by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was a 2010 two-part episode of the British
commercial TV show Midsomer Murders, a
series based on British police detectives in a fictional county in rural
England. This episode was called “Master Class” and made very interesting
viewing since I’ve just read Moscow Nights, Nigel Cliff’s combined biography of Van Cliburn and history of the
Cold War as refracted through his career — which began, at least in terms of
international fame, with his victory in the 1958 Tchaikovsky International
Piano Competition in Moscow that was largely considered a U.S. counter-strike
to the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first artificial
satellite, Sputnik-1, in 1957. “Master Class” is also about a piano
competition, this one headed by a world-famous pianist, Sir Michael Fielding
(James Fox), who lives in semiretirement in Midsomer County and runs a yearly
competition for teenage pianists. The top three finalists get to spend a week
at Fielding’s estate as he coaches them, and then he selects one of the three
to sponsor for a virtually certain international career. The opening is a
rather grim scene in which Fielding’s middle-aged daughters Miriam (Sylvestra
le Touzel) and Constance (Frances Barber) are handling the preliminary
auditions and finding the pianists hopelessly awful (though at least part of
the awfulness we hear can be attributed to the rather jangly and dubiously
tuned piano the producers used for the pre-recordings) until they hear a bit
from Zoe Stock (Lydia Wilson) — though the actors tend to pronounce her last
name “Stork.”
Zoe is a brilliantly talented pianist but one who’s afflicted
with odd allergies, including a tendency to start bleeding uncontrollably from
her nose at moments of stress. Despite this, she’s invited to join the list of
potential finalists and come to the Fielding estate, where in addition to the
Fieldings she meets the other contestants, Orlando Guest (a young man of almost
unearthly beauty named Matthew James Thomas who came to the U.S. to star in the
ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark) and Francesca Sharpe (Katherine Press). Francesca
has a classic S.O.B. stage dad, Simon (Michael Maloney), who’s obviously
pushing her into a career she doesn’t necessarily want; the Stock parents seem
like ordinary middle-class people who like their daughter but doesn’t think
music is that great a career choice — at virtually every traumatic moment for
her they try to get her to get in their car and let them drive her home — and
Orlando has a still quite attractive mom, Penelope (Nadia Cameron-Blakely),
who’s not above seducing Sir Michael Fielding (while he plays, of all things, a
piano transcription of the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und
Isolde) if that’ll help him get a leg up in
the competition. Zoe has a traumatic response when she sees the creek outside
the Fielding estate; she imagines she sees a young woman leap off the bridge
over the creek, fall in the water and drown. Later this turns out to be an
hallucinatory flashback and the woman was her mother; she committed suicide by
leaping into the creek and Zoe witnessed it, but was only a baby.
The local
priest, Rev. Gregory (Clifford Rose), and his nun, Sister Agnes (Elizabeth
Bell) — I was trying to figure out what denomination this was; I’d have assumed
Church of England except I don’t think it has nuns — took baby Zoe and placed
her for adoption with the Stocks, though when Zoe returned to the town Gregory
sent off a pair of DNA samples, some hair of hers as a baby and saliva from her
taking the communion cup (and breaking out into a rash because she’s allergic
to alcohol) — but the murders start happening before the cops learn why he
ordered a DNA test on two samples or what the results were. We’re also sent a
couple of red herrings, one in the form of Benedict Marsh (Richard Fleeshman,
who’s nowhere near as drop-dead gorgeous as Matthew James Thomas but is cute
enough I wouldn’t have minded seeing the two do a Gay porn film together), who
just missed the cut of three for Sir Michael Fielding’s master class and who’s
crashed the community and is holding out there in case something happens to one
of the other contestants; and Orlando’s sexual escapades with both Zoe and Francesca, who of course get ferociously
jealous once each finds out that Orlando has had the other. The action starts
when Zoe and Father Gregory are nearly killed by a pile of bricks being dropped
from the roof of the church (it’s being remodeled) — we know it’s not an
accident because we saw the person who pushed the bricks off the roof receive a
cell phone call immediately before, though we only see hands, nothing by which
we can identify the assailant — but it’s not until part two that someone,
Orlando, actually dies: he’s found hanging from a branch of the tree supporting
the treehouse where he had trysts with his fellow contestants, and the medical
examiner finds he was struck with a blunt instrument before he was hung and therefore it was murder, not
suicide. (I joked to Charles that in a Lifetime movie the cutest guy in the dramatis
personae is almost always the murderer; in
a British mystery he’s almost always the first victim.)
Later Father Gregory is
found bent over the altar, his throat slit from end to end, and Zoe’s adoptive
parents, Terry (Ian Puleston-Davies) and Dawn (Janet Sibley), nearly die in a
car crash after someone cuts their brake line. They recover enough to give Zoe
the shocking news that she’s adopted (I had thought it might be that Terry was
Zoe’s actual father and Zoe’s mom committed suicide when he wouldn’t leave his
wife and marry her), but they don’t tell her who her real parents were because
they themselves don’t know. Zoe eventually realizes that her mom was the
mystery woman she saw commit suicide while Zoe was still a baby, and [spoiler
alert!] in an ending writer Nicholas Martin
obviously ripped off from Robert
Towne’s script for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, it turns out her dad was Sir Michael Fielding.
What’s more, Fielding wasn’t just a sick old dude who got his kicks from doing
his kids; he’s also a crazy racist and a devotee of the eugenics theories of
Sir Francis Galton, an early-20th century scientist who first
established the science of fingerprint identification and also argued that the
British gene pool was getting polluted by people from lesser races, and
Fielding adopted that view and decided to do something about it by breeding
himself and his daughters — and he’s just about to seduce and presumably
impregnate Zoe (who’s both his daughter and his granddaughter — Molly, the girl who committed
suicide 18 years earlier, was another of Fielding’s daughters) when the police
drive up to his house and yell at Zoe to get out of there. “Master Class” is a
bit of good clean kinky fun, well constructed and with hints of the Fieldings’
inbreeding (not only Zoe’s allergies and bleeding but also a bottle of medicine
used to treat porphyria, the disease that drove King George III crazy)
carefully dropped in Martin’s script, expertly directed by Renny Rye and gifted
with that amazing talent pool of British actors.
