Midsomer Murders: "The Miniature Murders" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, Independent Television, American Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched yet another episode of the Midsomer Murders British independent TV series, set in a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England and dealing with the two local police detectives, chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). This episode was called “The Miniature Murders” and it opens with a great scene showing off an exhibit of incredibly elaborate doll’s houses, one of which even has a miniature doll’s house inside a doll’s house. The doll’s houses are being donated to the Midsomer Museum by property owner, financier and overall scumbag Alexander Beauvoisin (Roger Barclay), who couldn’t be less interested in doll’s houses but has got stuck with the collection because his late sister accumulated them. Alexander is having an extra-relational affair with an ex-cop named Holly Ackroyd (Joanna Page), who midway through the episode we learn was actually fired from the police for excessive use of force and afterwards re-invented herself as a private detective. Holly was actually hired by Alexander’s estranged wife Fiona (Clare Holman), and assigned to seduce him so Fiona could find where he was hiding the couple’s community assets so he wouldn’t have to share them with her in the final divorce settlement. Alexander is also the subject of a hate campaign by a Black (I suppose I should call them “African-British”) father-son duo named Samuel (Karl Collins) and Finn (Rohan Nedd) Wokoma, who run a storage facility just outside town and are mad at Alexander because Samuel’s daughter – and Finn’s sister – was killed in an apartment she was renting from Alexander when the gas furnace malfunctioned and asphyxiated her.

Alexander is the first murder victim, killed during the ceremony where he’s supposed to be handing over the doll’s house collection by a large gun fired with a silencer from one of the doll’s houses, and later one of the other most interesting characters is also murdered, found stabbed to death with a pen-knife in her home while a bubble machine is going in the background. She is children’s entertainer Jemima Starling (Katy Brand) and she comes off as a bizarre mash-up of Queen Victoria and the Sesame Street character Big Bird. If she has a life outside that bird costume, we never see her that way. But the intrigue turns out to revolve around Maxine Dobson (Eleanor Bron, who played Ahme, high priestess of the Kali-li Death Cult in the film Help! and whose presence here puts the rest of this Midsomer Murders cast one degree of separation from The Beatles), who acquired a gun from the Wokomas, who have ended up doing a black-market business in guns abandoned from their storage customers (since this is Britain and you can’t just go down to the local sporting-goods or convenience store and buy a gun, no questions asked, like you can in the U.S.). She was stealing artifacts from the doll’s houses and selling them on the Internet to collectors after replacing them with fakes of her own manufacture, and her rationale was that it would be better to have these objects in the hands of collectors who would genuinely appreciate them than sitting in a museum – only in at least one case, a jack-in-the-box she advertised as unique, she’d either mistakenly sent her replica to the customer and he spotted it, or he’d just read somewhere that another one existed on display in the Midsomer Museum and assumed that the one he’d been sold was a fake. Either way, he posted a negative review on her Web site accusing Maxine of ripping him off.

Maxine bought a gun to use for self-defense, only a young man came to her door; she assumed he was a prowler out to rob her and shot him to death, only to discover that he’d just been a young, innocent kid. She hid the body in her cellar and covered it in concrete, until Alexander threatened to have her whole shop torn down (since it was on his property) and she worried that as part of the demolition, the young man’s body would be discovered and she’d be accused of murder. But the actual killing of Alexander and Jemima was done by [spoiler alert!] Carys Nicholson (Rosalie Craig), who as far as the rest of the world knows was just an employee of Maxine’s shop. In reality she’d been about to commit suicide when Maxine found and rescued her, and so Carys took it on herself to move Alexander’s body and stash it in the Wokomas’ storage facility, then eliminate Jemima when the bird woman spotted her stashing the corpse at the Wokomas’ garage. There are a couple of red herrings, including the mysterious disappearance of Samuel Wokoma for an evening – it turned out he’d made a promise to his dead daughter that he’d take her to a ballet on her 21st birthday, and though she died of asphyxiation a few months before he felt psychologically compelled to keep his end of the bargain and went to a ballet performance that night – as well as a woman student activist who plans a big demonstration targeting Alexander for the sloppy and dangerous way he runs his student housing, only to call it off at the last minute after a scapegrace ex-boyfriend threatens to post nude photos of her on the Internet if she goes ahead with the action.

This Midsomer Murders episode was directed by Toby Frow from a script by Helen Jenkins, and though the ultimate origins of the series are a set of books by Caroline Graham it’s Jenkins who’s clearly responsible for the rather dreary overplotting of this story – which includes a twist ending in which deputy chief inspector John Barnaby goes off riding in a motorcycle sidecar, the motorcycle being driven by the leader of an all-female motorcycle gang composed entirely of women in, shall we say, their advanced years. The sheer incongruity of Neil Dudgeon in a motorcycle sidecar with the bike’s driver being a woman at least as old as he is was irresistible to the people doing the poster art for this episode, who featured the two-shot of him and her on the motorbike together even though the final shot has virtually nothing to do with the resolution of the story!