Midsomer Murders: "The Ghost of Causton Abbey" (Bentley Productions, ITV, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 p.m. I took advantage of the hiatus NBC put the three Law and Order series on to watch a PBS showing of the Britisn TV series Midsomer Murders, dealing with two police officials, Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant James Winter (the ultra-cute Nick Hendrix), investigating murders in the fictional “Midsomer County” in central England, near Birmingham and Manchester. (The show mentions Manchester as the nearest major city to which the residents of “Midsomer County” repair to when they want to experience an urban environment.) This episode was from 2019 (though it was billed as a “new premiere” since apparently that year’s shows hadn’t been seen in the U.S, until now) and was called “The Ghost of Causton Abbey.” It began with a prologue set in 1539, in which Causton Abbey was still functioning as a monastery – though the monks were also brewing beer there, which becomes important later on – when a police goon squad shows up and makes clear their intention is to execute the reigning abbot, Brother Jozef (John Cummins), by plunging him into a cauldron of boiling liquid.

It’s not quite clear what the liquid is, and it’s also not made clear by screenwriter Helen Jenkins (working from characters created by Caroline Graham) just what Brother Jozef did to earn himself this fate. My guess, considering this was 1539, was he was still running the place according to Roman Catholic ritual and Henry VIII’s religious police had caught up to him. Anyway, just before Brother Jozef is plunged into the vat he pronounces a curse on the abbey and all who live there – and then the scene cuts to the 2019 present, when the abbey has been converted into a brewery and is hosting a launch party for its new India Pale Ale. The management, sisters Sarah Barnaby (Fiona Dolman) and Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland), are hosting the event – or at least Sarah is: she and Fleur have agreed that Fleur will be the actual brewmistress and Sarah will present the stuff to the public and host the grand opening. Fleur is single but Sarah is married to a rather officious man who was previously married to Jenny Moss (Angela Griffin), an African-British nurse at the local convalescent home. One of her patients there is Keith Grundy (Michael Byrne), who is working with ghostwriter Adam Osoba (Justin Pierre), another Afro-Brit who previously wrote a memoir for actress Sylvia Reynolds (Elaine Paige).

Osoba – whose last name sounded to me like the word “sober” and that would be appropriate because he, like me, is a Gay man who doesn’t drink alcohol – was also hired by Sarah Barnaby to write a how-to guide for aspiriing home brewers. Alas, well before either book is finished Osoba is found dead, cooked in one of the brewery’s vats just like Brother Jozef was all those 480 years ago, and the killer even wore a monk’s robe to heighten the illusion that he was bringing back the old curse. (Sarah Barnaby is actually using the curse as a marketing gimmick: the brewery’s products are labeled “Cursed Brew” and “Cursed Ale.”) Unfortunately, though at least one supermarket chain has ordered the brewery’s products, since a local politician with an interest in a rival ale maker has prevented them from expanding their production plant to fill the amount being ordered, Sarah decides to spike the product: half of the bottles contain Fleur’s high-quality brew and half contain ordinary supermarket chain-store beer. Adam Osoba learns about this and threatens to expose it, which gives Sarah a motive to kill him.

Meanwhile, Keith Grundy has a son, Russell Grundy (Tony Gardner), who’s a local city councilmember who’s worried that the scandal surrounding the brewery will hurt his son Toby’s (Zebb Dempster) chances to get into a prestigious college. Alas, unbeknownst to Russell, Toby is following in his grandfather’s criminal footsteps: he’s making counterfeit two-pound coins. (My husband Charles told me that the current two-pound coin is bimetallic and would therefore be considerably harder to counterfeit than a coin made of just one metal.) The cops’ first important suspect is Kwame Asante (Chu Omambala), yet another Afro-Brit who claims to have been waiting in Osoba’s home after they met up in a bar for casual sex with each other. Asante tells the cops he has a wife and can’t let them know he was cruising for men on the down-low, but the truth is more sinister: he and Asoba were formerly a couple (they weren’t married but they were registered as civil partners) until they fell into debt, and Asoba decided to get out of by faking his own death, leaving Asante to collect the life insurance policy on him. Only now Asoba has almost literally come back to life under a different name, and Asante is worried that he’ll at least be forced to give back the insurance money in a civil suit, and at worst be arrested and prosecuted for insurance fraud.

Midway through the show Sarah Barnaby is also killed – speared to death by a two-pronged pitchfork stolen from the on-site display of implements used to brew beer there in 1539 – and the cops finally deduce that the killer is [spoiler alert!] Jenny Moss, ex-wife of Sarah’s husband, who was worried about Sarah’s alcoholism and didn’t want the kids she’d had with her ex being raised by a woman obviously not in control of herself. There’s also a subplot dealing with Sylvia Reynolds and her bitchy comments about an actress she had ostensibly befriended for 30 years but she told Adam Osoba that the woman was really a cow who had slept her way to the top by marrying her director – and Sylvia loses a potentially important comeback role as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest because the director was her old friend’s husband whom she just dissed, and her dissing of them was e-mailed to a tabloid after Reynolds refused Osoba’s bribery demand. (There’s a late shot of Sylvia Reynolds pulling the incriminating tape out of its microcassette and destroying it, oddly forgetting that there is at least one other copy out there.) Charles noted all the loose ends writer Jenkins left hanging and the sheer amount of coincidence needed to make this plot believable, and it’s not at all chear why Adam Osoba was killed or why his killer wore a monk’s robe, but I liked this Midsomer Murders episode even despite the loose ends and the improbabilities.