current partner Brin (John Hollingworth) has had time to smash the ex-lover’s sculpture under cover of darkness. It’s a confusing bit of timing, not fatal to the episode but a surprising lapse.
In a similar vein, it’s probably stretching credulity a bit to suggest that years after having stolen them, artist and lothario Lance Auden (Ramon Tikaram being rather roguish) still carries around somebody else’s drawings in his portfolio. Improbable too that Daniel Fargo, his ex-art teacher, and Summer Pitt, his ex-art colleague live in the same village as each other.
But then we’re back where we started, coming perilously close to criticising Midsomer Murders on grounds of ‘reality’. The point, surely, is that it’s still able to excite us, and absolutely able to wrong-foot us – proof of which is that this week, even when the pool of suspects had been thinned out and the killer narrowed down to a woman, I still managed to get it wrong.
I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.
Aired at 8pm on Wednesday 3 February 2016 on ITV.
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