by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My main “feature” last night was an oddball rerun of a 2009
episode of Midsomer Murders (the odd
spelling of the title is because it’s actually a series about law enforcement
in Midsomer County in central England) called “The Glitch,” in which the dramatis
personae — aside from series regulars Tom
Barnaby (John Nettles) and Ben Jones (Jason Hughes), the lead detectives for
the Midsomer County police — are George Jeffers (David Haig), a computer
scientist at the local university who developed the concept of “kernel
computing” (which basically means, at least as explained in Michael Russell’s
script, means making chips out of ever-larger sheets of silicon so the chips
will be baked together and automatically connected instead of having to be cut
up and then reconnected electronically — an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor says
this is B.S. but it sounds
impressive); and Clinton Finn (played by an actor who I’m assuming is British
from his name — Nigel Whitmey — but who speaks with a reasonably convincing
American accent even though nothing in Russell’s script specifies that the
character is American), head of an American computer company called SoftEarth
which has bought the rights to Jeffers’ invention and plans to use it to create
a new system for air traffic control. Only Jeffers has figured out a “glitch”
in his system that involves two contradictory instructions sent to a binary
chip at the same time that would essentially paralyze it, and he’s worried that
if this is used for air traffic control it could lead to planes crashing and
people getting killed. So he’s determined to stop the development of his own
technology even though this is going to cost SoftEarth millions and also lead
to the end of plans for a new science building the university Jeffers teaches
at is hoping to build with a multi-million pound donation from SoftEarth. There’s
also a bicycle race going on in Midsomer County that a lot of the people in the
movie are preparing for, and a mysterious assailant who’s sneaking up to owners
of sports cars and drenching them and their vehicles in red paint spiked with
glue, which makes it considerably harder to get off.
It’s one of those
surprisingly placid British mystery stories that runs about 95 minutes (it was
originally shown in two parts on the British commercial channel, though
blessedly KPBS ran the two episodes back-to-back); the murder — of Jeffers’
current girlfriend, Helen Ward, who’s run down while riding Jeffers’ bicycle
and wearing his coat — doesn’t occur until the show is half an hour long, and
the denouement in which the
killer’s identity is revealed (it was an old man who used to work at the local
college as a porter while his son got a scholarship there and ultimately became
its dean) seems surprisingly beside the point. Along the way we learn that
Clinton Finn is having simultaneous affairs with Jeffers’ immediately previous
wife (for someone as unprepossessing as Jeffers it’s a surprise that he’s had
three wives and quite a few girlfriends in between!) Melanie (Joanna Ross) and
his in-house publicity director, Helen Markham (Lucy Brown) — at one point
Clinton, the rotter, asks Helen to lie for him to give him an alibi for the
killing, and her price for doing so is that he dump Melanie. Eventually another
person gets killed — Daniel Snape (Philip Jackson), an auto repair garage owner
who takes care of Clinton Finn’s collection of rare sports cars and who’s also
the go-to guy for the red-paint thrower’s victims when they need their cars
stripped of the additional paint — and the red-paint assailant turns out to be
George’s and Melanie’s son Tom (James Musgrove), who’s doing it to get back at
Clinton for fucking his mom. He’s also a pretty typical alienated youth who
when he gets back from a red-paint attack goes to his room and blasts punk rock
on his boom box (though this show was made and set in 2009 the music Tom Jeffers
is listening to sounds like it came from the late 1970’s, the era of the Sex
Pistols and the early Clash), though in some ways he’s the most appealing
character in the show (certainly he’s the cutest, and I usually don’t like ’em that young!) and I wish there’d been more
of him. Like a lot of British mysteries this one is quiet, relatively
non-violent (we don’t actually see either of the killings being committed) and
with that odd aura of gentility with which British writers and filmmakers tell
stories of criminal violence and sexual shenanigans.
