Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Neil Dudgeon, Nick Hendrix, Fiona Dolman, Annette Badland, Vincent Franklin, Eleanor Fanyinka, Nicola Stephenson, Nitin Ganatra, Bronagh Waugh, Miles Jupp, Lloyd Everitt, Andrew Brooke, Morgan Watkins, Krupa Pattani, Aneurin Barnard, John Stahl, Paul Hunter.
Many a lake and village pond hold a dark and terrible secret. On the surface what is seen is just the ripples caught by the wind or the thrown and skimmed stone, a gentleness of English countryside, the majesty of the Scottish Loch, is in fact a burial ground for the dead and the forgotten.
Our fascination with water and the hidden crime is by no means a new phenomenon in detective drama, many a reveal has been peeled back from the sea, the well and the lagoon, that it becomes a place in which the killer may feel as though, like Lady Macbeth, they are surprised to find they cannot wash the blood from their hands after the deed is done. And yet the deed remains an enigma, unlike the body in the closed room, there is something more unnatural at play when the art of murder is placed within nature’s own dominion.
With Baited Breath sees Neil Dudgeon’s Detective Inspector Barnaby tackle the apparent sabotage of a monster run, an obstacle course of foul pleasure, and one that leads inevitably, as is the county of Midsomer’s want, to murder. It is a mystery that reels in one of his retired colleagues, Artie Blythe, played by Vincent Franklin as he makes a quick and welcome return to television after his performance in Gentleman Jack and his eye-catching turn in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell as Drawlight, and also brings Nicola Stephenson back to television audience’s minds as she tackles with great emotion the fear of every parent that an argument led to their daughter’s disappearance.
It is in the secret relationships that the course of investigation follows, the sense of injustice and possible vendettas that make up the English village scene being framed as one would when personal associations threaten to reveal the darker side of humanity, and in this episode the darkness is enveloped in the shroud of the water.
The classic misdirection and wrong victim targeted also finds a way to not fall upon the stony ground that other detective dramas tend to trip over, and indeed which Midsomer Murders has often been found to be guilty of in the past. It is through the emotional response of Vincent Franklin in his role of the retired detective that the episode hangs itself upon, the urging of the suspects to atone for their actions and the revenge of the murderer which makes With Baited Breath, one of net value.
Water is patient, its secrets revealed at its choosing, and in angling for a resolution of long forgotten crime, those secrets may be just the start of a fallout in which sparing of the rod is unavoidable.
Ian D. Hall