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Most Dangerous Television Towns
If you're looking for somewhere peaceful to spend a holiday, you might think of Oxford, somewhere quiet in Scandinavia or perhaps quaint Cabot Cove in Maine.
They all look so pretty on TV shows Inspector Morse, Wallander and Murder, She Wrote.
But you would be lucky to return alive if their fictional crime levels are to be believed.
The rates were calculated by BBC Radio 4 show More Or Less which found sleepy, but fictional, Cabot Cove is actually the most dangerous place on Earth.
The home town of amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher, played by veteran actress Angela Lansbury, had just over five murders a year in the series' 12-year run. Since the town has a population of 3,560, that works out at 149 per 100,000 people.
Even strife-torn South Africa and drug-ravaged Colombia had murder rates in their worst years of under 70 per 100,000.
The dreaming spires of Oxford are much safer, in Inspector Morse and its sequel Lewis.
The city has a population of 154,000 but suffered about four TV murders a year. That works out at around three per 100,000 people, compared to roughly one in real life.
Scandinavian detectives are the latest TV trend. Take the best-known, Wallander, set in the Swedish town of Ystad.
It has a population of 18,350, although that must be hard to maintain considering how many serial killers Wallander hunts.
While not every episode is set in Ystad, the annual murder rate is about 110 per 100,000. The real figure for the whole of Sweden is roughly one.
Back in England, Midsomer was the haunt of DCI Tom Barnaby, played by John Nettles in Midsomer Murders. It is a fictional county but much of it was filmed in Oxfordshire so Charlotte McDonald, numbers expert on More Or Less, worked out a murder rate for a similar population around 3.2 per 100,000. The real total is one.
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