I’ll be in watching Vera on the kitchen telly, if anyone needs me
When did television become so complicated? It used to be a cinch: you turned it on, you had a handful of channels, and provided the pipe didn’t go, you could usually find something to keep you mildly diverted from the drudgery of real life for an hour or two. Now though, there appears to be an infinite number of channels and streaming services, some of which are paid for, and others that — in this house at least — can only be accessed on the big television in the living room, or through the PlayStation in the kitchen that is so old its remote control defaults to rewinding after a couple of seconds, meaning you have to move fast to get your desired viewing up and running before hastily disconnecting the remote. Television used to be about relaxing. Now it’s exhausting.
Line of Duty is a perfect example. Unlike 99% of the gazillions of people who watched the last series after binge-watching the first five, I followed the earlier series when they were actually on television, which means that I had about six hours of Line of Duty every year for the guts of a decade. And honestly, there was a lot of other stuff going on as well. So when Ted Hastings said things in the last series like “she’s a DNA match for Tommy Hunter,” I hadn’t a breeze who he was talking about. At the end of each episode, I had to do a sort of online tutorial in Line of Duty, just to keep up with proceedings.
Then there’s WandaVision. Now, it’s hard enough to watch that here, as it’s only available on the aforementioned Big Telly. But The Boy started watching it and singing its praises, so I decided to give it a whirl. But it turned out it wasn’t that simple. ‘You won’t understand it because you haven’t watched any films from the Marvel Universe,’ The Boy explained. And it is true – somehow, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has passed me by, presumably in a parallel universe.
Still, I really liked the trailers for WandaVision, which weren’t on the Big Telly or I’d never have seen them, so I was game. Somewhere in the wilderness of the regular channels, the premium channels, the streaming services and the recordings, I found Deadpool and watched it. I even enjoyed it, up to a point. But apparently, although made by Marvel, Deadpool is not of the Universe, so in The Boy’s Universe, it didn’t pass muster as a gateway to WandaVision. Effectively, I had wasted my time. Helpfully, The Boy gave me a list of films that would do the job and instructed me to watch three. Reader, I watched one and it was literally rubbish. It was at that point I realized that watching WandaVision was going be harder than passing the driving test, and it took me 30 years to do that.
Besides, if I’m honest, I’m happier with the more modest kitchen telly and my umpteen recordings of high quality crime dramas. The kids might like to occasionally distract me with shiny things, but the fact is that I’m at my most comfortable in The Vera Universe. Other denizens of that particularly crime-fighting solar system include Dalziel & Pascoe, Endeavour, Lewis, Inspector Lynley and the women of Prime Suspect and Silent Witness. But it is Vera who reigns over them all; the Goddess, a powerhouse of policework in a trench coat and a battered hat.
I can’t really explain why I love British crime drama so much. I don’t read much crime fiction — though as a precocious pre-teen reader I hoovered up everything Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. But there’s just something about starting a story at its end point — the murder — and watching brilliant minds figure it all out backwards. That most of The Vera Universe’s sleuths have vaguely dysfunctional personal lives adds an additional and comforting layer to these complex, brilliantly plotted stories. Apparently, we prefer our detectives to be shabby, borderline alcoholic and basically nuts — I regularly mark Midsomer Murders down for Barnaby’s annoyingly idyllic homelife. At least his predecessor, the other Barnaby who was once Bergerac, had the good grace to be married to a woman who looked old enough to be his mother.
I have never needed to do any prep before entering The Vera Universe, nor do I have to take an internet debriefing afterwards. It reminds me of simpler times, when all television required was that you show up. Now, it’s murder out there. Who knew that “on demand” would turn out to be so, well, demanding?