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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

What contemporary detective television tells us about the UK

I haven’t posted for almost 2 weeks – my readership has therefore plummeted from some 300 a day to about 50…..confirming my feeling that blogs are like drugs – people need a fix on them….indeed become dependent…..I’m not sure if I want to encourage such habits – so perhaps I should follow Chris Grey’s example and make my posts WEEKLY

Or, when my creativity languishes, put up a link to one of the (many!) good posts which readers may have missed – for example this post on mapping values and world views 

And I’m conscious that I’ve not made much use this year of my Snippets feature – which I use to store interesting links which I haven’t been able to develop into a single post. In that spirit, let me share an interest I have in one cultural aspect of contemporary Britain – the television detective genre.

My mother was a great fan of Inspector Morse which ran from the late 1980s to 2000 – precisely the period I was out of Britain. I would stay with her for a couple of weeks each year from one of the dozen or so countries in which I was based until her death in 2005; and became quite addicted to it myself.

Starting in 2013, Endeavour portrayed a younger Morse starting his career in 1965….There was, of course, a strong element of both elitism and class in the series – based in Oxford, with the University buildings and its academics playing a prominent part in the narrative.

It’s taken me some time to realise that there is in fact a much better UK detective series – namely Vera, based in Newcastle and the superb surrounding Northumbrian landscapes and coastlines. Its strength is the realistic portrayal it offers of the different employment challenges of contemporary Britain – whether its immigrant workers, fishing communities, construction sites, ex-mining communities or caravan parks and holiday lets….

I’m surprised noone’s done a post-doctoral thesis on the series. I wrote a lot last year about what Brexit told us about the UK. Proper study of the Vera series – currently running to 11 – would probably tell us more than most academic studies!

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