Midsomer Murders: "Blood Will Out" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, Arts & Entertainment, American Public Television, 1999)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 31) at 10 I switched on KPBS for a Midsomer Murders rerun that reached even farther back in the show’s history than “Beyond the Grave”: “Blood Will Out,” from the show’s second season in early 1999. It’s set in a small village called Martyr Warren in the decidedly fictitious Midsomer County in central England, and it’s centered around the local town bully, Hector Bridges (Paul Jesson). Hector is having hissy-fits over the arrival in town of a band of “travelers” – people with no fixed abode who live in RV’s and other large vehicles, travel from place to place and essentially live off the land. Though they’re not “gypsies” in the literal sense of being Rom people, they live much the way gypsies do and are subject to the same social prejudices, including continually being accused of stealing from the locals. Hector wants the representatives of local law enforcement, detective chief inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles, who’s played this role since the series began and still does) and his deputy, Sgt. Gavin Troy (Daniel Casey), to run them out of town. Barnaby protests that he can’t do that because they haven’t broken any laws; the travelers are encamped on private property and its owner, Will Saxby (John Tuttine), has given them permission to be there. Will’s wife Muriel (Elizabeth Garvie) is upset because he told her there would be only one or two guests on their land, and instead there are at least a dozen, plus the conveyances in which they live. It turns out that some years earlier Will and Hector switched partners – literally; Muriel left Hector to marry Will and Will’s wife Jenny (Tricia George) left him to marry Hector and took their daughter Fleur (Honeysuckle Weeks – either that’s her real name or she should have fired her agent for giving her such a silly one) with him.

Fleur is desperate to get away from Hector because she says he’s abusing her, and everyone at first assumes he’s molesting her but he’s really beating her physically. Writer Douglas Watkinson, working from characters created by Caroline Graham, follows at least one of the standard rules of whodunit construction: he spends the first half-hour establishing that Hector is so broadly hated in the town that when he finally turns up dead, there will be lots of suspects. Among them are Orville Tudway (Kevin McNally), an old Army buddy of Hector’s; they served together in the Falklands War of 1982-83 but had a falling-out because one day Hector led their unit on a charge against an Argentine battalion while telling the others there were far fewer Argentinian soldiers than there actually were. Tudway left the service after the war and joined the travelers – he seems to be the only one who didn’t have to take the last name “Smith,” a defense mechanism they adopted to make it harder for the police to bust them because the plethora of Smiths would make it impossible for anyone to establish that one particular Smith was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Among the Smiths – though these actually are biologically related – are an older man named John Smith (Jerome Willis) and his two children, son Michael (Nick Moran) and daughter Rachel (Elizabeth Thomas). There are a lot of other people in the dramatis personae, including local shopowner Peter Fairfax (Ian Thompson); Tilly Dinsdale (Rowena Cooper), who keeps pigs on her farm (until one of the traveling caravans sets them free with a bolt cutter and rustles at least one; Barnaby questions Michael and Rachel Smith but they point out that they wouldn’t be interested in stealing a pig because they’re vegetarians); and her sister Felicity (Phyllida Law), a Scrabble devotée who provides an alibi for Peter Fairfax for Hector’s murder since they were together at the time.

This Midsomer Murders episode differs from later shows in the series in being relatively streamlined in its plotting and in featuring only two killings – Hector’s and John Smith’s. John is discovered in his trailer with his head bashed in, and eventually Barnaby deduces that Hector was killed by his stepdaughter Fleur in self-defense after he’d taken his belt off and threatened to beat her literally within an inch of her life. John Smith was accidentally killed by Will Saxby during an argument that turned violent. There’s also a comic-relief plot element in Barnaby’s attempt to slim down enough to fit the only pair of pants available at the local store, which Gavin Troy tries to accomplish by putting him on a diet of cabbage soup, apple slices and other healthy but unappealing foods. At one point Barnaby tries to sneak in a candy bar in the glove compartment of his car, but Gavin discovers it and eats it himself. The punch line comes when Barnaby has finally slimmed down to the size he needed to be, but by then the pants are available only in red and Barnaby tells the stuck-up queen who works there, “Do I look like the sort of man who wears red pants?” So Gavin offers to take Barnaby to lunch at a fancy restaurant for coq au vin and bread-and-butter pudding, which I presume is as fattening as it sounds. This Midsomer Murders episode was quirky (as the show usually is) but at least it makes sense, though I wish writer Watkinson and director Moira Armstrong would have made more of the kinkiness of the sexual swap at the heart of the story!