Midsomer Murders star Nick Hendrix has promised the show won’t have lost any of its trademark strangeness when it returns to ITV tomorrow night, as the broadcaster celebrates 25 years since its premiere.
Hendrix joined the long-running series in 2016 as DS Jamie Winter, who works closely alongside DCI John Barnaby to get to the bottom of a wide variety of macabre crimes.
This weekend, they’ll be delving into the so-called Scarecrow Murders, where the picturesque village of Little Upton becomes the setting of a spate of killings in the run-up to a popular scarecrow building competition.
Bodies are soon discovered displayed publicly on poles next to their straw creations, with the clock ticking for Barnaby and Winter to find the culprit, who is evidently prepared to do anything to win.
In an interview with RadioTimes.com, Hendrix reflected on the latest episode’s theme: “Scarecrows are quite strange. There’s a bizarre sort of rural fascination with scarecrows and you don’t see them around as much as you used to. They’ve invented more modern and interesting ways of doing the job of a scarecrow.”
While Midsomer Murders has always had a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, Hendrix later revealed that bringing the morbid deaths to life on-screen has sometimes resulted in some startling moments during production.
“What we often find on set is when you have something like a scarecrow or a [mannequin] body… the scariest thing about them is when they’re discarded at the side of the set,” he continued.
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“For instance, they’re lying innocuously and you come around the corner down a little bit of the set to find something and then suddenly, there’s this straw strange body in some bizarre posture lying on the side. That’s when you’re like, ‘Oh sh*t.’ So it’s pretty spooky.”
The guest cast for the latest episode of Midsomer Murders includes Billy Hinchliff, Jacqueline Boatswain, Simon Shepherd, Amara Karan and Jason Wong, but it really is anybody’s guess which characters will still be breathing when the credits roll.
Hendrix added: “And then in the episode the fact that we dress up people as scarecrows is sort of the next level of weirdness. It’s weird enough that you have a scarecrow, a doll of strung up, but then if you string up a person and then put the straw with them, it is particularly weird.
“But it ticks that box that Midsomer has, which is being spooky and weird, but very much in a rural setting. There’s not the urban, inner city darkness. It’s very much this is rural spooks.”
Midsomer Murders returns to ITV at 8pm on Sunday 29th May 2022. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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