Midsomer Murders

Here is my theory about Midsomer Murders.
Every show has to be taken as a stand alone piece of drama.

If you view it as a series, it makes no sense.
For example.
A line from a recent episode had Bergerac sitting in a quaint little tea-shop with Troy, trying to thrash out the evidence of three murders inside a week, and the tea-shop lady came over and said, " I hope your investigations are going well Inspector Barnaby, because these murders are affecting our trade."
And you're thinking, like, you don't say.
At least five people get murdered there every day.
Picturesque as it is, I wouldn't go near the place if you payed me a million pounds.

But if it were to be viewed as a series, any sensible murderer would kill Barnaby/Bergerac first, before setting out on a killing spree, because he is always the one who catches them in the end.

Scenario.

I don't know why. This just came to me.

Hello.
Hello.Where's my car?
Well, that's what I came to talk to you about.
Where's my car?
Well, that's what I came to talk to you about.
Where's my car?
I crashed it.
You crashed my car?
Yeah. I just hit a bump in the road and it swerved off and hit a tree.
You crashed my car into a tree?
Yeah. I'm really sorry.
YOU CRASHED MY CAR INTO A TREE?!
Yeah. I'm sorry.
You're sorry?
Yeah. I'm sorry I crashed your car.
Well that's just great. I'm really glad you're sorry you crashed my car into a tree.
There's no need to be sarcastic. It was an accident. It's not like I formed Nazi Germany and set about wiping the Jewish people off the face of the planet. All I did was accidentally crash your car into a tree.
Well, yes. I suppose when you put it like that, it's not such a big deal. I never liked that car anyway.
So we're cool?
Yeah, we're cool. Fancy a pint?

Neil. Your lab's been testing bleaches for us 3. (3D?)

Neil.
What?
Your lab's been testing bleaches for us.
No we've actually been testing nuclear weapons. Oops! I don't think I was meant to say that.

Neil. Your lab's been testing bleaches for us 2.

Neil. Your lab's been testing bleaches for us.
Yeah, well it's a crappy job, but I need the money.
What were the results?
They're all the same. Bleach is bleach.

Neil. Your lab's been testing bleaches for us.

Neil. Your lab's been testing bleaches for us.
Yes. And it's the most soul destroying horrible job I've ever had in my life!
I could have been somebody! I've got a Phd in biochemistry!
Yes Neil. Just stick to the script.
So. Neil your lab's been testing bleaches for us.
Yes. And my wife just ran away with another man.
Yes, but what were the results of the tests on the bleaches you were testing for us?
Then my dog ran away. I crashed my car and my house got re-possessed.
Then a volcano erupted and there was an earthquake!
Yes, Neil. This is an advert for bleach, not a blues song.
What about the bleaches Neil? We're only paying you to talk about the bleaches.
Oh, you mean which one killed germs longest in the lavatory?
Yes.
There was one overall winner.
Care to name it for us?
...No.

Back in them days.

Do you remember the days when if you needed a job, you just located somewhere where you thought you would like to work and walked in and asked them if they needed anyone?
They said, well what can you do?
You said , well what do you need me to do?
They told you.
You said, I can do that.
Hey, Presto! You start tomorrow.
What should I wear?
Nothing.
Nothing?
Oh yes, we're all naturists here. The human body in all its glory is nothing to be ashamed of.
Yeah, I'd sort of noticed that. I think I might look for a job somewhere else.
Wait! Can you drive a fork-lift truck?
Yes.
Brilliant! We need someone who can drive a fork-lift truck.
And am I allowed to wear clothes while I'm doing it?
No.
Then no. I've just remembered that I don't know how to drive a fork-lift truck. Goodbye.

Ah them was the days all right!
I actually can drive a fork-lift truck. I've never done it naked, but in these dark days of recession I'd be willing to give it a go if the money was right.

Packing up and leaving the festival.

I hate to compare our meagre plight with that of soldiers in the First World War, but these lines came to me as I awoke on the last day of the Donington festival. They are from Seigried Sassoon's poem, "Counter Attack."

We'd gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps;
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,--the jolly old rain!

Okay. We didn't have to post bombers and place Lewis guns, and we weren't in immediate danger of being shot or blown to pieces. But it was a grim sight we awoke to on that morning.
Abandoned tents, clothes, and remnants of food and litter of every description were scattered everywhere.
My brother said, "Come on. We have to get moving."
I said, "What am I going to wear?" as we had, we thought sensibly, taken all our possessions back to the the car the night before, not having forseen that we would get absolutely soaked by torrential rain.
"You'll just have to wear those." he said, and I literally started to cry as I pulled on a pair of trousers that looked like they had just been dipped in a river.
We packed up the tent and sleeping bags and began to trudge off through the Somme-like mud.
Then I was "Oh! Look. Someone's left some tins of beer behind."
I went to salvage them, and my brother said, "Come on. We don't have time for that."
I thought, is this really my brother? Maybe he was adopted or dropped on his head as a young child. This is free beer we're talking about here. We ALWAYS have time for that. So I grabbed a few cans and we made our way back to the car.
Endless praise must be heaped on my brother, as I slept through most of the journey and he drove us safely home.
After sorting out the tent and other equipment, I was never so glad in my life to see a bed.

