Still on the case on DVD
After a dozen years of solving some 170 macabre murders in picturesque Midsomer County, actor John Nettles detects a certain grumpiness overtaking his character Det. Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby.
“And a certain rigor,” he said. “It might be rigor mortis.”
That’s the sort of dry, dark humor you find in “Midsomer Murders,” the droll English village mystery series recently released in two new collections: “Midsomer Murders: The Early Cases Collection” and “Midsomer Murders: Set 10.”
The series, starring Nettles as a contemporary but low-tech crime solver, gained a following in the U.S. when it aired on A&E; and the Biography Channel. So far, Acorn Media has released 10 sets, plus the collectors’ set, on DVD, at a rate of two a year and will have more to come as new episodes continue to be churned out. Producers are now finishing up Series 11 for broadcast in Britain.
‘It’s too slow’
No one is more surprised that the series even has a U.S. following than Nettles, who lives in the countryside himself, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon.
“The kind of policing I do, the old-fashioned coppering, belongs to the ‘60s. It has little to do with forensic advances,” Nettles said. In an English competition, which rated TV crime-solving practices, “Midsomer Murders” received “0” out of 10 possible points for its scant resemblance to modern-day police work, he said.
“I said this will never go anywhere in the U.S. of A. It’s too slow, too ponderous,” he said. “How wrong can you be?”
But as a classic whodunit series, filmed in what Nettles called the “verdant excesses” of Buckinghamshire, the series obviously appeals to those who find comfort in the contained world of an earlier time -- despite an outrageous rate of gruesome killing. Needless to say, there are enough Pudding Clubs, cricket matches and bird watchers in the local pubs and forests to satisfy any Anglophile.
Barnaby is smart but simple, happily married and polite, even to murderers and the wild array of snobby villagers and eccentric vicars. He and his sidekicks -- Troy (Daniel Casey) in the early cases and Scott (John Hopkins) in Set 10 -- invariably catch the murderers, who are almost always middle-class villagers.
Stoic sleuth
During the hunt, Barnaby keeps his upper lip stiff amid even the most bizarre cases such as “Hidden Depths” (in Set 10), in which a victim was tied down and bottled to death with his own collection of vintage wines. Naked bodies popped up in crop circles in “Electric Vendetta.” But no one noticed that the police forgot entirely about the first body, who he was and who killed him, Nettles said.
His favorite episode, he said, was “Blue Herrings,” in which no one at all was killed. Set in a home for the elderly, the episode contained “grown-up dialogue” and featured many established actors, many of whom are now dead, he said. Both are on “The Early Cases” DVD, which also includes a retrospective disc.
In the Bogart mold
Nettles called the acting in the series as deliberately old-fashioned as the policing. It’s a kind of “clean acting,” he said, devoid of psychological tics or “solipsistic introspection,” he said. Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper represented the best of that style, he added.
He strives to make Barnaby as ordinary as possible, he said, because “he represents everything decent and normal in English society.” Barnaby always wears a three-piece suit and never complains about his wife’s bad cooking.
“His lack of complaint is an index of his love for her,” he said. “He won’t point it out because it would hurt her. A nice touch, that.”
Almost every player from the Royal Shakespeare Company has made an appearance on “Midsomer Murders,” Nettles said, and the show has attracted well-known actors including Orlando Bloom and Emily Mortimer. Like “Law & Order,” the series also attracts young actors looking to break out.
When filming, Nettles lives in Buckinghamshire, which he said resembles Virginia. Its real-life villagers really are as batty as they appear in the series, he added, and, inbred to some degree, are too parochial to even be called Anglo-centric. On the other hand, he said the show does a disservice to the vicars who are actually caring and intellectual. The rest are as “mad as the north wind. They really are.”
It’s a lunacy “Midsomer” will continue to celebrate as long as any villagers remain in the fictional county. Nettles said a former philosophy professor sent him a letter saying that by process of logical deduction, Barnaby must be the killer.
“He said, ‘There’s nobody left,’ ” Nettles said.
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