Drawing Dead

Carver Valley's comic festival is in full swing, all performance art and festival cider, when the village is shaken by the murder of a former supermodel. For Barnaby and Jamie Winter the timing could not be worse and the setting could not be better, because a festival full of performers is the last place you can trust anyone's account of anything. The festival, meant to bring the village together, instead gives everyone a stage.

The only real lead is a comic set that shamed several villagers, and that turns the investigation into a slow process of separating what happened from what was performed. Everyone at the festival is good at presenting a version of themselves, and several of them are professionally good at it. Barnaby and Winter sit through shows, take statements from people who are used to being watched, and try to find the one story that was never meant to be told on stage. The jokes stop being funny the moment they become evidence.

The murder cuts through the festival's bright surface into something private and bitter. The victim's past is part of it, and so are the people who remember her from before the fame. Winter's scepticism and Barnaby's patience make a good pairing for a case where the truth keeps getting a round of applause. Even the laughter starts to sound like a distraction once the case gets going.

Jeff Povey and Caroline Graham wrote it, Toby Frow directed. Neil Dudgeon and Nick Hendrix head the cast, with Fiona Dolman and Annette Badland in support. Bill Bailey plays Darwin Chipping, Ruby Bentall is Stella Starling, Will Brown plays Timothy Argo, Nicholas Burns is Barrett Lounds, Ben Caplan plays Murray Eccbeer, and Nicholas Farrell appears as Isaac Starling.

It is a bright, nasty episode with a good sense of its own humour. And it proves that the show can find murder anywhere, even somewhere as noisy and cheerful as a village comedy festival.