Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast Neil Dudgeon, Gwilym Lee, Fiona Dolman, Tazmin Malleson, Arabella Weir, Sharon Small, Clive Wood, Mark Elliott, Lucinda Dryzek, Tyger Drew-Honey, Hayley Mills, Matt Kennard, Catherine Bailey, Lucy Akhurst, Neil McCaul.

Too many cooks can spoil the broth, or at least, make it inedible due to the nature of the toxic substance found lurking within its fatal ingredients. For the residents of Midsomer Wyvern and especially those who work under dictatorial chef Ruth Cameron at Wyvern House, life is about to get a little hotter in the kitchen.

Midsomer Murders was back on television after a break in its proceedings bought about by its perennial enemy, the football, and whilst there may have been shouts of murder at Old Trafford the week before from the Manchester United faithful as their team lost on the worst penalty shoot-out perhaps of all time to struggling Sunderland, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby must have been willing for the phone to ring and have someone relieve him of all the nefarious going’s on in Midsomer county.

Wild Harvest owed a lot to the idea of the celebrity chief, that murder sometimes isn’t about greed, ownership, revenge or bloodlust, but sometimes just the hardest emotion of them all to understand, love.

Love was certainly running high in the episode, not least between D.C.I. John Barnaby and his wife Sarah as they expect their first child together but also between the eventual murderer and the person they had originally lost some years before, the tangled web of love that had once gone sour, rekindled by at least one person in the relationship.

It is programmes such as Midsomer Murders which allow the tantalising figures of actors past to once more step into a well-deserved limelight and take a bow infront of a younger audience who might not understand the rich complexity they have brought to the television screens, radio and films in their career. To have the legendary Hayley Mills in the cast may have been a surprise to many, but this star of such films as Tiger Bay, The Parent Trap and of course five years in fellow I.T.V. programme Wild at Heart is nothing less than a consummate professional who brightened up the screen in an episode that was unfortunately just a little under the high standards usually afford one of great drama.

With great performances by Lucinda Dryzek as Amy Strickland and Clive Wood, it feels as though it’s never too hard to forgive this usually excellent crime drama, even when the action seems just a little under-par.

Murder may always be the order of the day in the county of Midsomer but it takes a broken heart to be so calculating and so evil that they believe revenge is a dish served cold…stone dead.

Ian D. Hall