Hard not to lose the plot

Igot my Silent Witness mixed up with my Vigil and my latest scandi noir the other week. In fact, trying to unravel the complicated plots kept me awake one night and I had to resort to the Guardian spoiler blog on my bedside phone.

Dealing with murdered submariners, bodies dissolving in slurry tanks and jars of severed fingers is not recommended at three in the morning, even if taken with a cup of tea.

In all the above, the characters are inevitably referred to by their surnames, so one can’t remember if they are male, female or other.

And at the risk of being politically incorrect, a lot of Scandinavian names are somewhat similar.

I just can’t tell my Christiansens from my Andersens. What’s more in the scandi noirs they nearly all have beards (the men that is) and hefty hooded anoraks, and what with the sun barely visible above the horizon, I generally don’t have a clue who is being dunn, let alone who dunnit.

And speaking of darkness, have these people never heard of electricity?

Even my posh new flat screen super-telly can’t cope with extended scenes of police/criminals stumbling about bashing into furniture and eventually each other.

Apart from abandoned coalmines and possibly a submarine in a power cut, there is almost certainly a light switch somewhere to hand. Use it please.

I’ve taken to employing post-it notes. I have one for each character stuck around my screen. ‘Evans: blonde woman.’ ‘Proudfoot: gangster owner of golf club.’ ‘Hargreaves: Man dead in allotment shed.’

Allotment sheds feature in most detective series. There must be some near the studio.

Used as an illicit sperm bank in one programme the other week if I remember rightly.

Most people use theirs for propagating seedlings or tinkering with their motorbikes.

Three different series featured a corpse transported in a rolled carpet. One even raised a comment from a passer-by. ‘What have you got in there, a body?’ they quipped. That was on an allotment too.

Handy tip for murderers moving a body in a rolled-up Axminster on an allotment: You can re-use that old carpet as a substitute for plastic weed control membrane.

I missed an episode of Silent Witness recently. On catchup, it took me a full fifteen minutes before I realised I was watching one I’d already seen.

As I’d started, I decided to carry on until the end. An end that wasn’t as I remembered it from two nights before. Someone completely different seemed to have ‘dunnit.’

And what happened to the poison gas in the kitchen? Oh, right, that was in Vigil.

And the slurry tank? That was in the scandi noir. And in Vera if I remember rightly. And even The Archers! Note to self: Avoid slurry tanks.

Here’s a telly game to play: Every time someone in a detective thriller does puzzled face/thinking face/ realise face acting, take a sip of wine. You’ll be pretty tiddly by the end.

Ralph Oswick was artistic director of Natural Theatre for 45 years and is now an active patron of Bath Comedy Festival