The Stage

Midsomer Murders rapped again by Ofcom

Published Monday 31 March 2008 at 13:05 by Matthew Hemley

Midsomer Murders has once again fallen foul of Ofcom’s broadcasting code, after an episode of the detective series showing a man being electrocuted was broadcast in the afternoon.

The regulator found that the programme, aired in November last year, featured a “relatively large number of violent images” that made it inappropriate for a slot on ITV1 at 4pm, when a “significant number of children” were able to watch it.

Its criticisms come just a few months after it reprimanded ITV and Channel Television, the company responsible for checking the series’ episodes comply with the broadcasting code, for screening two episode in the afternoon that featured strangulation, bad language and a man cutting his throat with a razor.

In the latest incident, a viewer raised concerns about the second episode of a two-parter called The Electric Vendetta. The viewer complained about violent images in the recap of the previous episode, and other images in the episode in question, including burnt dead bodies, electrocutions and a man thrown through a car’s windscreen.

Channel Television responded by claiming that the scenes involving the electrocution were “shortened and made less explicit” for the afternoon show.

Referring to the body through the windscreen, it said “there were only two brief shots of his dead body with some blood on his face”.

Following Ofcom’s complaints last year to the company about Midsomer Murders, Channel Television also said it had “reviewed the criteria for establishing its suitability for daytime slots” and that it had taken “all necessary steps” to make sure the series was suitable for daytime repeats.

However, Ofcom said the “concentration of violent images” in the recap shown at the beginning of the episode in question, and violent sequences shown in the episode itself, made the programme “inappropriate” for a 4pm slot, when children could be watching.