‘Welcome to the Bellville Hall Small Pets Show,” reads the banner. Oh dear. It may not be spattered with blood and guinea-pig fluff, but give it time. Entering this impending crime scene – a sort of Bake Off with bunnies – things get more creepy. I mean, cosy. Pets are persuaded over teeny-weeny hurdles. A strange man called Tim kisses Hercules, “the greatest rabbit who ever hopped the Earth”, on the lips. Everything is bucolic and mildly menacing in a clap-your-slippers-together way. Midsomer Murders (ITV, 8pm) openings don’t get more Midsomery than this.
Of course, the point of such long-running detective dramas is to up the ante, slowly, sneakily – in this case over 19 increasingly preposterous series – until a body festooned with bouncing bunnies seems totally plausible and fun. To be more Midsomery, self-parodic, silly. To churn out more romantically situated homes with more period features, more petty vendettas, more ad breaks and, above all, more murders.
Onwards to the body count, which in this season finale is disappointingly low. Only two in two hours … well, two and a half, because the final victim is rescued from a concrete mixer at the last minute. First to be bumped off is posh estate agent Seb Huntington, found in the rabbit tent dripping with blood and cloaked with prize bunnies. Did he rumble someone letting all the pets out of their cages in the middle of the night? Or is he the pet-show saboteur? After all, he wanted to get his hands on Belville Hall, a crumbling stately home where historical romance novelist Delphi Hartley lives with her French lop rabbit, who is “anybody’s for a cherry tomato”.
Don’t dwell on the details. DCI Barnaby and his sidekick, DS Winter, certainly don’t. In spite of their unparalleled experience, their interrogation technique involves asking someone a question and, as soon as they surmise they are lying, saying thank you and walking off. No wonder it takes two hours to sort out the mess. Anyway, the point is … what’s the point? Ah, yes, the properties are lovely. This episode, centred around dodgy dealings at a local estate agent, provides the ideal Midsomer marriage of bloody corpses and bonnie cottages.
Everything else is filler: vintage furs are stolen, Hercules is kidnapped, even Bernie, the stuffed toy badger Sarah Barnaby brought home from her daughter’s nursery, is ravaged by the dog. By the time the murderer is revealed, I have an urge to check out some schedules for Buckinghamshire cottages. According to the Midsomer effect, which is an actual thing, if a property has featured in the series, it increases in value. Someone always benefits from bloodshed, I guess.
Hospital (BBC2, 9pm) is profoundly upsetting and frustrating, “the story of the NHS in unprecedented times”. We know about this “humanitarian crisis”, as the British Red Cross termed it earlier this month, from the daily updates, the personal experience of operations cancelled and long waits for beds. But no amount of knowing makes this six-part series, edited and broadcast within weeks of filming, any less shocking. And, appallingly, no amount of knowing seems to change anything.
To take a single sorry tale, Peter Lai, a 60-year-old retired software engineer, is in St Mary’s, Paddington, for one of the biggest surgeries the major acute hospital will perform in a year: an operation to remove an aortic aneurysm in his chest that at any moment could rupture with fatal consequences.
Fourteen people are required in theatre to carry out the operation. It takes two months to co-ordinate diaries. On Tuesday, Lai – a calm, kind man, who never once shows a moment’s despair – waits patiently for a bed. By the evening, he gets one, only to be told that a bed in the intensive care unit might not be available after his operation. This is an acute hospital at full capacity after all. It is what happens.
On Wednesday, Lai is wheeled into theatre, while his consultant, Colin Bicknell, one of the country’s foremost vascular surgeons, runs around St Mary’s looking for a bed. There isn’t one. The operation is cancelled and Lai, literally waiting on the operating table, is sent home.
I would love to say that everything works out in the end, because everyone is trying their utmost and everyone deserves it to, but this is real life, and a real crisis.
Midsomer Murders review – like Bake Off with bunnies, but more menacing
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