Smallscreen: The British invasion

British television will be everywhere in 2011, from The X Factor’s American debut to more Midsomer Murders in the Ukraine
February 3, 2011
Justice is done on Midsomer Murders. But is the show a parody?




We all have guilty pleasures. My guiltiest is watching reruns of Midsomer Murders on ITV3. Perhaps it helps to know that I’m not alone. MM’s many series, the latest of which began on 12th January on ITV1, have sold to more than 100 countries. Two days earlier, another international success, One Born Every Minute, started its second run on Channel 4 after delivering a Christmas Day special. The format—a fly-on-the-wall documentary about birth—has been sold to the Lifetime channel in the US, an augur of a year that will see British talent and ideas achieve further success across the pond. Our television industry is enjoying the sort of currency our music had in the 1960s, when the Beatles first conquered the Billboard charts. More of this later. First, we must do justice to Midsomer Murders.

You’ve heard of the big society, in which everyone is kind to each other? Well, Midsomer Murders is the antithesis: a small society in which everyone murders each other. It adopts the traditional Agatha Christie approach to homicide—all the perpetrators and victims are exclusively and hygienically middle class. There isn’t a hint of the deprivation, drug-dealing or sheer desperation that accompanies most real murders. In Russia and the Ukraine the show is broadcast under the title Purely English Murder. This is how the world now sees us: a country of picturesque Tudor villages behind whose twitching curtains respectable-looking matrons and gin-tippling colonels are poisoning and strangling the hell out of their neighbours before bicycling off to Evensong. The series can be seen as a richly comic creation and perfect seasonal fare. It is an entirely intentional pantomime. Look at the evidence.

The music, composed by the prolific Jim Parker, is faux-horror and played on the theremin, an early electronic instrument known for its eerie sound. The characters in this series opener (Not In My Back Yard) have Ronseal-style, pantomime names as well. So Maureen Stubbs (Joan Blackham) is stabbed. Fiona Conway (Linda Marlowe) is hiding secrets. Geoff Rogers (Hugo Speer) is… well, you can guess—a muscular builder and a lovemaking machine. And Liz Gerrard (Amanda Drew), the corrupt town planner, is a lesbian. The screenwriter, John Wilsher, has only put three murders into the episode, by the way, which in MM terms is tantamount to being asleep on the job. But the methods were agreeable enough: poor Maureen is stabbed in the back by a broken bottle, blackmailing Clifford Bunting (Alistair Petrie) is strangled by an electric French window, while greedy, conniving Geoff is encased in concrete in a Range Rover after overdoing it on horse tranquillisers. And, to be fair, there was also an attempted murder with jellyfish venom.

I long ago concluded that all the actors in Midsomer Murders are in on this 80-episode joke except one: John Nettles, who plays the central character, Inspector Barnaby. He’s a Shakespearian thesp and the producers would never have got him had they told him it was all a panto-parody. Alas, 2011 is the last year in which Nettles will play the part. Is he leaving MM because one of the cast has carelessly or maliciously revealed to him that he’s been starring in low comedy for 14 years?

Meanwhile, 2010 was the year in which the BBC’s Dancing with the Stars became pretty well the biggest show in the US. Also on ABC was Jamie Oliver, who won an Emmy for his campaigning show. NBC continued with its version of The Office and took a first series of Who Do You Think You Are? Fox had two different series with Gordon Ramsay, while one of the biggest hits of the year came from the Brit, Stephen Lambert, who sold his Channel 4 show, Undercover Boss, to CBS, which launched it directly after the Super Bowl. All these shows have been recommissioned for 2011. Jane Root, the former controller of BBC2, had the cable hit of the year with America: The Story Of Us and is negotiating another landmark series for the same broadcaster, the History Channel. Then there’s Simon Cowell’s launch of a US version of The X Factor in the autumn, not to mention knock-offs of Skins and Shameless starting in January.

So there will be more than just a British accent this year across the factual, reality and entertainment genres of US television. It’s an extraordinary achievement which says much about our producers’ ability to innovate. The change in the law in 2003 that gave independent producers control of their rights has unleashed a phalanx of hungry sales teams on the world, anxious to exploit every aspect of their intellectual property. Provincial murder mysteries are a valuable part of that but, thankfully, only a small part of a rich and diverse export slate.

Peter Bazalgette advises a range of content companies, some of which are mentioned in this article