Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Neil Dudgeon, Nick Hendrix, Fiona Dolman, Samuel West, Susie Blake, Abigail Cruttenden, Claire Skinner, Nicholas Gleaves, Georgie Glen, Chris Lew Kum Hoi, John Macmillan, Anamaria Marinca, Paul Shelley, Thalissa Teixera, Karl Theobald, Jodie Tyack, Lotte Rice.
You can arguably do no wrong by having the name Jane Austen come to lips of those you are indebted to performing in front of; a sure-fire winner, only the Brontes could lead the television or cinema audience to sit up and take notice more readily, even the most tenuous link will do, and it is that the scriptwriters have a moral duty to not let the work descend into a screenplay anarchy, dependent upon creating a pastiche which is below gratitude and honour to the much-loved writer, which sparks of desperation and folly.
To get the balance right, even if the writers of the modern day detective should fear the reprisals of the 19th Century author’s fanbase, is a task worthy of those that saw fit to put obstacles in the way of true heroine romance and believed that corsets were anything but a cage in which to keep a woman from expressing themselves in the name of fashion, it is near on impossible to put down a word without it being compared in some way to the work that went before.
Death by word, by the drone, by the once termed illicit affair, even if we find a way to survive we still are at the mercy of the penmanship of others, the axe to grind that looks forward to being bathed in blood, or at least the staining of reputations. When first love is always last love, when true love is thwarted and the chance to seek revenge comes out in the wash, when extortion and blackmail pay the heavy toll, then in all matters the writer must bathe their quill and font size in relishing a mystery worthy of doomed proportions that so many of the leading lights of female written literature in 19th Century Britain demanded.
A return of the much admired Midsomer Murders is always a cause for celebration, a chance to pit the armchair detective wits against those who see Death By Persuasion as a means of exercising the need to restore balance in society, and with Neil Dudgeon as DCI John Barnaby and joined by the superb Samuel West, Abigail Cruttenden, Anamaria Marinca and Claire Skinner, Death By Persuasion is a feast for the period, one that alludes to the misfortunes of women in their pursuit of true love and the once strong men made straw to whom such heights attained are therein their downfall.
It is always deadly being a resident in Midsomer, there is no escape even when the murder revels in the sense and sensibility of their reasoning to destroy many lives.
Ian D. Hall