Midsomer Murders: "Blue Herrings" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, Arts & Entertainment, American Public Television, 2000)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I walked from the book event at Mysterious Galaxy to the Old Town bus station to catch the #10 home last night (Thursday, September 14), and we got back just in time to watch the latest PBS rerun from the early days of the Midsomer Murders series, “Blue Herrings.” This was aired in 2000 and was a major comedown from last week’s 1999 episode, “Dead Man’s Eleven,” a well-plotted show dealing with a greedy landowner (Robert Hardy, 39 years after his stunning performance as King Henry V in the BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings; my mom and I both predicted international superstardom for him on the basis of that performance, but it was Sean Connery who grabbed the brass ring instead) and a plot to destroy his life by killing off those near and dear to him. “Blue Herrings” takes place at the Lawnside Residential Nursing Home for the Elderly, where Alice Bly (Phyllis Calvert) is a resident. Alice is the aunt of Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (series star John Nettles), and when he goes to visit her at the nursing home she reports a series of suspicious deaths there. Since all the residents are in their 70’s or 80’s it’s not that surprising that a lot of them are croaking under mysterious circumstances, but Alice is convinced that at least two of them have been murdered, including one who supposedly died of a heart attack just after doctors examined her heart and pronounced it perfectly fine for someone her age. The other is Celia Armstrong (Gudrun Ure, who also has a Shakespeare connection; she was voice double for French actress Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona in the Orson Welles film of Othello), who it turns out was smothered with a pillow by her niece Pru Bennett (Angela Down).

It also turns out to have been an act of euthanasia: Celia had just been diagnosed with cancer, and Pru, who had been raised by Celia after the deaths of her parents, wanted to spare her the long-term pain of a struggle with cancer and instead dispatch her immediately. There are a few red herrings, including a male Lawnside resident named William Smithers (Nigel Davenport) who worked as a chauffeur for a London company that frequently drove celebrities like Jack Buchanan, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who covets an Aston-Martin belonging to a scapegrace young man named Mungo Mortimer (Colin Tierney) and takes the car for a joy ride that ends ignominiously when he swerves to avoid crashing into a construction vehicle and crashes the car in some bushes. Mungo himself is a red herring because he’s implicated in a scheme to embezzle funds from the nursing-home residents by getting them to change their life insurance policies to make him their beneficiaries (though writer Hugh Whitemore just drops this plot line and never resolves it), and his real name is Maurice Willson. There’s also an S/M relationship between the nursing home’s doctor, Clive Warnford (Clive Wood), and his nurse/dominatrix, but in the end Tom Barnaby and his partner Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey) figure the whole thing out and it’s a surprisingly innocuous ending for something billed as a mystery/suspense thriller. And the reason for the episode's title isn't explained until the very end, when a woman going through the remaining possessions of one of the deceased residents, including Raymond Chandler's Playback and a number of other mystery novels, says she's not interested in mysteries because she's tired of all the "blue herrings." "You mean, red herrings," she's told … to no avail.