A Gentle Touch of Murder

There’s a rather pleasant little TV show I enjoy watching, imported from Britain, all about murder.  It’s called Midsomer Murders and stars John Nettles, who used to be Bergerac (only Brits of a certain age will understand that reference; others please just pass by on the other side).  Now, there are many earthy, in-yer-face British police shows – all the Prime Suspects, Wire In The Blood, Rebus, Waking The Dead to name but a few – but Midsomer Murders is gentle, easy stuff.  Definitely a pastoral version of  the English detective story, but set in the present day with real policemen, not in the 1930s with interfering amateurs.  And thoroughly unrealistic.  The programme is set in a rural area around the fictitious town of Cawston, and its location is never identified, though I like to think of it in either the Cotswolds or maybe Hampshire.  A charming place, full of big old houses, thatched cottages, and isolated farms which are mainly inhabited by eccentrics, the sexually repressed or the wealthy but troubled types you run into all over this atypical English landscape.  It’s a very dangerous place.  So far there have been over one hundred murders in this little corner of England (an England where, apparently, it never rains).  This makes it even more dangerous than Oxford was when Inspector Morse was on the job and the city had a murder rate higher than the rest of England put together.  Not to worry – Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby and his sidekick Sgt. Troy manage to solve every single one in the  space of each two-hour episode.  Someone needs to tell the scriptwriters that in the real world murders are solved by the combined efforts of whole police departments using  every resource at their disposal, not by a pair of detectives plodding about.

Still, no matter.  The show is an undemanding bit of fun and for someone like me who enjoys spotting them, a feast of British character actors.

“Oh look!” I exclaim to my wife, “There’s Frank Windsor.  He used to be in Softly Softly.” 

She nods patiently as I go on.

“That’s Eleanor Summerfield. I was in the audience when she did an episode of Just A Minute.”

“Yes, dear.”

“That’s Peter Jones.”  I remark , and she looks up.

“Peter Jones who was the voice of the book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”  she asks.

“Yes!”   

“That’s not how I imagined him at all.” she remarks, in a tone that suggests that she wants them to send this Peter Jones back and get another one.

“That actor is a direct descendant of the Duke of Wellington; the one who beat Napoleon.” I say, as Jeremy Clyde appears on screen.   She nods.

“Now that, “ I point out. “is Phyllis Logan.  I remember her when she played Lovejoy’s girlfriend.”

Lovejoy, of course, got very bitter and twisted in his later years and went on to become Al Sweringen in Deadwood, which was a fave of my wife’s, but this tenuous connection fails to enthuse her. She just watches quietly with me and as almost always happens we manage to guess the ending before it comes. Quite often the murderer kills himself just as the police are closing in on him. That must save a fortune in court costs.

The thing is, though, that Midsomer Murders is put out on channel 261 every Saturday morning at seven o’clock.  I don’t watch it then.  I shove a tape into the VCR the night before and set the timer, so we can watch it while we relax in  the evening.  And this is the point of all this blather.  I don’t think anyone should be watching television at seven o’clock in the morning.  I can’t explain it, but it just doesn’t seem right.  As anyone who has macheted their way through the various entries in my blog that deal with such matters will know, my instincts and sympathies  are entirely hedonistic – pleasure for pleasure’s sake is my motto.  Even so, I can not shake off the feeling that it is in and of itself wrong to watch television before you have had lunch.  This flies in the face of our twenty-first century, I know, when television watching at all times is possible, or even compulsory.  Try finding a doctor’s waiting room, in Gainesville anyway, where you aren’t subjected to CNN, Fox News, ESPN or even the 700 Club at full volume.  You want to sit quietly and read? What are you; some kind of a freak?  And what about those parents who like to plonk their children in front of the TV as soon as they get up, in order to keep them quiet and in the process blot up every drop of creativity or individual thought they may have?

So, in our household, the TV stays off until lunch at the earliest, and neither of us feels at all hard done by. Breakfast television might as well not exist. And when it is switched on it is because one or both of us wants to watch something, not because we want noise in the background.  Some people seem almost scared of switching the box off.   In the mornings it is as though it doesn’t exist.  I don’t think I will ever suddenly get an urge to drape dark cloth round table legs or to go looking for witches to burn, but I do have this one puritanical streak.  It’s rather worrying.

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Comments

[Di]

I HATE the omnipresence of TV everywhere one goes!!! I'm not a TV snob...I DVR (Nicholas...it would be well worth it to get out of the VCR dark ages and part with the few bucks a month for TiVo or DVR...you have trust me on this) my favorite shows which I will not disclose here because Nicholas would think that I am much less of an intellectual than he might think I am. However, when I am waiting in a doctor's office, a hospital or an airport, I would like to read quietly and I am inevitably pelted with the background NOISE of TV.

I think the TV watchers should have a way to opt-in...rather than making me find ways to opt-out. I bring my iPod and my laptop with me to the orthodontist's office because I just can't abide the noise of the TV, the constantly ringing phones, the video games (because God forbid we teach our children that sometimes you just have to wait and entertain yourself rather than being provided an endless array of entertainment choices) AND then the noise of the parent trying to pry the kid from the video game to go into the office for the appointment that necessitated the visit to the office in the first place!!!

If I am one of a few people in a place with a mindlessly blathering TV and I look around and no one is watching, I brazenly walk up to the TV, find the volume button (yes kids, it is possible to make adjustments to a TV WITHOUT a remote!) and turn the volume off. I have never been criticized or even gotten a dirty look for doing this.

Now that I am disclosing my noise snobbery...I will admit that I have even asked a young man seated near me on a plane to turn down the volume on his iPod because I could hear the drone and boom of the bass of his music.

This is a can of noisy worms we've opened here...I may see a TT in my future!!!

[Mary Emken]

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[MissMeliss]

I think I'm in love with your blog. I'm definitely adding it to my blogroll (as opposed to my rss reader, which is where blogs I only kind of like go) - I hope you don't mind.

I've caught one or two episodes of Midsomer Murders when TiVo decided I might like them, but never remembered to set up a season pass.

I grew up in a PBS household, so Britcoms and British mysteries are more familiar to me, at times, than whatever my friends were watching.

And while I do like movies playing while I write, I never have the television on before noon, even for movies, and I feel guilty about it until five pm.