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!