by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I’ve got a number of movies I’ve seen recently that I want
to write about in these pages, including The Beast of Hollow Mountain and Miami Exposé (two films I dredged up over the weekend on a
home-recorded DVD I’d taken off Turner Classic Movies in 2013), but the item
I’ll have time to write about now is an interesting episode of Midsomer
Murders, the oddly named British TV show
about a police force in the relatively rustic Midsomer County, England (the
county is fictitious, invented by creator Caroline Graham for her Chief
Inspector Barnaby book series, but there is an actual English town called Midsomer Norton near
the Mendip Hills in Bath and North East Somerset, and it’s called that because
the Somer River runs through it — I’m not making this up, you know!). Some of
the Midsomer Murders episodes
have had that weird sort of gentility that makes British mysteries considerably
less thrilling than they could be, but not this one: the show they aired last
Thursday on KPBS, San Diego’s local PBS outlet, was called “Last Year’s Model”
and was about a self-contained middle-aged woman, Annie Woodrow (Saskia
Wickham), who as the show begins is about to go on trial for the murder of her
lifelong friend, Frances Trevelyan.
Supposedly her motive was that she was
infatuated with Frances’s husband John (Brian Protheroe), though he had no
interest in her “that way,” and she figured she could win John’s affections if
she just knocked off his inconvenient wife. Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (John
Nettles), the series lead, helped build the case against Annie but as the trial
winds on becomes more and more convinced she didn’t do it. Annie is married to
Lance Woodrow (Miles Anderson), a boor who tries to look younger than he is,
produces rock bands’ recordings in his home studio (he’s currently working with
a band called “Hidden Agenda,” and given all the secrets percolating in David
Hoskins’ script, I suspect the writer picked that name as deliberate irony),
and publicly insists that he believes in his wife’s innocence but he’s actually the one who’s cheating. There’s a nicely
lubricious scene in his hot tub with Samantha Flint (Josette Simon), who hears
the doorbell ringing and hurriedly puts on a dress and a pair of shoes to
answer it; it’s Chief Inspector Barnaby, and he notices her shoes are dripping
water and deduces from this that Lance is having an affair with her. There are
also some oddly quirky aspects, including the Trevelyans’ two children, Sophie
(Rosa Hoskins) and “Ed” (Emily Gloyens) — presumably the name is short for Edna,
but she wears a jacket and tie and has her hair cut short that only her wearing
a skirt below the waist “outs” her as a girl. (I couldn’t help but wish they’d
do a sequel about her when she grows up and keeps challenging gender norms!)
Where I thought this was going
was that Lance Woodrow would turn
out to be Frances Trevelyan’s real killer — he knocked her off and then framed
his own wife for the crime to get rid of her à la Ray Milland in Dial “M” for Murder — but in fact Hoskins throws us a curveball: the
real killer is antiques dealer Jamie Cranmer (Jamie Glover), and his motive was
that he was working as a volunteer for a local support group for senior
citizens and in that capacity had offered to sell the home of Joyce Barnaby
(Jane Wymark), octogenarian who lived between the Woodrows and the Trevelyans
and who, because she’d seen Annie going to the Trevelyan home in the middle of
the night Frances was killed, was one of the key prosecution witnesses against
Annie. Jamie had convinced Joyce that he could get a good price for her home by
selling it privately and avoiding any estate agents (Brit-speak for
“realtors”); of course what he really wanted was to sell the house at a good price, tell Joyce he got far
less for it, and pocket the difference. He killed Frances when she caught on to
his scheme and threatened to tell Joyce she was being scammed — and there’s a
marvelous piece of acting on Jane Wymark’s part when she finally realizes the friend she trusted was a swindler and a
murderer to boot. Another thing I liked about this show was that the prosecutor
in the British court trying Annie was a young Black woman — and I thought it
was cool to see her wearing the traditional white powdered wig of judges and
attorneys in British courts. All you Hollywood people who are prattling on
about “inclusion,” here’s a real example of it, powerful precisely because it’s
presented so matter-of-factly, as if it isn’t a big deal!
