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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