Midsomer Murders is never short of a bizarre or gruesome murder implement.
Since the series began in 1997 they have included a cricket bat, bludgeoned by a fire iron, clubbed to death with a saucepan, electrocuted by a faulty microphone, strangled with cord of a camera light meter, a candlestick, a tree shaker, a doped horse, a pitchfork, a Celtic spear, liquid nicotine, a syringe, a billhook used by woodcutters, toxic fungus, a necktie, a slide projector, a switchblade razor, a drinks cabinet, a plough, a hammer, hemlock, vintage claret, bottles of relish, death by poisonous frog, a longbow arrow through the heart, a French guillotine, a prop theatrical knife, pinned to the wall by a family dagger, King Neptune’s trident, a hatpin through the ear, an Iron Maiden … and alien abduction.
Here are the top 10 so far:
- Otto Benham is staked to his lawn with croquet hoops and pelted with wine bottles catapulted from his replica Roman trebuchet.
- A visitor to Plummer’s relish factory is crushed by a forklift then dumped naked into a 200-degree sterilizer.
- While performing Amadeus, Esslyn Carmichael slits his throat with a prop razor.
- Rebellious teenager Christa Palfrey is stabbed through the heart with a home- made trident.
- A magician’s assistant dies when the retractable spikes in her ‘cabinet of death’ are jammed and coated in deadly frog poison.
- Hotel receptionist Eleanor Crouch is spun to death in a tumble drier.
- At the Straw Woman festival, a vicar is burned alive inside a straw effigy.
- Marcus Lowery is bludgeoned to death with a slide projector.
- A body is found in the middle of a crop circle bearing the hallmarks of an alien abduction.
- Cook Danny Pinchall is drowned in a cauldron of cold tomato soup.