Precious Ramotswe and the Glasgow Bloodfest

I've been watching the new TV channel provided by my rather wretched cable TV service. I'm used to new channels popping up from time to time. Normally they tend to be of the "lifestyle" variety with programmes like Trinny and Susannah Perform Open Heart Surgery. I generally avoid them like the plague. I can't help thinking lifestyle programmes are largely for people who don't have one. Until they come up with a programme that tells you how to pin down a paranoid cat with one hand and apply flea medication with the other while avoiding claws aimed at the eyes I don't think they have anything for me.

This new channel is good though. Its been going for some months now and is called 13th Street. Essentially its a murder mystery channel which means that I get to see all the mystery shows from a few years back that I missed on free to air TV. At the moment I'm revelling in an overdose of Poirot and Taggart. In my family the latter show has been referred to as "the Glasgow Bloodfest" for as long as I can recall. I mean I know Glasgow has a pretty gritty reputation but honestly if the murder rate in Taggart was maintained for any length of time Glasgow would be depopulated by now. Surely even the inhabitants of Glasgow would flee to Edinburgh rather than take their chances on the gore drenched streets. Or possibly they wouldn't, I've been to Edinburgh.

Currently we are seeing what are euphemistically referred to as "the middle years". The middle years being the period between the death of Mark McManus (who actually played Taggart) and the departure of James MacPherson (no relation, I think) who played Jardine. It would appear that not even the actors are immune to the relentless body count. I liked Mark McManus and I particularly liked a couple of the things he did with the show. If you look at the old episodes that he appears in you will notice that absolutely nobody smokes. They kill each other all over the place but they don't smoke. This is because McManus once appeared in a movie (where he played a smoker) and was appalled to be accosted by a couple of teenagers later who enthused over his performance and told him how cool he looked smoking. He decided that if he ever got any creative control over a programme no one would be allowed to smoke onscreen. When offered Taggart the other thing he insisted on was that everybody spoke with a genuine Glaswegian accent. While this means that the early episodes require subtitles it did add a certain verisimilitude.

Precious Ramotswe has been appearing in The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency on another channel. It would appear that in the interests of balance the number of murders committed in Glasgow is counterbalanced by the lack of them in Botswana. To be fair if the murder rate of Taggart was maintained in Botswana the country would be depopulated in a week. Still its a nice change of pace. Sadly the Agatha Christie mysteries (Poirot and Marple) appear while I'm at work so I have to hope for sudden attacks of illness if I want to see them.

The best thing about cable tv is that no programme however crappy is allowed to die. Somewhere in the tattered fringes of society there will be sufficient interest to allow the programme to appear on some channel most people have never heard of. I've been watching Get Smart and occasionally even Hogan's Heroes. I loathe Hogan's Heroes but as I watch it I can't help wondering why nobody picked Bob Crane as a sado masochistic homosexual earlier. What everybody else's excuse for appearing in the programme is I don't know. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Xena appear on the sci fi channel which means that somebody in the programming department really doesn't understand the definition of science fiction.

I meant to say something intelligent about cable television and its effects but I have to admit I love it. I've seen more aircrashes than I ever though possible and there is so much footage of world war 2 that if you played it from beginning to end it would take longer than the actual war. All in all relentless reality programmes, Gordon Ramsay and Trinny and Susannah are a small price to pay for so much enjoyment. Cable tv proves that if you just get as many people making television programmes as you possibly can some of them are going to be interesting simply by the law of averages. Of course then you have to find them. Which is why I tend to stick to reruns of Taggart.