For Death Prepare

The Midsomer Mummers are an amateur opera company, which tells you most of what you need to know about the scale of the ambition involved. They are mid-rehearsal for a charity concert when a dead body turns up in the theatre, and the investigation takes on a theatrical colouring of its own. The inquiry is aimed at a different target than usual: which member of the company was most desperate to be the centre of attention. In a group of singers, that is a crowded field.

Barnaby and DS Jamie Winter work their way through people who have spent years learning to hold a stage. The body has stopped the rehearsal, but the performances carry on anyway, even with the police in the room. The theatre makes a good box for a murder mystery, with its contained space and a dozen people who all know how to project. Artistic ambition and sudden mortality make for an uneasy pairing, and the show leans into it. Whoever staged this particular drama wanted an audience, and in Midsomer the audience is always there.

Julia Gilbert wrote the episode with Caroline Graham, and Toby Frow directed. Neil Dudgeon and Nick Hendrix anchor the investigation, with Fiona Dolman as Sarah, Annette Badland as Fleur Perkins, Alexander Hanson as Marcus Dunlow, Clive Rowe as Derek Sharrow, Kevin Whately as Jeremy Whittingdale, Samantha Spiro as Phyllis Cuttle, Shobna Gulati as Shaila Handsworth and Jenna Russell as Faith Dunlow. Kevin Whately, of all people, gets to be one of the more suspicious singers in the county, and he wears the part well.

The episode uses the theatre the way the show uses all its settings: as a way of concentrating the danger. Everyone in the company has a reason to want the spotlight, and one of them has taken that desire somewhere lethal. And the answer, when it comes, is fitting for a company that lives for applause. Amateur opera has never seemed so well organised.