"You go out there and you go, I'm going to stay here for days, and days, and days, and days, and I may accumulate an innings over that period, but I'm not the one who slogs it around," he says. "I'm going to stand there and I keep going, I'll just take a single there, and a single there. And then Edward Fox comes in at No. 3 and he slogs it over the boundary."

And he becomes the star? "He takes over the show!" exclaims Dudgeon, laughing.

"I love that, that feeling that you're there to help this thing exist, and that you're sort of holding the whole thing together and being with the audience and guiding the audience," he adds. "But it's the other people who come in and do, really the characterful stuff. Their characters have lives and stories, and emotional lives, where the police don't."

Though Midsomer Murders, a body-of-the-week mystery drama set in the county of Midsomer, has aired since 1997, Dudgeon did not join until 2011. He plays DCI John Barnaby, the cousin of the series' original lead DCI Tom Barnaby, played by John Nettles.

The show's peculiar dependence on cops named Barnaby stems from the fact that it is based on a series of books by Caroline Graham about the cases of Chief Inspector Barnaby. (Graham wrote seven novels, beginning with 1987's The Killings at Badger's Drift.)

With seven years under his belt, Dudgeon says he knows now, wryly, "to a degree, how to do it".

Because the roles of the chief inspector and sergeant - five so far: Troy, Scott, Jones, Nelson and, presently, Winter - are functions of the story, "it's always a bit odd to me doing something like this, because it feels like we're sort of in it all the time but it's not really about us," Dudgeon says.

"It's about the big stars of the show really, and often the countryside is a big star in the show. That whole milieu and the whole visual, and sort of physical, almost emotional landscape of the show. Every episode is kind of a little world unto itself."

As a result, Dudgeon observes, you don't get "a ton of character" to play with.

"There was a time that every TV detective in Britain had his very special, particular kind of car, particular year of Cognac that he liked, his particular strand of jazz music that he loved and hated and all that," Dudgeon says. "They had all these police-y tropes about how the main lead characterised the main policeman."

He recalls that one of Midsomer's creators, Betty Willingale, wanted none of that.

"She said he drives a Sierra, he wears a suit and he's happily married. And that's it. He doesn't have a crisis."

That subtle shift, Dudgeon says, steeps the series in a little more realism than most cop shows.

"When police are affected by things they do in their work, I imagine it manifests itself in other, subtler, more nuanced ways than what you see on the telly, when they suddenly start banging their desk and say, for god's sake, this woman! You wouldn't survive in this job if you get all emotional about those things."

One of the most intriguing elements of the series is that something so quintessentially British sells so well internationally. For its distributing studio, All3Media, Midsomer Murders has become a huge export, commanding large and loyal audiences around the world, but notably Australia.

"I think there is more relatability in the specificity than there would be in trying to do something that will appeal to everybody, and therefore appeal to nobody," Dudgeon says. "Because it becomes sort of bland and empty."

People, he suspects, find the "quintessential English-ness of it is something to respond to, either because they find it a bit sort of, funny or risible, or comforting, or whatever they like about it, whether their idea is of a certain vision of England. I think that's true of all genres of things."

The Killing, he offers as an example, is not a show whose Danish producers sat down hoping to construct something "very Danish; it's very much about Danish society but because it's truthful we all watch it and go, 'oh, it's just completely intriguing'. It's the specific things that make things truthfully human, and other humans relate to what is truthfully human. It's not geography."

The show's wry punchline, of course, comes with the fact that its setting, Midsomer, seems to have an alarming death rate. To be fair, that is offset slightly by the fact that Midsomer is an area which encompasses many villages, running the alphabet from Angels Rise and Aspern Tallow to Upper Warden and Whitcombe Mallet.

With an estimated 2.6 murders per episode, averaged off across each season, and 114 episodes in the can so far, that's roughly 296 murders in the last 20-odd years.

"If you like something and you enjoy something, I think you park a certain level of judgment to one side to enable you to enjoy it," says Dudgeon. "There's a willing suspension of disbelief."

There is also, he adds, the small cheat that like every television series of its genre, the reset button is to some extent pressed on a weekly basis.

"You sort of press that reset button and nobody knows what's going to happen, nobody knows what the shows about, we're in this seemingly sleepy, peaceful village landscape, there's a horse riding festival or something like that," he says. "And then somebody goes into the stable and there's a scream, and somebody goes, oh my god."

Other towns might be shocked. But in Midsomer? Just another body to add to the pile.

WHAT Midsomer Murders

WHEN ABC, Sunday, 8.30pm