The Axeman Cometh

Badger's Drift, one of the quietest corners of Midsomer, plays host to a rock festival, and the county's murder rate responds accordingly. The band in question is Hired Guns, thirty years past their prime and hoping for one last run at the Midsomer Rocks Music Festival. A comeback thirty years in the making deserves better luck, but their fans get a disappointment of a particular kind: somebody starts killing the band members one by one. But festivals are public things, and somebody in the crowd knows exactly what is going on.

Barnaby and DS Ben Jones work the festival site, and the case naturally centres on the band and the people around it. The cast includes Ingrid Peterson, played by Annie Lambert, Gary Cooper, played by Phil Davis, and James Hobson, played by David Horovitch. The central figure of menace is Jack 'Axeman' McKinley, played by James Cosmo, whose relationship with Willow McKinley, played by Fiona Button, suggests a family connection with plenty of rough edges. Joyce and Cully Barnaby are on hand, and Dr George Bullard, as ever, gets the call.

Michael Aitkens and Caroline Graham wrote it, and Renny Rye directed. The festival setting gives the episode a scale the show does not always attempt, and the sight of middle-aged rockers reliving their glory days provides its own gentle comedy before the bodies start piling up. The performances are all suitably dodgy, in the affectionate sense.

There is something faintly poignant about watching a band get picked off on the eve of their comeback. The show plays the deaths with a straight face and lets the setting do the joking. And the name 'Axeman' follows McKinley through every interview. It is a proper Midsomer entertainment: a celebration that turns sour, a village that never quite learns, and a murderer whose motive, as ever, comes down to something old and personal.