Midsomer Murders: "A Climate of Death" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 25, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles joined me for my third and last TV show on Thursday, January 29: a Midsomer Murders episode called “A Climate of Death” that has one of the most intriguing premises ever used on this show. It takes place in and around a village in Central England called “Goodman’s Green,” whose leading citizens have decided to make it a model of environmental self-sustainability and proof that human-caused climate change can be reversed. To this end, they’ve banned internal combustion-engined vehicles and cell phones (they can’t be charged without fossil-fuel energy) and set up an array of multi-colored trash cans to make sure everything that can possibly be recycled is. They’ve also set up solar panels everywhere they can to make sure all their energy comes from renewable sources. Alas, the centuries-old land grant by which the village became independent of direct control of the British government has run out, and a notorious American oil millionaire named Rooster Harlin (Corey Johnson, who affects the worst American accent I’ve heard from a British actor since Ron Randell’s horrible 1955 performance in the film I Am a Camera, the earlier non-musical version of Cabaret which suffered irretrievably from the total miscasting of Julie Harris as Sally Bowles) has just bought the place. The enforcers of the strict “green” code by which the village lives are Brian Havergal (Nathaniel Parker) – one wonders whether writer Maria Ward deliberately created his name by reversing one of Britain’s quirkier 20th century composers, Havergal Brian – and his wife Dixie (Julie Graham). Their enforcer is Tobis Seaton (Robert Akodoto), who not only refuses to wear shoes but patrols the village with a long-lensed digital camera taking photos of anyone who transgresses against the green-at-all-costs ground rules.

The show opens with the murder of a young villager named Danny Tarleton (Tim Cullingworth-Hudson), who not only owns a motorcycle (a big bozo no-no under the Goodman rules) but hopes to cut a deal with Rooster Harlin to build a motor-racing track in the middle of the village. He’s stabbed to death with a weather vane – I was regretting that he exited so early since he was easily the sexiest guy in the cast by far, with a huge cock flapping around under his blue running shorts that was turning my crank big-time – and the lead police officers, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), run smack into the middle of Goodman’s environmental politics and both its supporters and its enemies. One of its biggest enemies is Aldo McLean (Tony Jayawardena), who was forced to close his butcher shop after his family had run it for several generations because he couldn’t make money with the high cost of organically raised meat. Another one of the suspects is Danny’s father Liam Tarleton (Nigel Betts), who also didn’t support the environmental policies of the Havergals but was not as outrageous about it as his late son – until he, too, is murdered with a particularly picturesque weapon, a multi-toothed farming tool. And one of the quirkier plot twists is the so-called “Chilli-Eating Contest” [sic], which turns out to be not a contest between cooked chili dishes but one in which the contestants actually have to eat raw chili peppers. Rooster Harlin enters the contest but the chili pepper meant for him actually gets consumed by Aldo McLean, who dies of a heart attack immediately after eating it because it’s been artificially injected with several times the usual amount of capsaicin, the spice that makes chili peppers hot.

Ultimately we learn that [spoiler alert!] Rooster Harlin was not an oil millionaire; he’d made money in oil but then lost it all and that led him to a road-to-Damascus moment in which he decided he’d been wrong all along and the environmentalists had been right. He bought the village not to shut down its no-carbon-footprint experiment but to sustain it and also to locate his missing brother, who’d dropped the last name “Harlin” and was living in Goodman’s Green well before its environmentalist conversion. The brother had been dating Harper Havergal (Eve Austin), daughter of Brian and Dixie, but he didn’t want to marry her because his real love interest was Ginny Kilcannon (Helen Lederer). Since Rooster Harlin didn’t have any money himself, his purchase of Goodman’s Green was bankrolled by a Japanese tech billionaire, Ken Makoto (Takayuki Suzuki), who was committed to the cause of environmental sustainability and wanted to use his money to establish that the Goodman’s Green lifestyle was sustainable and should be exported around the world. We later learn that the real killer was [double spoiler alert!] Harper Havergal, who killed Hardin’s brother in a fit of jealous rage over his breakup with her and then killed the others out of fear that Danny Tarleton’s proposed racetrack would expose the brother’s remains and thereby incriminate her. (Charles thought that was a bit far-fetched, but the annals of true crime are full of stories about murderers who get caught because they get paranoid about being discovered and do stupid things that unravel their cover-ups.) Even before the murders started, Harper Havergal not only had a bootleg cell phone but had been building herself up as an online influencer and was hoping she could break free of her parents’ obsessive control so she could expand her site, get hundreds of thousands of followers, and ultimately secure herself big and lucrative advertising deals. This was a better-than-average Midsomer Murders episode that was, among other things, refreshingly free of one of this show’s most maddening tropes – the sheer multiplicity of crimes that often get exposed along with the primary intrigue – and it also had some nice comic-relief moments involving Barnaby’s malfunctioning Fitbit (the watch records him as walking only nine steps on a day when he’s been trundling around the fictitious Midsomer County on his investigation) and the insistence of his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) that he wear it at all times and take its results seriously.