I do have to say I enjoyed it immensely. But NEVER AGAIN!

We're getting too old for that.

Back in Black.

Okay. Now I'm back, and I am in black. I even changed my underpants and socks to ensure I would be totally in black, despite the fact that I had only been wearing them for a week and they didn't smell too bad.
That's how committed I am to be "Back in Black".
Because....
That is topical to the rant I am about to embark on.
My brother made me go to the Download festival at Castle Donington, probably remembered better by most people as Monsters of Rock.
The headline act were AC/DC.
First thing. I did a fair bit of walking about while we were there, and I never once saw a castle. So that was a rip-off straight away.
Next, when we got there they put this wristband on you that was impossible to remove (I'm still wearing it). I mean they might as well have issued you with a stripey pair of pyjamas with a six pointed star on them.
Then you went into what amounted to nothing more than a big field where you were expected to live for three days. To make matters worse, the big field was covered with people you didn't like.
And I mean covered. They were everywhere. The furthest away you could get from them was about 300mm.
They all seemed to be determined never to sleep, and to shout as loudly as possible in the middle of the night.
If I wasn't a pacifist, someone might have got hit.
Now here comes my AA Gill of the Sunday Times bit...
The food was utterly ghastly. Four pounds for a burger that looked like it wasn't particularly good to begin with, but had then been reversed over by a lorry.
More and more people appeared. The distance you were able to keep from them decreased to about 10mm.
Now, I rather naively, not having been to a festival before, thought that you would get out of your tent, and
there the bands would be.

How wrong I was. We had to walk so far that I was beginning to suspect that the show might actually be in a different country to the one we were camping in.

But we eventually got there, and after being practically strip-searched by nazis, they let us in to an area where the food was even more appalling and if you wanted a paper cup of beer you had to go through a process that was worse than USA immigration after September the Eleventh.

The organisers had obviously decided that everyone would like to listen to GWOAR! music early in the afternoon. So on came a succession of bands I had never heard of who played their guitars at a million miles an hour while someone who was clearly demented screamed unintelligable nonsense into a microphone. All well and good if you like that sort of thing, which I do, but I noticed some of the audience with looks of consternation on their faces, as if to say, "What's this?"

Finally, though, AC/DC came on, to a stage of their own construction, and made all the bad things go away.

I'm not even going to try to describe how good they were.

Then there were fireworks at the end and the march back to Auschwitz.

On the second day, after no sleep, due to the people I didn't like, who shouted at the top of their voices all night, I made a decision to break open some wine we had brought, and get roaring drunk. However, after a glass and a half, I abandoned this idea, as my brother surfaced from the tent and the idea came to me that it might be better to get out of this hell-hole and go to a nice little pub we had seen on our way in. It was walking distance away and looked like it might do food.

So this we did, and we we had a really nice lunch that hadn't been reversed over by a lorry, and the landlord and landlady, and the waiting staff were all really pleasant, and it was a nice break from the horror...the horror!

But we had to go back. I wanted to watch Rage Against the Machine that night.

My brother said he had never heard of them, but I suppose that's because he never went to art college in the mid-nineties, and he's a bit right wing.

You would think he would have known what to expect from a band called "Rage Against the Machine", but even I was shocked at the sight of a girl who can't have been more than six years old, sitting on her dad's shoulders giving a Black Power salute, and shouting, "FUCK YOU i WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!"
Modern parenting in action there, I suppose.

The last day came with the inevitable festival rain and mud, and us being middle-aged light-weights, we decided to retire to the tent for a couple of leisurely beers, on the grounds that we would have liked to see Motorhead and Aerosmith, but we didn't want to catch pneumonia doing it.
There's more to come on this subject, namely our packing up and leaving the site, but I think I will leave that for another time.

PS. When I said my brother is a bit right wing, I don't mean he's like a nazi or anything. He's just not a Pinko disestablishmentarianist like I am. In fact you could almost say he is an antidisestablishmentarianist, which is, by the way, the longest word in the dictionary.

I'm back!

But I'm not in black. I'm wearing green trousers and a blue and white checked shirt. Hang on. I'll go and change...