Midsomer Murders star Nick Hendrix on working with his real-life wife: 'It was great to have her on set'

"It's about a scarecrow festival, which is a very Midsomer-y concept! But there's also a background of a gambling narrative, and a vicar who wins the lottery, so there's quite an interesting moral question about people in religious positions of authority winning lots of money and what they choose to do with it."

"They are a bit spooky, aren't they? It's been used before a lot in horror movies and darker things than Midsomer, but I think it's a nice feel for us — I think it works really well. I'm sort of surprised they haven't done something with scarecrows before, actually, but I know everything is checked against the archive. After so many episodes, you do kind of go, 'how do we keep coming up with things that we haven't done before?' — that is a challenge!" 

"Winter's personal life is something that pops in and out of episodes, but there's not loads of real estate within the script for him to have lots of personal scenes. There have been episodes in the past where I've had the odd dalliance, but no huge romance or anything. But to have a character turn up that is very much from his past, and an ex-girlfriend, is a really fun little detail for the show. It was great — and what was useful was that they had a bad break-up and it's a sort of sour, negative relationship in that sense, which is slightly easier to play on set with a real-life partner!"

"It was fun! It was nice to have her on set, and to have to be sort of anti-each other, playing awkwardness with each other rather than affection, which is obviously the opposite — we have affection for each other naturally! We weren't in all the scenes together. We were in a lot together, because her character was connected to mine, but I wanted her to be able to be on set and film without me there, so it was a job for her rather than like, 'oh, and there's Nick'. There were scenes where I was off, sitting at home, and she was on set with all the crew, essentially with my friends and colleagues, and I wasn't there!"

"What an honour, without sounding too dramatic about it! There aren't loads of shows in the canon of British TV that run for this length of time. You pass the point of just being a show that's been on for a while in a 'yeah, whatever' kind of way, and when you're on for so long, you get into this new realm of 'wow, this is actually quite special' — you feel like you're part of the fabric of British entertainment on every level.

"I've been doing it much longer than I realise — I still think 'oh, I've just started', but I'm filming my fifth series at the moment. Although, because the show has run for so long, five series in you're still the new boy — in any other show, you'd be a seasoned veteran! People still talk about Neil being the new guy, and he's done it for a decade! But it's an honour, really, and it's a lot of fun, and it's a show that we're still proud of as well."