Murder He Watched (aka Watch With Mother)

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I am, as I'm writing this, in Essex, collecting my daughter following her week and a bit long stay at my mother's who showed her the London sights. Come down one day leave the next.

It is always a pleasure to see my mother, but like all families that pleasure means tolerating things you wouldn't put up in anybody else (I'm sure she'd say the same about me.....but it's my blog so there).

What I was conscious yesterday evening was that one of those things was watching television. Now am not saying that my tastes are better but they are different. And as I don't see her on a regular basis I feel rude putting headphones on and shutting myself off from the immediate world.

So I have to go retro and watch with mother.

My mother, like many other sweet, shall I say mature?, ladies has a taste for TV crime series. The programme we watched together last night was Murder She Wrote. I could see why she liked it. Jessica Fletcher was clearly a role model for ladies of her years. Aged well, was fit and active, talented, wealthy but most of all mentally stable. With an intelligence to solve murders that the local police force in the village she lived in in Maine (that is to say geographically judging by the show bordering California) is unable to solve. This inability then being spread out across the globe to affect many other forces of law and order.

If this was real life of course her local police force would be under investigation for it's inability to solve crimes without the help of a pensionable amateur.

And as I'm watching this piece of utter drivel (one hour incl commercials) I think that a more realistic aged amateur detective would have more wrinkles, consider walking to be exercise enough and would be struggling to live on the pension. If that was on TV then I'd watch it willingly.

But don't think her taste is solely on American trash. There's Midsomer murders. The programme I watched as if in a coma with her last year. Set in the fictional county of Midsomer, the only county it appears consisting just of a collection of villages and no towns/cities, it follow the experienced detective and his sidekick as they solve murders in the chocolate box England they live in.

An England which incidentally (as I understand it) did not have anyone until fairly recently whose skin colour wasn't white

This is two hours of cliché English drivel. It drives my brain to mush. Where is Inspector Morse when you need him?

But I have to watch. I'm with my mother.

(As a quick aside the only time I've ever willingly watched it was in Italy. British TV programmes watched overseas is some sort of electronic comfort blanket. A programme you'd cross the street to avoid in Britain suddenly becomes interesting).

The other crime programme my mother watched is Taggart. A show that I liked in the beginning but seemed at the end to be performing some sort of cull on the population of Glasgow. Do you know who my mother has also made a fan now? My daughter.

Suppose these things jump generations.

Until the next time