Last Wednesday, at 9pm, I had a splendid choice of murder programmes to watch. There was White House Farm, about the 1985 Jeremy Bamber murders (I’m convinced he did it) on ITV. There was a new series of Silent Witness on BBC One. And, on BBC Two, there was The Disappearance of Margaret Fleming, about a 19-year-old murdered in Scotland in 1999. In 1946, George Orwell, who died 70 years ago on January 21, 1950, wrote Decline of the English Murder. He describes the fascination of News of the World readers with juicy, classic, old-fashioned murders that involve poison, money or social advancement. Their perfect murder was a slow-burner. As Orwell wrote, “The murderer should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say … He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience.” These perfect murders, Orwell said, were being replaced by sordid, quickfire, salacious killings – like the 1944 Cleft Chin Murder, where a couple on the run ran over a nurse, beat up a hitchhiker and murdered a taxi driver who had a cleft chin. The couple had only known each other for six days – unlike in the old-fashioned perfect murders, which depended on toxic, decades-long marriages or lengthy affairs. Orwell, as ever, is still spot-on today. The British public – me included – is still captivated by a good murder; any sort of murder. But what they really like is a horrific one like the Jeremy Bamber case – where a rich, middle-class, good-looking man hatches a long-term, considered plan to kill his parents, sister and two nephews in a rural, picture-postcard setting in Essex. In other words, a real-life Midsomer Murders.