The face that flickers on the television is wreathed in angst. Eyes are haunted. There may be a tear or two. A voice-over on how life has led a man down a path of such wretchedness, you wonder if he’ll get to the end of the show without jumping off a bridge. This has to be the latest in the long line of sadistic villains to frighten our small screens.
Well no, actually he’s the detective.
Letter to the Editor
The trend towards having your cops either bent, broken or bonkers has got as firm a grip on television producers as a seagull’s claw on a battered chip. It’s not the only worrying trend affecting such series. Hardly any of the victims are men. Women are getting slaughtered by the bucket-load in a variety of truly horrible ways.
The Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick approach to murder has become old hat. If some poor, preferably attractive woman hasn’t been ravished, tortured, or maimed before her body’s been thrown behind a bush the script might as well be shredded.
The Brits seem to have cornered the market on gruesome. Watching any crime show that’s put up these days requires nerves of steel. The killer / female victim / troubled detective playbook is entrenched.
This may go down a treat with some misogynistic sub-set of viewers that rather likes seeing women get their comeuppance. As for the rest of us, the question arises: do men ever get murdered? And, if they do, could a baddie not just shoot them with his regulation Smith & Wesson?
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Those were the golden days. Detectives in Borsalino hats and drape-pants suits. Not one corpse eviscerated. Nutting out the manner of death while a victim lies comfortably on the lino in front of them, a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
No chance of that happening these days. Tom Barnaby has given way to Freddy Krueger. And speaking of Tom Barnaby – as the column is wont to do – Midsomer isn’t getting away with it. If you think for a minute all is sweetness and light on those bucolic streets, think again. Cute little Betty Barnaby lives in one of the most murder-prone villages on earth.
That daffy librarian with the twinkly eyes has got a dismembered corpse in the freezer of her thatched cottage. The chortling vicar laces the communion wafers with cyanide. When the sun goes down, the lady who chirrups happy greetings as she rides around town on a bicycle nicks out the back door and into the woods, where she takes off her clothes and dances nuddy around a fire with a coven of witches. It follows that they stab some confused yokel through the heart with knitting needles.
But if Midsomer makes Royston Vasey look a model of normality, at least it does so with a wink and a titter. Not much chance of that with your new cop show. The only answer is to revert to the draped pants. Bring back those nice Barnaby boys. And Frank Burnside. And a retrospective of Leonard Teale’s best work – that could be a real winner.
