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Is there anything on television so pointless as a Christmas special out of time? We all know they are filmed in mid-year - which in England means at the height of summer when artificial snow has to be brought in by the sackful and characters have to wear enough layers to suffocate an Eskimo and walk around saying "B !" a lot, when we all know they have a flight booked to Portugal as soon as filming wraps.
Tonight's final episode of Midsomer Murders, 'Ghosts of Christmas Past', is all done up with tinsel and holly, and should by rights deal with spectres of the future kind: a key to the plot is an entry in a diary dated "December 24, 2004". Popping on the deerstalker and taking a long draw of the calabash pipe, I reached the elementary conclusion that we colonials are indeed fortunate to see this a full three months ahead of head office. Think of the fun you could have ruining Aunt Jessie of Tunbridge Wells' festive season by giving the game away scrawled in your Christmas card.
Be that as it may, I'm not going to say too much about 'Ghosts of Christmas Past' except that it relies on the most ancient of plot devices since the York Mystery Plays: the country-house murder. Indeed, the home selected bears a tantalising resemblance to a three-dimensional Cluedo board, with wood-panelled rooms and even more wooden characters who arrive by the carload, taxi or motorbike and proceed to make life miserable for one another. At one stage, most of them sit around a card table playing Monopoly: I wish it had been Murder in the Dark or, at the very least, Are You There, Moriarty?
I am unsure if this was meant to be some comic elaboration of an already complex storyline involving a suicide nine years previously of one of the many siblings - a professional magician, as it happens. Back in the approximate present, DCI Barnaby (John Nettles, pictured) and Sergeant Scott (John Hopkins) have their Christmas Day interrupted when a mad old aunt is pushed down the stairs. Who did it? Who gives a damn?
Australian actor Philip Quast crops up as one of the brothers, and gives a silky, measured performance that sets his character slightly apart. Most of the others are so haughty or insouciant or unimportant (one chap is so mute, he's upstaged by the candelabra) that I'd be tempted to say they all had a hand in it, except only Agatha Christie did that sort of thing with any panache.
© The Age Company Ltd.
