Death in Chorus

The church choirs of Midsomer are locked in a heated competition, which is about as genteel a battlefield as the county has ever managed. The contest has been building for weeks, and the rival choirs take it with a seriousness that borders on the warlike. The harmony does not last. The tenor of the Midsomer Worthy choir, a local artist, is found bludgeoned to death, and the singing contest stops being a matter of local pride and becomes a murder inquiry.

Barnaby and DC Ben Jones take the case, and the investigation spreads through the choir stalls and beyond, trying to work out who really knew the victim and where his passions actually lay. The answer, as ever, sits somewhere between the music and the private lives the congregation preferred not to notice. Joyce and Cully Barnaby provide the family backdrop, Dr George Bullard brings his professional eye, and the suspects arrive with familiar faces: Laurence Barker, played by Peter Capaldi a few years shy of the TARDIS, and his wife Ellen in the capable hands of Annabelle Apsion; Giles Armitage, played by Ronan Vibert, and Carolyn Armitage, played by Sara Stewart; and Connor Simpson, given life by Patrick Drury.

David Harsent and Caroline Graham wrote the episode, with Sarah Hellings directing. The murder sits comfortably inside the competition setting, and the script makes good use of the way a choir, like a village, runs on reputation and rivalry. The choir's internal rivalries give Barnaby his list of suspects, and he works through them with his usual patience.

It is a pleasure to watch a murder case unfold where the victim was loved and resented in roughly equal measure. The show has always known that the most harmonious corners of England can hide genuine malice, and here the singing barely masks the discord underneath. But the real discord was never musical; it was the old jealousies the singing was meant to soothe. One tenor down, and the contest carries on regardless.