Why did Midsomer Murders 'go woke'? It traces back to one interview in 2011
Midsomer Murders has been accused of many things over nearly three decades — chiefly an implausible body count for a cluster of sleepy English villages. But in recent years a different label keeps surfacing on social media: that the cosy ITV detective drama "went woke".
The trail leads back to a single Radio Times interview in March 2011 — years before anyone was using that word.
The interview
Brian True-May had produced Midsomer Murders since its launch on 23 March 1997, and in 2011 he was asked why, across 14 years, the show's characters had been almost entirely white. His answer described the programme as the last bastion of Englishness:
"We just don't have ethnic minorities involved, because it wouldn't be the English village with them," True-May told the Radio Times in March 2011.
The reaction was immediate. ITV said it was appalled, production company All3Media suspended him, and True-May apologised. He returned to finish the series in production, then stepped down as producer — ending a run that covered the show's first 89 episodes.
What changed on screen
The casting shifted noticeably after his exit:
- 2012 — the first Asian family appeared in the village drama, one year after the row.
- By February 2016 — a Daily Mail tally counted at least 24 ethnic minority characters across the latest 20 episodes, 22 of them in mixed-race relationships.
- 2016 — the show introduced its first permanent Asian character, pathologist Dr Kam Karimore, played by Manjinder Virk.
That's the entire substance behind the "went woke" charge: a casting policy that changed after 2011, in a show that had previously — and deliberately — kept its fictional county monochrome.
Did viewers abandon it?
No. Midsomer Murders is still in production, 25 series and 144 episodes deep, with Neil Dudgeon fronting it as DCI John Barnaby since John Nettles retired from the role in 2011. The programme has been sold to 231 territories, from Afghanistan to Zambia, and counts Joan Collins and David Cameron among its declared fans.
The debate does resurface periodically. Some longtime viewers argue the storytelling lost something after True-May's departure; others point out the villages simply started resembling the actual English countryside, where ethnic minorities do live. Both camps keep watching.