Midsomer Murders: "For Death Prepare" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, ITV [Independent Television], American Public Television, PBS, copyright 2021, released 2023)

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

Last night at 10 I watched a recent (first aired May 28, 2023, though the copyright date is 2021) episode of Midsomer Murders on KPBS: “For Death Prepare,” in which the murders (there are three, two actual and one attempted, but pretty widely spaced during the show) take place in and around a local amateur operetta company doing Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. The corpse of the first victim turns up in a mock treasure chest representing the Pirate King’s treasure in the operetta, and at first no one in the company has any idea who he was. Neither do the lead investigators for local law enforcement, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his partner, Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). It turns out well into the show’s 90-minute running time (it was originally segmented to allow for a two-hour time slot with commercials, but fortunately this was KPBS and they were showing it straight through) that the victim was a real-estate developer who wanted to buy the old mill land on which the theatre stood, but Katisha Empson (Jane Bertish) was dead set against selling even though her niece and heir, Phyllis Cuttle (Samantha Spiro), desperately wanted to sell and thought she could use the money to build a state-of-the-art theatre on what was left of the property. Katisha is being attended to by a so-called “concierge doctor” – meaning one who doesn’t accept any sort of health insurance and practices only on people who can afford to pay him in cash. The “concierge doctor” is Simon Charteris (Rajat M. Bose, also known as Mathew Bose), who has got Katisha to change her will so if anything happens to her – as indeed it does when she becomes the second victim, taking a tumble down the stairs of her great mansion while under the influence of opium which someone disguised as her sleeping tablets – he stands to inherit a lot of her money. This understandably upsets her niece, who stood to inherit most of her estate before she changed her will, and for a while Barnaby and Winter regard both of them as potential suspects.

There are a lot of the usual red herrings, including local pub owner Marcus Dunlow (Alexander Hanson), who’s been hitting on his barmaid, Phoebe Whittingdale (Tessa Wong) to the understandable disgust of his wife Faith (Jenna Russell); Marcus’s son Luke (Dylan Wood, easily the cutest member of the cast), who’s just won admission to a prestigious conservatory in London even though that’s his dad’s dream, not his – he’s dating Phoebe and wants to take off with her back to Australia, where she was living until she recently returned to Midsomer County to reconcile with her father, Jeremy Whittingdale (Kevin Whatley), only she can’t stand him and wants to return after she does some aimless traveling around the world, including a visit to Goa (India’s smallest state by area and fourth smallest in population; I heard of it from an archive.org download of a concert by Goa’s amateur symphony), and wants Luke to accompany her. Also in the mix is the irascible estate manager, the thug-like Graham Handsworth (David Rubin) and his long-suffering wife Shaila (Shobna Gulati), who’s responded to Graham’s physical abuse by drifting into a Lesbian affair with Katisha’s niece Phyllis. There’s also a heavy-set Black man named Derek Sharrow (Clive Rowe) who’s the sole caregiver of his disabled father, and among the dark secrets in the various characters’ past is the scandal that led Jeremy Whittingdale to get fired from his former job as a private-school teacher (the scandal didn’t involve him molesting the students but fixing their grades; he was allowed to leave quietly and avoid prosecution) and the fact that Phoebe Whittingdale was the result of a brief affair Marcus Dunlow had with Jeremy’s wife, which means that she and Luke are half-siblings (which suggests to me that instead of giving The Pirates of Penzance the local opera company should have been staging Die Walküre).

In the end Barnaby and Winter uncover quite a few crimes; they have Simon Charteris (whose name I suspect writer Julia Gilbert got from Leslie Charteris, creator of the character “The Saint,” as well as “Simon Templar,” The Saint’s real name) arrested for “grooming” various wealthy women into giving him their inheritances, and they discover Derek Sharrow is the real killer from misspellings in the quotes from Gilbert’s libretto to The Pirates of Penzance which he painted on the walls of Jeremy Whittingdale’s dressing room, since he was playing “the modern Major-General” in the production. Apparently this wasn’t the first time the Midsomer Murders crew did an episode involving an opera production; there was an earlier one called “Death of a Hollow Man” in which the opera being produced was one by Mozart (which would have turned me on a lot more than Gilbert and Sullivan), though I give Julia Gilbert and director Toby Frow credit for effectively using quotes from The Pirates of Penzance in the show, including having lines from the operetta carved into the wooden prop coins representing the pirate’s treasure. But I quite liked “For Death Prepare” and thought it was very entertaining within this show’s overall quirkiness.