Bless Acorn Media for sending us these wonderful DVD sets as they become available! I remember all too well the exquisite torture of watching some of the earlier Midsomer Murders episodes, well larded with commercial breaks, on the A&E Network. The experience of watching one all the way through without interruption is truly delightful! Cat asked me to review these two sets for you. You may also want to check out his review of four earlier episodes in this long-running and highly successful British mystery series.
To be entirely honest, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call Midsomer a series. With the exception of a very few main characters, there is virtually no continuity between the episodes. In fact, you can watch them out of order with very little sense of disorientation. However, the episodes do share some thematic similarities. For the most part, they all take place in the fictitious Midsomer region of England, an area comprised of charming little villages populated by eccentric individuals, some of whom are sexually perverted, murderous, greedy or otherwise not very nice.
Each episode features at least one and often several murders, typically of a gruesome sort. Because of the prevalence of red herrings, it’s often easier to pick out the murder victims than it is the perpetrators. More often than not, the perps wear black gloves and Wellingtons when they do the deeds, and most of the deeds take place in the dark of night. During the day, the sun shines far more often than not, and the scenery typically includes lots of flowers and green foliage.
Does that all sound rather silly? Well, it is rather silly, and all the more so because of the persistent twinkle in the blue eyes of John Nettles, the inveterate and talented actor who plays the lead character, DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) Tom Barnaby. The only other characters who have continued throughout the entire series are Tom’s wife Joyce (played by Jane Wymark), his daugher Cully (Laura Howard) and the medical examiner George Bullard (Barry Jackson).
It’s the rare episode that features any one of these characters in more than a minimal supporting role, however. The show belongs to Barnaby and his sidekick of the season, whoever that might be.
That’s the principal difference between this set of episodes and those that came before, by the way. Once again, Tom is blessed with a new sidekick. This one isn’t even a DS (Detective Sergeant); he’s a mere DC (Detective Constable). Nonetheless, Ben Jones (played by Jason Hughes) seems a much better match for Barnaby the character and Nettles the actor than the previous sidekicks (Gavin Troy played by Daniel Casey and Dan Scott played by John Hopkins). First of all, he appears to be closer in age to Nettles (although in fact he’s about the same age as Casey and Hopkins). Second of all, he seems to be more relaxed in the role. Third of all, the writers have given the character a real skill set and avoided trying to load him down with a lot of the hang-ups that rendered his predecessors sometimes painfully stiff and not very funny.
Set Eleven contains four episodes, each running approximately one hundred minutes in length. ‘The House in the Woods’ introduces DC Jones with a throwaway reference to DS Scott and gives Joyce a role in unraveling the mystery surrounding a haunted house that becomes the site of a nasty double murder. In ‘Dead Letters,’ Barnaby and Jones investigate a drowning that appears accidental until Dr. Bullard notices bruises on the victim’s body that suggest someone held her face in the water. This death takes place at the opening of one of those local festivals (this one is called Oak Apple Week) for which the villages of Midsomer are ever so well known.
In ‘Vixen’s Run,’ Joss Ackland plays the patriarch of a very dysfunctional family whose members gather at his estate to hear a revelation, about his will as it turns out. This one is a true manor house mystery, and the scene preceding the victim’s death, in which he eats and drinks with great gusto, is worth watching over a couple of times. It’s incredible! ‘Down Among the Dead Men,’ the last episode in this group, is quite unlike any other Midsomer episode I’ve seen. The murder victim is a blackmailer and the list of suspects is quite long. The investigation takes Barnaby and first Joyce, later DC Jones, to a seaside town that is definitely not part of the Midsomer region. It’s cold and damp and not very green. The scene showing Barnaby scampering about in the waves in his bare feet with his pants legs rolled up is totally hilarious-yet another demonstration of John Nettles’ seemingly infinite capacity to engage in comic acting!
Set Twelve is actually the second half of Season Nine, originally aired in the UK in 2005-2006. It features four more episodes, each running a hundred minutes in length. Not surprisingly given that these are really part of the same season as Set Eleven, the cast of regular characters remains consistent. It seemed to me on these episodes, however, that the screenwriters started playing around with the relationship between Barnaby and Jones. On a number of occasions across the episodes, Barnaby gives Jones a difficult and unpleasant task to perform, such as taking DNA samples from a number of very unwilling suspects.
That’s the other difference I really noticed on these four episodes: all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, the Midsomer constabulary appears to have discovered modern forensic science! Mind you, they are hardly operating at the level of the CSI shows on the CBS network in the US-but they are swapping for DNA, dusting for fingerprints, taking crime scene photographs and footprint castings, and making use of computer databases to track down information on people with uncertain backgrounds.
I would also venture to say that these four episodes were a bit racier than anything I’ve seen in Midsomer for at least a couple of seasons. ‘Four Funerals and a Wedding,’ for example, takes place in the hamlet of Skimmington, where the locals stage an annual fair that includes a ritual humiliation of the menfolk by the womenfolk. This event stands as a visible reminder of underlying tensions between the sexes that started during World War I. In the midst of the rather gruesome murders taking place, there’s a hilarious flashback to a sex scene that takes place inside the greengrocer’s delivery van.
In ‘Country Matters,’ which concerns the attempt by a large national supermarket chain to build on the site of a long deserted lumber mill, one of the male characters has rather kinky sex with three female characters over the course of a single afternoon, and is later found stabbed to death at the mill site by two pre-teens who go there to drink and smoke.
Barnaby’s wife Joyce is a member of the choir features in ‘Death in Chorus.’ DC Jones gets recruited to join the chorus when one of the members is murdered. Joyce discovers that Jones has a good singing voice when she overhears him taking a shower – we actually see him naked with only a lightly frosted shower door to obscure his private parts!
‘Last Year’s Model’ breaks with the usual Midsomer formula by situating the story at the time of a murder trial, several months after Barnaby arrested the suspect, the wife of a pop music impresario (the latter played to the sleazy hilt by Miles Anderson). Although at the time he made the arrest, Barnaby was convinced he had the right person, the victim’s young daughter challenges his thinking, and he and Jones begin to pick away at the evidence. A key witness recants and becomes an accomplice to the police in forcing the hand of the real perpetrator. A clinical psychologist named Pru Plunkett also aids the defendant. This is the first Midsomer I recall that features extensive courtroom scenes. Oh, and there’s also a suggestive hot tub scene with the music impresario and his well-endowed ‘assistant.’
Earlier this year (2009), John Nettles announced his intent to retire from the series after at the end of 2010. The production company plans to introduce a new DCI in the following series. That should be interesting!
(Bentley Productions U.K., 2005, Acorn U.S., 2008)
(Bentley Productions U.K., 2006, Acorn U.S., 2008)
