Midsomer's missing minorities mystery
Tuesday 15 March 2011
It is the great unsolved mystery in the long-running ITV1 drama series, Midsomer Murders: where are the characters from ethnic minorities?
Viewers face a very different crime wave as a new set of police heroes hits the small screen
Friday 30 April 2010
Forget Frost and say goodbye to Barnaby. The latest stars of crime dramas are complicated, compromised and criminal. Gerard Gilbert examines the scene
Wallander: Swede dreams are made of this
Friday 31 July 2009
Kenneth Branagh's 'Wallander' captivated TV viewers. Now, as BBC4 shows the Scandinavian original, Geoffrey Macnab examines their different emphases on detectives, darkness and alienation
'Midsomer Murders' – the top 10 killer facts
Sunday 15 February 2009
1. John Nettles' daughter, Emma, works for the police force in Jersey.
Television: Today's Pick - Hetty Wainthropp Investigates
Friday 28 November 1997
Hetty Wainthropp Investigates (9.30pm BBC1) Patricia Routledge, without diverting in any major degree from the mannerisms and cadences of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, manages to express a completely different character - her cosily steely Lancashire private eye whose terms of reference are "no sex scandals, no divorce, no drug-running and no industrial espionage". So what does she do? In the first episode of this returning series she tries to put an end to a reign of terror by the bad boy on a local housing estate, posing as the sister-in-law from Ireland of a district nurse whose car has just been torched. Derek Benfield is once again Hetty's husband Robert (shades of the long-suffering Richard in Keeping Up Appearances). Dominic Mon plays plays her young assistant (a nice touch this) Geoffrey.
TV: Watching The Detectives
Saturday 22 March 1997
Any new TV detective becomes the subject of an amusing parlour game for viewers: Spot the Quirk. John Nettles, who for 11 years and more than 90 episodes played Sergeant Jim Bergerac and has now been promoted to Chief Inspector in ITV's solid new cop show, Midsomer Murders, knows all about this game. "It's like birdwatching for ornithologists," he jokes. "`Whooo, there it is, he's got the car or the drink problem'."








