26th April Midsomer milestone matched

 Unnoticed by many, the United Kingdon passed a historic land mark today with the number of fatalities from Covid 19 finally exceeding the number of deaths in Midsomer. 

Over its 23 seasons, during which it has seen house prices in the area absolutely plummet , first Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, and then his cousin  DCI John Barnaby have as a family unit single handedly failed to prevent more murders than he's had hot dinners, begining with the killing at Badger's Drift back in 1997.

 Amongst the fatalities that the Barbaby Boys' have been unable to prevent are being crushed to death by tins of relish after a forklift truck chase, being electrocuted whilst holding on to a microphone during a rock concert, being tied to a bullseye in the garden and catapulted with bottles of wine, being bitten by snakes in a room full of snakes, strangled whilst attempting to fix some sabotaged automatic doors, killed by a “meteorite” during a total eclipse, hit by a tyre from a flying aircraft whilst running through a cornfield and of course Martine McCutcheon getting crushed by a giant wheel of cheese!

 With crime figures that would make even Cressida Dick blush, the murder rate in the fictional county of Midsomer is around 3.2 per 100,000,  more than 278 times the real rate in England and Wales, just slightly above that achieved by Inspector Morse and his sidekick Lewis, who managed to have three murders for every 100,000 in their hometown patch of Oxford. 

Thankfully for Middle England, those figures are still a crime prevention officers wet dream compared Jessica Fletcher's sleepy home town of Cabot Cove has a positively alarming rate of 149 murders per 100,000 residents.This compares to the real-life murder rates of the most murderous cities in the world, Tijuana, which has an annual homicide rate of 134.24 per 100,000 and yet doesnt seem to have a famous TV detective associated with it.

One thing is for certain, if you suddenly come across Angela Lansbury on your daily walk, watch out or you could be next!

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