The Killings at Badger's Drift

The case that started it all opens in the usual way: an elderly woman found dead in her own cottage, and DCI Tom Barnaby quietly certain that it was no accident. Her death looks natural enough to most people, and the village is ready to move on. But Barnaby is not most people, and he follows the feeling down into the life of the village. Barnaby knows that old ladies die, but he also knows when one of them has been helped.

What follows is the careful business of turning over a small community until the truth falls out. Neighbours, family and professional contacts all have something they are unwilling to share, and the deeper Barnaby digs, the more the picture shifts. Behind the tidy gardens of Badger's Drift, people are lying about things that matter, and each lie points a little further into the dark. It is slow work, mostly talk and tea and careful questions, and it is gripping anyway.

Anthony Horowitz and Caroline Graham wrote it, and Jeremy Silberston directed. John Nettles leads as Barnaby, with Daniel Casey as Sergeant Gavin Troy, Jane Wymark as Joyce and Laura Howard as Cully. The village is populated by Renée Asherson's Emily Simpson, Rosalie Crutchley's Lucy Bellringer, Jonathan Firth's Michael Lacey, Emily Mortimer's Katherine Lacey and Julian Glover's Henry Trace, with Barry Jackson's Dr George Bullard on hand to examine the body and raise an eyebrow.

The pilot sets a template that would serve the show for decades: pretty villages and sudden corpses, with a detective who never mistakes charm for innocence. It is an hour of gentle suspicion, and it still works. Watching it now, you can see the makers quietly working out what they have, and the promise of local secrets is what keeps drawing us back to these pretty, unsettling corners of England.