Midsomer Murders: "Dead Man's Eleven" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, Arts & Entertainment, American Public Television, 1999)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 7) KPBS re-ran an episode of the quirky British TV crime drama Midsomer Murders from early in the show’s history (originally aired September 12, 1999) called “Dead Man’s Eleven.” The title stems from a local cricket match in the fictional Midsomer County between two local amateur teams, and the show was noteworthy mainly because Robert Hardy, who played King Henry V in the 1960 British TV mini-series An Age of Kings (which presented eight Shakespeare history plays in chronological order – as in the historical sequence, not the order in which Shakespeare wrote them), was in it as Robert Cavendish, owner of a local estate and a rock quarry. When An Age of Kings first aired on KQED, San Francisco’s public TV station, in the early 1960’s my mother and I predicted superstardom for Robert Hardy on the basis of his preternatural good looks and charisma in the role of Prince Hal, later Henry V, and his performance still ranks alongside Laurence Olivier’s and Kenneth Branagh’s among filmizations of this role. Alas, the actor who rose from An Age of Kings to superstardom was Sean Connery, playing Hotspur (whom Prince Hal kills at the end of Henry IV, Part I) just before his explosive debut as James Bond in Dr. No in 1962. Hardy sank into the character-actor salt mines thereafter – imdb.com describes him as “[o]ne of England's most successful and enduring character actors, with a prolific screen career on television and in films … acclaimed for his versatility and the depth of his performances” – until his death in 2017.

“Dead Man’s Eleven” was directed by Jeremy Silberston and written by Anthony Horowitz, who for most of the show seemed to be setting Robert Cavendish up to be the murder victim by using the classical whodunit trick of making the character so hateful he’s racked up a whole lot of people with motives to kill him. Instead he double-crossed us and had the first victim be Robert’s second, much younger wife Tara (Felicity Dean), who’s prevailed on him to sell the estate and retire to Orlando, Florida, U.S.A. This will screw over Robert’s adult son from his first wife, Stephen (Anthony Calf), who’s been living rent-free on Robert’s estate and counting on his dad to bail out his failing interior-design business. Stephen is married to Jane (Annabelle Apsion) but he’s been having extra-relational activities with local barmaid Patricia Smith (Zoë Hart), daughter of the Cavendishes’ housemaid, Mrs. Wilson (Penelope Beaumont). The local police, detective chief inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles, who’s played this role throughout the show’s 26-year run as he’s naturally aged) and his partner, sergeant Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), investigate and connect the current crime with the mysterious death 17 months earlier of Robert Cavendish’s previous housekeeper, Emily Beavis (Susan Field). Gavin Troy befriends Ian Frazier (Terence Rigby), who used to run the quarry until Robert suddenly and without warning shut it down, who was accused of causing the death of quarry worker Matthew Draper (Joss Gower) in an industrial accident after an explosive charge used to blast away some of the rock didn’t go off until later than it should have. Ian was accused of causing the accident and he lost his license to run a quarry and from then on has been barely holding on, spending most of his time getting drunk at the local pub, to the predictable disgust of his wife Zelda (Delia Lindsay).

At first Troy is convinced that Stephen Cavendish murdered his stepmother to keep his dad from selling the estate and putting him out of a home, but Barnaby is certain Tara’s killing is connected to the mysterious death of Emily Beavis. At first he blames the killing on a local couple of religious zealots, Colin (Duncan Preston) and Christine (Imelda Staunton) Cooper, who supposedly murdered Emily to gain possession of an incredibly valuable old coin she owned – a rare gold penny minted under King Henry III worth 100,000 pounds. But it turns out that the Coopers didn’t murder Emily, though they did steal the coin and sell it to a museum (but in that case, what did they do with the money? It’s not that they’re living a lifestyle beyond what they could have afforded on their above-board sources of income). One more person gets murdered: Charles Jennings (Terence Corrigan), a cricket player whom Robert Cavendish suddenly demoted to scorekeeper on the eve of the big game (and a quite hauntingly beautiful young man, though given what Robert Hardy looked like here versus his youthful appearance in An Age of Kings I shudder to think what Terence Corrigan looks like now), who gets stabbed in the scoring box with a dagger from Robert’s collection of World War II Nazi memorabilia. (One wonders if the Jewish-named writer was setting Robert up to be a neo-fascist as well as an overall creep when Robert sounds off about his admiration for the Wehrmacht as a fighting force.) It turns out that the killers are Mrs. Wilson and her daughter Patricia Smith, and their motive was revenge. Mrs. Wilson was the widow of Matthew Draper and Patricia Smith was their daughter. The two women plotted a long-term campaign against Robert Cavendish that would involve knocking off people near and dear to him and ultimately stabbing him to death but faking it to look like suicide.

There’s an exciting (as exciting as this determinedly low-keyed show ever gets, anyway) chase scene at the end in which Barnaby and Troy are racing to the Cavendish estate hoping to get there in time to save him from the villains’ murder plot. They’re stuck on the little two-lane road leading to the Cavendish home behind a horse van (we know that because it says “HORSES” on the outside) and various other vehicles, but in the end the cops get there just in time and Patricia falls on the knife with which she was to stab Robert and ends up dead. “Dead Man’s Eleven” was actually one of the better Midsomer Murders episodes; this early the plots at least made some sort of sense and didn’t involve dredging up so many criminal secrets it seemed like Barnaby and his partner were arresting half the town at the end. Also it was nice to see Robert Hardy and find out what happened to him, even though he never attained the stardom he deserved after his incandescent portrayal of Henry V in An Age of Kings. It was ironic, to say the least, to hear him deliver a pep talk to his cricket team 39 years after he’d spoken the St. Crispin’s Day address from which innumerable American football coaches plagiarized Henry V’s stirring words for their own halftime pep talks!