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When it comes to feel-good TV, there's nothing like settling down to a cosy murder mystery and they don't come cosier than Midsomer Murders
In his 1946 essay, The Decline of the English Murder, George Orwell asked us to imagine a scene that looked quaint, even for those days: 'It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the War. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant.' What, asked Orwell, do you want to read about in the paper, in these blissfully narcotic conditions? Why, a jolly good murder of course!
Fast forward to 2004. It is Sunday afternoon. A calm lunch en famille and post-prandial doze is a fantasy only. You have exhausted yourself putting new roofing felt on the shed in the driving rain, and there was rushhour traffic to and from BQ. The idea of children being obediently sent anywhere, still less on an invigorating walk, is inconceivable. The thought of returning to the office tomorrow fills you with gloom.
So what do we do to relax? More and more of us switch on the TV to get our fix of the most outrageously cosy and escapist detective drama in memory: Midsomer Murders, which has an extraordinary ten million viewers per episode and has now overtaken Inspector Morse in both popularity and longevity.
The eighth series began screening on ITV1 in October, and with series nine and ten being worked on, fans will be able to enjoy deliciously implausible and convoluted murders in the fictional, golden-hued English realm of Midsomer until 2006. Before then, there is a prestige slot on Christmas Day, in a special episode entitled The Ghosts of Christmas Past.
Midsomer Murders has been sold in dubbed form to 188 countries, and something in that gentle, unchallenging drama has them hooked from Azerbaijan to Bangladesh, from Djibouti to El Salvador, from the Vatican City to the United States. Millions of us here love Midsomer Murders on a Sunday night: it's like eating delicious, sugary chocolate shortbread: rich in buttery tastiness, and not terribly good for you.
After the maverick and melancholy grump of Inspector Morse, with his incessant disputes with colleagues high and low, the public has taken to the gentler, subtler charms of John Nettles's amiable Det Chief Insp Barnaby, the placid family man and plainclothes officer who tends to start each episode in a sharp collar and tie, generally changing to casual dress for chases and confrontations.
Not for Barnaby the loose-cannon posturing of almost every other small-screen detective. He has no dark side to speak of. Other cops have drink, gambling or women problems and, above all, massive issues with authority. None of this applies to imperturbable nice- guy Barnaby, who goes by the book, but is rarely seen in anything so unsightly as an office. His sidekick used to be the northerner Det Sgt Gavin Troy, played by Daniel Casey. Now Troy has been kicked upstairs, and the new number two is Det Sgt Dan Scott, played by John Hopkins, a handsome, lantern-jawed young man who supplies some of the smouldering hunk factor.
The grislymurder in the quiet English village has been a well- loved staple of detective fiction since Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Midsomer Murders effectively takes the essence of Miss Marple's 'innocent' era of Thirties and Forties England and transplants it to the modern age, notionally tricked out with contemporary details such as sadomasochistic intrigues and gay love affairs. But its soul is firmly rooted in Christie's heyday.
Midsomer Murders is based on the original novels of Caroline Graham, who joins the much-adapted likes of Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Elizabeth George, Minette Walters, Ruth Rendell and Reginald Hill. And the programme is loved because it is a detective story rather than a thriller. If we wanted a thriller, we would tune into something gory, violent and modern like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The detective story is much more reticent and genteel, and Orwell's essay playfully suggested that old-fashioned 'detective-story' murders were declining in real life because the conditions of class, repression and hypocrisy were ceasing to exist.
The grande dame of modern detective fiction, PD James, was thinking along similar lines when she made her controversial observation in 1996 that middleclass murderers are more interesting because of the discrepancy between ugly deeds and a nice environment. This is true for Midsomer Murders; everyone is unrepentantly middleclass and provincial.
Another reason for the hold MM exerts is the weird otherworldliness of its visuals. It looks and sounds like real life but has the lush, through-thelooking-glass quality of rural life glimpsed at the back of a colour supplement. The exterior locations are Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire villages, greens and streams, and some manor houses, which inside often look as implausibly grand as Blenheim Palace. The landscapes, too, are hyperreal in their sunlit loveliness.
It is in this almost-real world that Barnaby investigates his murders a local man who knows the area, but is never compromised by any inconvenient acquaintance. There is always a vivid Cluedo line- up of characters nursing secrets going back decades, and every week there is such a charnel house of killing it's a wonder there's anyone left in Midsomer.
These nasty doings create the atmosphere, but Barnaby himself is an emollient presence on screen. He gets his man all right, but without seeming to exert himself, and the culprit is generally thoughtful enough to explain everything to him on getting his collar felt.
Midsomer Murders is seductive for another reason: unlike a lot of crime drama, it doesn't take itself too seriously. In fact, there is every reason to find the whole thing more than a little tongue-in- cheek; it revels in how uproariously unlikely everything is. Sex is another factor, all the more potent for being decorously presented. There are boiling lusts, seething jealousies in which Barnaby has the good taste not to participate, being devoted to his homely wife. But it is notable that Midsomer Murders often likes to show older women enjoying liaisons with dishy younger men: is this a shrewd piece of escapism for the female demographic?
Whatever the reason, life can be tough on a Sunday night, when the sofa cushions aren't so soft, and the pipe isn't drawing so sweetly, and we don't feel like thinking about the harsh, real world of crime. That's when Midsomer Murders, and its comfy world of risk- free danger and gore, all solved by the quintessential English hero Barnaby, looks very inviting indeed.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd.
