A Dream Come True : …Midsomer Murders
Last Sunday at the end of a long hot and sweaty day in my studio….I collapsed in front of the tv with a glass of chilled wine and was delighted to read in the paper that Midsomer Murders had just started.
I have always been fascinated by Soaps, Prisoner Cell Block H a choice de rigueur in those pre-video recorded years…staying up til the early hours to get my fix. I have a theory that the ‘worse’ they are the more true to life they mirror. BUT I really love them. Part Prozac, part dream. John Betjeman was a huge fan of Coronation Street I learnt. In fact my Royal College thesis was written about one…..but that’s another story.
Where was I?….MM got under way…I don’t care about the plot, the more farcical the better….the bandsaw played…a hand reached into a bathroom [?] cabinet and there on camera was a packet of Sainsbury’s hand soap WITH A HACK-IT-PAYS-THE-RENT-WATERCOLOUR OF TWO PEACHES I DID WAY BACK IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES! UNBELIEVABLE! I spilt my wine in the excitement and started levitating.
Graham Rawle (of Lost Consonants fame)once told me that he wanted to write and film an Avengers style programme. He has a life long crush on Joanna Lumley [or is it Honor Blackman?..or all of Steed’s partners?].Maybe we should collaborate one day. I remember reading about a pair of Californian artists [ who made me take seriously Post Modernism for the first time)who ingeniously invented a consumer product, with the purpose of persuading a Hollywood scriptwriter to weave it into a long running popular tv soap opera….then they collaborated with the scriptwriter to create and film an art gallery filled with their paintings…..which slowly become an integral part of the plot.