Season 22 - The Blackheath Poisonings (1992-1993)
If you're anything like me you have an old stack of catalogs in your bathroom. Signals and Acorn are perennial favorites even if they're over a decade old. Of course this leads to the problem that most of the DVD sets I'm coveting are now long out of print. One such DVD I desired was The Blackheath Poisonings. Oh, how I longed for it. It's in the British tradition of everyone in a large extended family living together who them start dropping like flies. Add in the fact that the family runs a successful toy company and live on the edge of a heath and the Gothic atmosphere is turned up to eleven. One day when I was checking my external hard drives I discovered that I had somewhere along the way acquired a copy. Which meant that all other shows were dropped because it was time for some poison! Three episodes later I wished I had taken the poison. Such potential wasted with too many tropes. Literally the only thing I liked was their house. It was a unique and highly tiled entryway that helped distract me from how completely stupid each and every character was in this series. I honestly don't know how it was possible for each and every character to be too dumb to live. Literally ALL OF THEM. The patriarch becomes severally ill and is recovering if his food is carefully prepped and monitored. But occasionally he relapses and eventually dies. Don't you think that, I don't know, someone would look for some food secreted about his room or a flask filled with liqueur that he might be sneaking against doctor's orders? When his son bothers to look after the death the flask is found in under a minute. But then again our earnest young crime solver is also in love with his "aunt" who was also his father's mistress and he spends all his time when he's not trying to connect the dots of criminality plighting his troth. To a women who could easily be his mother. Though of course the killer isn't done with one death, the elderly matriarch, Sister Monica Joan from Call the Midwife, she starts exhibiting the same symptoms and seriously, the family and the family doctor are like, what could it possibly be!?! She deserved to die. They all deserved to die. And I felt cheated with them using Patrick Malahide as a red herring. He's so wonderfully malevolent and scheming, but alas, this show is nothing more than a family bickering, having affairs, fighting for dominance, and wanting to sleep with Ian McNeice's wife. And that right there is why the first murder happened, because Ian McNeice is the killer. But it's SO much worse than that. Because he likes to dress in women's clothing and go to secret clubs and wander the heath dressed in widow's weeds. That's why his mother had to die, she saw him on the heath. Though there was no way that was Ian McNeice. There is no fat shaming on this blog, but it has to be pointed out that even in the early nineties Ian McNeice was an ample man. There was no way he fit convincingly into a corset to wander the heath. That's a body double. Which is why I didn't guess he was the killer, it wasn't that I didn't add up the pieces I just hoped that this was above hateful anti-trans tropes. But it wasn't. Though in my desperation to follow this up with something I would enjoy I rewatched all of Father Brown, so I have to thank The Blackheath Poisonings for being so bad, stupid, and hateful, for me to remember how much I love the denizens of Kembleford.
The Cloisters by Katy Hays
The Mitford Secret by Jessica Fellowes
