Midsomer Murders, series 23, review: warning – this show has reached hokum overload

Neil Dudgeon and Nick Hendrix in Midsomer Murders: The Blacktrees Prophecy – ITV

You don’t tune into Midsomer Murders (ITV1) expecting verité film-making, but even so The Blacktrees Prophecy touched the very heights of hokum. I like to think that writer Jeff Povey knew exactly what he was doing – if you put aside silly stuff like plausibility and just went with it there was some fun to be had.

It helped that the episode, the first of series 23, began on a strong footing, with a murder vividly portrayed and a bad guy who was properly unnerving. Warren Kaine (Aran Bell) was the fearmongering head of a group of local doomsday preppers who’d built a bunker in the woods worthy of a spread in Living Etc. When he got a call on his shortwave saying that someone had pressed the nuclear button he rushed to the shelter, only to find that it wasn’t the end of the world at all. Except for him.

A mysterious figure in a hazchem suit and a gas mask had spiked the ventilation system and Warren soon suffocated. Although our faceless bad guy will have brought back fond memories of Walter White cooking meth in Breaking Bad to some, you can’t beat a good mask for creepiness, and it gave the rest of this Midsomer Murders a dash of the chills that it so often lacks.

Naturally, hazchem man (or was it woman?) kept cropping up with bricks and crossbows and massive tins of cooked meat, bumping people off willy-nilly with admirable inventiveness. In perhaps my favourite Midsomer Murders murder of all time, one suspect was eliminated from DCI Barnaby’s (Neil Dudgeon) enquiries when he was sent flying into a tree by an exploding lifeboat (that, for some reason, was being stored in the middle of a forest). A lesson for us all there, though I’m not quite sure what it is.

Povey, as that fatal “life” boat suggests, did at least drag viewers through the seeming – no, actual – hours of exposition with a lubricative sense of irony. Yes, Midsomer Murders plods its way through soused peat-bogs of plot at an infuriatingly slow pace, and, yes, two hours of it does feel a little bit like listening to Alexa reading you Proust.

But given that steady-as-she-goes carnage is MM’s whole modus, and it’s currently one of Britain’s few winning exports, it must be part of its appeal. I don’t get it; other, much better shows are available. But with that accepted, little gags like marrying a story about the coming apocalypse with the arrival of Barnaby’s mother-in-law at his house were welcome. Just enough spice to make the stodge palatable.

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