Midsomer Murders: “The Ballad of Midsomer County” (Bentley Productions, Independent Television, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night Charles and I watched a 2015 episode of the long-running (since 1993!) British TV mystery Midsomer Murders, set in a fictitious “Midsomer County” in central England. This episode was called “The Ballad of Midsomer County” and centers around the annual Lower Crosbie Folk Festival, a festival of folk-music concerts that’s supposed to be a huge economic driver for the local town and its businesspeople, especially its hospitality industry – restaurants, hotels, bars. The rather small crowds we see don’t seem like they’d be a particularly strong economic driver for anything, but the townspeople make enough money that they’re terrifically upset when the festival’s promoters, Toby Winning (Stuart St. Paul) and Brian Gray (Daniel Brockelbank) announce plans to move next year’s festival to a location nearer to London. The episode begins with Toby Winning’s death – he’s overpowered in his own kitchen and drowned in a large bowl filled with eggs and small eels, which turns out to be a reference to a local folk song, “The Ballad of Midsomer County,” in which a young hunter named John Henry is lured to the farmhouse of a young woman who proceeds to kill him by slitting his throat. (The song was actually composed by Seth Lakeman – though the rest of the episode’s score is by Jim Parker.)

Later Brian Gray is murdered when the killer cuts the straps holding together a stack of Marshall amplifiers and it collapses on him. His assailant then sticks three roses in his mouth, another reference to the lyric of “The Ballad of Midsomer County.” The killer also takes out a third person involved with the festival, African-British folksinger Frank Wainwright (Clark Peters), by impaling him with a beach umbrella. The MacGuffin is a tape of an unreleased album legendary folksinger Johnny Carver was recording in his home studio at his cottage in the neighborhood when he supposedly committed suicide. Johnny Carver’s “lost album” has achieved legendary status, and plenty of people are after the surviving tape – which Johnny’s brother Danny (Sean Gilder), a sound engineer for the festival, hid under the floorboards of the cottage but now finds is no longer there. Danny is hostile towards the whole music business and does everything he can to keep his daughter, aspiring folksinger Melody Carver (Lucie Jones), from pursuing a musical career. Melody works as a waitress at the local hotel, owned by Claire Asher (Claudia Blakeley), but keeps trying to get away from her job to try out at one of the festival’s open mikes. She gets cruised by Jay Templeton (Stephen Hagan), the festival’s headliner, but soon realizes that Jay is just trying to seduce her with promises of helping launch her career and letting her open for him.

The detective characters, DCI John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his sidekick, DS Charlie Nelson (the drop-dead gorgeous Gwylim Lee), originally suspect Winning’s widow (Rakie Ayola) – another Afro-Brit and a folksinger herself who recorded “The Ballad of Midsomer County” on her first album back in 2002 (in one scene we see her hand-packing CD’s for sale at her festival merch table) – but then they realize that the murders all center around the tape of Johnny Carver’s lost album. They discover that Melody Carver was not Danny’s daughter but Johnny’s – her mom had an affair with the brother-in-law, who even though we never see him alive is described as a typically rambunctious musician heavily into drugs and casual sex – and the murderer was Claire’s husband Tom (Dean Andrews), who also killed Johnny Carver. It seems that Johnny was having an affair with Claire, who was planning to sell the hotel and run off with Johnny, only Tom confronted him while Johnny was at work on the album and the murder ended up being audio-recorded on the tape Johnny was using to record his album. At the end Melody Carver finally gets to sing at the festival, and does “The Ballad of Midsomer County” – but only one verse of it, which was disappointing (I was hoping she’d get to do the whole song, especially since Lucie Jones has a quite nice folk voice). Charles (the near-namesake of the younger cop character!) liked the show and particularly enjoyed the scene in which one of the folk groups is performing at an indoor venue and the audience spontaneously starts singing along without any prompting from the performers to do so – something Charles said he saw at real folk concerts when he went to London. It was an unusually good Midsomer Murders episode and I liked the idea of the MacGuffin being an unreleased album that contained a song which became the basis for the central intrigue – and despite the brutality of the murders the show retained that rather odd gentility with which the British have generally approached the mystery genre.