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ARTS AND CULTURE

Breaking with bad programming

  • 28 November 2022
Welcome to 'Stray Thoughts', where the Eureka Street editorial team muses on ethical and social challenges we've noted throughout the week.  An episode of that quintessential English murder mystery series Midsomer Murders is equivalent to a cup of hot chocolate before bed. Despite having more murders per population than the most dysfunctional metropolis, the overall impression is one of quaint English villages, cucumber sandwiches and cricket on the green. Perhaps even the inventiveness of the murders — guillotining, crushed by a large cheese or drowning in a vat of cider, to name a few — adds to its charms. However, all is not well in the Midsomer counties, and it’s not just the crime rate.

The series began in March 1997 and even for the time it was anachronistic. Everyone was white, usually Christian, and there wasn’t a female police officer, let alone a senior one, to be seen. From about the mid-2010s the calls for diverse casting became more insistent, and while it has taken some time for guest cast diversity to look seamless rather than a box-ticking exercise, it’s getting there.

So, I tend to give the earlier episodes a pass — going along with the preposterous story lines and lack of diversity to enjoy the harmless cup of chocolate. That was until rewatching an episode from 2011 when I was hit with such a horrible bit of sexual politics I’m reviewing my attachment to Midsomer. The episode is called ‘Night of the Stag’ and while in essence it’s about a land grab and the murders and blackmail to make that happen, there is some byplay about two remote villages. In previous centuries, once a year the men from the villages would raid the opposing village to rape (though that word is not used) the women from the other village. [The rationale was it was a way to ensure the two villages did not get too inbred.] The rite had died out in modern times but for reasons of control and power the village leader behind the land grab talks the men into reviving the ‘tradition’.

After a frenzied confrontation, Detective Inspector Barnaby arrests the leader and charges him with murder and blackmail, and all is right with the world. Except it’s not. Despite a few minutes depicting the village leader’s attack on a young woman, there is no mention of a charge of attempted rape. And I’m left pulling at this thread until my whole attachment to the series comes undone. The casual
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