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

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

Last night (Thursday, September 21) at 10 I watched another Midsomer Murders rerun from the show’s early days as a co-production between the British All3 Media company and the American Arts & Entertainment channel – which was obvious in the show’s many false climaxes where the commercial breaks for A&E’s telecasts occurred. This episode was called “Judgement Day” – note the British spelling of the word “Judgement,” which in U.S. usage doesn’t have that first “e” – and the titular judgment day (to use the American spelling) is of a local village called Midsomer Mallow in the fictitious Midsomer County in central England. The show, first aired on January 29, 2000, starts with a prologue in which a martinet-like housekeeper is stabbed to death by an unseen assailant. It wasn’t until these shots reappeared at the end of the show that I realized the prologue was set years before the original action, though the clues were that the housekeeper was watching a small-screen black-and-white TV (a crime show, naturally, and one obviously patterned on the big 1950’s U.S. hit Dragnet) when she was stabbed. The episode was written by Anthony Horowitz and cleverly directed by Jeremy Silberston, who in the prologue mounts a quite effective elevator crane shot to link the action in the crime show the housekeeper is watching to the real-life assault and murder of her. The girl the housekeeper was baby-sitting, Annabella Weston (Emily Canfor-Dumas), supposedly slept through the entire incident and is found in bed by her parents, Michael (Richard Trinder) and Ruth (Caroline Faber), but at the end of the episode we learn that she was actually the killer and she was incarcerated in a mental institution for decades until she was sent to a halfway house, called Sebdon Manor but nicknamed “The Retreat,” in preparation for releasing her altogether as her doctors had judged her no longer a danger to herself or others. (Wrong, big-time.)

The current action begins with a series of burglaries in Midsomer Mallow committed by the local Lothario, Peter Drinkwater (a young and already strikingly handsome Orlando Bloom), in collaboration with Jack Dorset (Tobias Menzies), son of the local butcher, Ray Dorset (Bill Thomas). Peter is sexually involved with both his age-peer girlfriend, Caroline Devere (Chloe Tucker), daughter of Marcus Devere (Timothy West) and his wife Bella (Hannah Gordon), and older woman Laura Brierly (Marsha Fitzalan), frustrated wife of local leader Gordon Brierly (Richard Hope). Laura pays Peter 50 pounds for each of their trysts. Gordon is spearheading Midsomer Mallow’s entry in the “Perfect Village Contest,” a competition whose judges include Frank Mannion (Nickolas Grace), host of a TV gardening show and an obvious screaming queen (he’s constantly slipping off for Gay quickies with local waiters and the like); Rosemary Furman (Maggie Steed), who edits a magazine called Country Living but actually lives in London and can’t stand the country (sort of like Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Christmas in Connecticut); and Samantha Johnstone (Josephine Tewson), a friend of Rosemary’s she enlists at the last minute. Samantha is a writer and she’s had at least some success, but she’s also an alcoholic who suffers from clinical depression and has made at least one suicide attempt. Also in the mix is Edward Allardice (Moray Watson), a decently remembered character actor from the London stage (he recalls playing Laërtes in a 1955 production of Hamlet directed by and starring Laurence Olivier which had the play set in a doll’s house and reduced the number of actors to seven, though Allardice insists that Olivier did that just to give himself more stage time) until he suddenly retired following an auto accident that killed his wife, stunningly beautiful actress Jane Rochelle (Shelagh Fraser).

Only Jane Rochelle actually didn’t die: she emerged from the accident hideously disfigured but still alive, and Allardice hid her out in the big house he bought in Midsomer Mallow and never let anyone from the outside world see her. Writer Horowitz almost certainly cribbed this plot device from Jane Eyre (maybe we were supposed to believe Allardice had once acted in a stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic), and it sets up one of the most chilling scenes in the episode, in which eyes belonging to an otherwise unseen face watch Peter and Jack as they burglarize Allardice’s home but she does nothing to stop them. (At that point we don’t yet know that she’s a she and I thought Allardice himself was watching his house being burglarized but doing nothing, presumably out of fear for his safety, or maybe because he was having a Gay affair with one or both of the burglars.) The local police, series regulars Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) and his partner Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), get involved partly because Peter Drinkwater gets stabbed with a two-pronged pitchfork just before Barnaby and Troy arrive at the abandoned farm he’s living at to question him about the burglaries, and partly because Barnaby’s wife Joyce (Jane Wymark) won a TV contest to be the fourth judge in the Perfect Village Contest. Also Barnaby’s daughter Cully (Laura Howard) is an aspiring actress and writer who’s researching a history of the local playhouse and wants to interview Allardice for it. Other murders occur: Rosemary Furman dies from drinking poisoned wine at the big local festival for the Perfect Village judges. On the same occasion Bella Devere takes a sip and collapses but survives, though she falls in such a way that she knocks over the table and thereby destroys the other wine glasses and therefore wipes out the evidence.

Later Samantha Johnstone is found stabbed to death in her hotel room, and Barnaby and Troy ultimately deduce that Bella Devere is in fact Annabel Weston, who returned to the village following her release from custody and hooked up with Marcus through answering his lonely-hearts ad. Marcus figured out who she was but fell in love with her anyway, and the reason Bella Devere a.k.a. Annabel Weston poisoned the wine is that Samantha could have recognized her and exposed her as a former mental patient because the two of them met at “The Retreat” following Samantha’s suicide attempt. It’s still not clear why Bella offed Peter Drinkwater, but even with that rather important plot hole left unfilled “Judgement Day” remains one of the better Midsomer Murders episodes. Its characters are compelling creations, the intrigues more or less make sense (making the principal villainess a madwoman helps in that regard; then you can always say, “Of course her actions don’t make sense! She’s crazy!”) and the show overall manages to maintain its trademark lightness even though it’s dealing with some pretty dire aspects of human nature.