Midsomer Murders: "Beyond the Grave" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, Arts & Entertainment, American Public Television, 2000)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 24) I turned on KPBS for a rerun of a Midsomer Murders episode from 2000, “Beyond the Grave,” which already featured John Nettles as the lead cop, Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, but considerably younger than I’m used to seeing him in later incarnations of this series. It centers around a museum in the fictional “Midsomer County” in central England devoted to the memory of Johnathan Lowrie, a Cavalier who was killed by Roundheads in 1644 in the English Civil War between supporters of King Charles I and backers of the Puritans led by Oliver Cromwell. The royalists were called “Cavaliers” because the men wore their hair long and dressed in dandy fashions, while the Puritans were called “Roundheads” because they shaved themselves bald and wore stark black and white clothing. James Tate (James Laurenson) leads guided tours of the museum, which is in the old Lawrie family home – Johnathan Lawrie is even buried under his living-room floor because he left orders that his final resting place was to be wherever he died, and that’s where a Roundhead death squad cornered him – until one day when he’s pointing out the portrait of Lawrie, and it’s been severely vandalized. Tate calls in the one experienced painting restorer in the area, Sandra MacKillop (Cheryl Campbell), to fix the portrait, and she does her best but freaks out when she realizes how much John Lawrie resembled her late husband David, who died less than a year before. Barnaby investigates the vandalism with his usual assistant, Sergeant Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), and Nico Bentley (Ed Waters), an actor who’s dating Barnaby’s daughter Cully (Joyce Howard) and has lined up a job playing an assistant police detective. There’s a nice line for Gavin Troy in which he expresses his discontent that Nico is going to make more money playing a police detective than Gavin makes actually being one.

Sandra is more or less living with her brother-in-law Charles (David Robb), who co-owned a lucrative software company with his brother David, Sandra’s late husband. She’s also had a history of mental illness in the months since David died, and somewhere along the way she started taking heroin and ultimately developed a habit, though she apparently kicked. There’s also a memoir by the late George Burton, who masterminded a robbery years before and then, after he served his prison term, wrote a book about it. James Tate was a member of his gang, under his original name, Michael Whistler, and his assignment was to create a blocked account so that they could keep the money after a decent interval had passed and the victims of the big robbery had stopped looking for it. Only one of the original crooks, Ralph Bailey (Roger Sloman), has traced Tate and demands his share of the money at once. Meanwhile, Nico has translated a Greek inscription on the Lawrie tombstone which nobody else had been able to read; it said he was buried there with all his possessions, including a silver service which his direct descendant, Marcus Lowrie (Charles Simon), wants. Only Marcus is beaten to death inside Johnathan’s grave by a man wearing a suit of armor that once belonged to Johnathan Lawrie and was sent to the museum by a family member living in Champaign, Illinois. There’s also the character of Alan Bradford (Malcolm Sinclair), who’s James Tate’s assistant at the museum and in a rueful scene confesses to Tom Barnaby in a rather elliptical way that he’s Gay.

One of the ways the people running the Lawrie museum promote it is by claiming that it’s haunted by the ghost of Johnathan Lawrie, and as part of her mental illness Sandra (by far the most interesting of this rather dreary lot of characters) believes it. A local medium named Eleanor Bunsall (Prunella Scales, who played the wife of ex-Monty Python star John Cleese in Fawlty Towers and has a number of distinguished credits in films over the years) regularly holds séances at the Lawrie estate and is caught by the cops walking across the grounds. A fire breaks out inside the museum and later a bust of King Charles I moves, seemingly of its own accord, and breaks on the floor. Later, however, Tom Barnaby deduces that both these incidents had prosaic causes: the fire was ignited by a beam of light concentrated by a part of the stained-glass window that acted as a prism, and the statue was moved by a fishing line hooked on it. It turns out that Sandra McKillop is being gaslighted by her brother-in-law in league with her therapist, Linda Marquis (Sylvestra Le Touzel), to get her declared legally insane and incarcerated in a mental institution so Charles can grab her share of the software company (ya remember the software company?), which if she died would revert to her sister. Directed by Moira Armstrong and written by Douglas Watkinson based on characters created by Caroline Graham, “Beyond the Grave” is an overly complicated and not particularly thrilling mystery – this show really has got better over the years – but it has a comfortable feeling like a lot of British mysteries, which make even murder seem pretty genteel.