The Great and the Good

A schoolteacher in Midsomer has a problem that can't be politely ignored. She sleepwalks, and she is prone to a creeping kind of paranoia. She is convinced someone has been in her house. Nobody quite believes her. A house that feels wrong in the small hours is the sort of thing this show does very well, and so is the slow way the doubt creeps into everyone else. Then the doubters start turning up dead, which does tend to confirm her fears in the most forceful way possible.

Tom Barnaby and DS Ben Jones take the case, and it is a delicate one. The question of whether the danger is real or comes from somewhere far closer to home drives most of the episode, and the show lets a genuinely frightening idea breathe: what if the person everyone dismissed as overwrought was the one who needed protecting? Barnaby has interrogated killers who were clever and killers who were obvious, but a witness who cannot trust her own memory is a new kind of problem. Every interview takes place against a rising body count, and each new death makes the teacher look either more right or more lost, with Barnaby unable to tell which until the end. Joyce Barnaby hovers supportively, DC Gail Stephens puts the legwork in, and Dr Bullard does what he can at the edges of the inquiry. Around them move Connie Bishop, Justin Hooper, Mrs Stroud, Imogen Stroud and Laurence Mann, each with reasons for looking sideways at the whole business.

David Hoskins wrote it with Caroline Graham, and Richard Holthouse directed. John Nettles anchors it as Barnaby, with Jason Hughes as Jones, and the guest list does its job properly: Nancy Carroll, Bertie Carvel, Paola Dionisotti, Monica Dolan and Paul Kaye all supply the quiet, watchful work that Midsomer villages do so well.

And there is something uncomfortable about watching a community chew over one woman's distress while the bodies mount up. The horror here is mostly in the head, and that turns out to be plenty.