British old-school television show Midsomer Murders really sets the gold standard for people killing off other people in spectacularly perverse and unrealistic ways. And there's none of that new world Netflix business where you have to guess the plot because the TV show title is just a bit too clever. There gonna be murders in Midsomer.
There is something about a quaint little chocolate box village that has a tendency for murdering just about everybody who walks its cobblestones.
And as in all loosely based detective narratives, never in the history of the township of Midsomer has anyone ever linked any murder to the one that happened on the show just last week, or the week before that. They are all completely unrelated obviously and why would you even question that?
Here are some of my thought bubbles as dastardly events took place:
- Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Barnaby, the superstar super-detective super detective chief inspector of the show, seems to stay cheery despite the fact his beat is full of innovative sociopaths.
- DCI Barnaby spends much of his shift being accosted by little old ladies who like to spill all the sordid, scandalous personal secrets of the villagers. Which are invariably not relevant to any case he’s working on, but are quite useful for a mental filing of every villager into some sort of alphabetical list of nutters.
- There's that guy in a hoodie who's been watching him in every scene of this episode. This time he's hiding in the bushes. Now he's on the run. DCI decides to chase him into an abandoned, dilapidated building, still not having called for backup. I'm sure the guy’s harmless.
- It's an old boarded up house and the music is getting a bit hair-raising. DCI Barnaby goes in. Sorry, false alarm, nobody got murdered here.
- This new guy has intricately detailed appointments in his diary apart from this mysterious one that seems to coincide with the time of murder. I'm sure it was a legit appointment. DCI decides there's no need to check it out any further.
- DCI Barnaby returns to the crime scene at night by himself for no apparent reason. A man with no apparent reason to be there yells at him "what the hell are you doing here. You shouldn't have come back". DCI leaves the area. There was no reason to further question the crazy man, apparently. Pretty sure cops would find him a person of interest. What's the point of this scene? As an armchair crime-solving enthusiast, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to weed out the killer/s from all the village nutters.
- By my count, 180 people have being murdered so far in this episode.
Land owners in Somerset should consider themselves lucky they didn’t call their bathing spots jacuzzis.
The writer of Midsomer Murders found Midsomer Norton on a map and thought it sounded quintessentially British and sufficiently murderous. Is Midsomer Norton really like its television twin?
Well, the crime stats of the real village indicate a boringly average amount of crime occurring in the township, with anti-social behaviour the most prevalent type of criminal activity.
I’m a little hazy on the actual definition of murder, but I imagine it is certainly a fairly anti-social thing to do, so it may be more similar than we think.
I actually visited Midsomer Norton in July 2014. We were travelling through Somerset, mainly to attend the lovely city of Bath, and our hotel was a couple of miles from Midsomer Norton.
By some extraordinary stroke of luck, we were not murdered or even attacked by anti-social behaviour while walking the mean cobblestones of the pretty high street to get to Sainsburys in Midsomer, but there’s always next episode.
