Crimes of the Season

The last Midsomer Murders of the present series was on Sunday. I like Midsomer Murders, the more so since Neil Dudgeon took over from John Nettles. Originally Nettles was very good, but he rather outstayed his welcome, being far older than any Inspector had a right to be, and the scripts had become rather tired. While it was a good idea to give Barnaby a home life, it always seemed just that bit contrived with Nettle’s screen family, while Dudgeon’s screen family, with now an infant, and a second dog (after the first died in real life of old age) comes across as far more realistic.

One of the appeals of Midsomer is the sense of place. This is, however, a kind of Agatha Christie village life, peopled by eccentrics of varying descriptions and dispositions, and as in a small community, there is conflict and murder. The murder may be brutal but it is never gory, this is a cosy kind of murder, in which we have to see past the red herrings to find the real criminal, and along which, we have wonderful pen-sketches of characters.

Talking Pictures has a detective series Gideon’s Way starring John Gregson in the title role as Commander George Gideon of Scotland Yard, with Alexander Davion as his assistant, Detective Chief Inspector David Keen. While never quite up to date with the “swinging sixties”, it was short in mid-sixties London, but almost looks back to the late 1950s. Like Inspector Barnaby, we catch glimpses of Gideon’s family, his wife and two sons. A filmed series, the extensive location shooting makes it a veritable time capsule giving an authentic view of London in 1964/65.

A sense of place, albeit a very different place, is what I like about the Inspector Chen radio plays. Adapted from the books by Qiu Xiaolong, they are set in Shanghai in the 1990s at the point when the People's Republic of China is making momentous changes, and feature Chief Inspector Chen Cao, a poetry-quoting cop with integrity, and his sidekick Detective Yu.

The plays delve into China ancient and modern, the culture, the cuisine, history, politics as well as the crime itself. The music also adds to the tone, and they transport the listener to a very different culture, but one which is palpably real, and often exotic and sensuous. The latest, Don't Cry, Tai Lake, takes the listener on a journey in which environmental pollution and the newly emerging entrepreneurial factories are at odds with one another, and also has poetry and romance entwined with a murder.

Repeating on the Drama channel, Inspector Jean Darblay played by Stephanie Turner is the lead in Juliette Bravo, which is set in a small police station in the fictional town of Hartley in Lancashire. First broadcast on 30 August 1980, this is a million miles from the cosy villages of Midsomer, but the sense of place, of the North of England, is palpable.

As a police procedural drama series, there is not always a detection element, and the stories are relatively slight – very few murders in place – but the situations they deal with are very real. It is like having a snapshot into the period and the people of the 1980s, and that strong sense of place, helped by the location filming, of which there is plenty, makes it a very distinctive drama.

A distinctive drama of another kind was “A Very English Scandal” written by Russell T Davies, adapted from the book of the same name, but also informed from meetings with the principals still alive or those who knew them. Jeremy Thorpe, as portrayed brilliantly by Hugh Grant, is a monster, but an all too human monster, whose old Etonian background helped him to avoid the pitfalls of his illegal behaviour.

In one scene, an accusation by Norman Scott is transcribed at a police station, gets passed along in an envelope from department to department, being read, put back in the envelope and getting an extra signature on the envelope every time, until finally it ends in MI5 where it is locked in a safe! Things did not happen quite like that, but as a shorthand for the way in which the "old boys" network protected their own, the sequence works perfectly.

Whether Thorpe would have been such a monstrous character if homosexuality had been legalised is a question that might well come from watching it. Certainly, with the MP and Peer who both take up the fight to legalise homosexuality, there is a clear sense of how the law could hound people to death – almost literally, some people killed themselves as a result of the treatment by the legal system. That comes across strongly, as does the fact that Norman Scott, while wildly unstable - a brilliant performance by Ben Wilshaw - was also brave enough not to hide his sexuality while Thorpe and those in his circle did.

Thorpe comes across as charming, brilliant, talented, clever, but also quite ruthless in the pursuit of a political career in which glittering prizes were seemingly close to be taken. I got the impression he would have been just as ruthless even if he did not have to hide his homosexuality.

This has a stellar cast, and again a real sense of period, as well as having a lightness of touch in the direction which, together with the incidental music, suggests elements of black comedy in the unfolding events. I look forward to next week. It's not a detective series or a police procedural, but crimes it has a plenty.