Current mood:

amused

Inspector Lynley Mysteries
I was working on images for my Second Life store and decided I needed a little company so I switched on my little tv I keep next to my computer and saw that Mystery Theater was on. In case you don't know what Mystery Theater is, it's a program with episodes of different UK "mystery" or "detective" type shows and presented on Public TV. I admit I haven't had the time or inclination to watch many of them in the last few years but this one caught my eye because I faintly recognized the man in the lead role. It took me a while (and the help of Google) to realize that this was none other than the power-tripping manager of Whitney Houston in the Bodyguard. Also, I had picked up a DVD at the rental store the other day called, "Wide Sargasso Sea" and he had the lead role in that as well so it was no wonder he seemed familiar.

I said to my kids, "Look at this man here, he's the guy who was the manager in The Bodyguard."
They peered in disbelief at his face and said, "Oh, that can't be! That guy is sooo old!!!" Personally, I thought he had improved with age, in acting ability and the way he looked so I left it on the channel, watched the entire show and found it quite enjoyable. The plot was the often used, "The killer is calling you from somewhere inside the house!! Get out now!!" The plot wasn't what interested me so much as the dynamics between the two lead characters, especially Barbara. In this particular episode, a man with a gun was taunting her about how scared she was (Lynley was on his way, having seen the killer's face in a picture they had enlarged using digital imaging) and when he was distracted for a moment, she throws a glass at him and then jumps him even though she's only about 5'2". She knocks him to the ground and continues to punch and pound him until Lynley pulls her off and then she dissolves into tears in his arms.

The next day I mentioned this show to Jigsaw Pig and he said, "That woman sidekick always looks so cross," and "The show is easy to watch, I guess. It's very popular here." He made a few other comments I found intriguing and filed the information away in the back of my mind as being "something I might want to watch more of" and promptly forgot about it until I got to the library yesterday.

As I was waiting for my daughter to finish looking at the videos, I happened to glance up and see an entire row of "The Inspector Lynley Mysteries". "Well what do we have here?", I said to myself. Three entire years worth of episodes in twelve DVDs. That amounts to four episodes per DVD and I promptly scooped up the first four videos and went to check them out with the books I had picked up.

So I've watched the very first episode and found out there was a reason the Miss Havers was so cross, she had a nutty mother and her dad was dying in the hospital. Besides that, Lynley was a LORD and kind of looks down his nose at her and some of her ideas and she has the strongest disdain for the upper class.

The first episode centered mostly around a boy's school and I found out I might as well have been watching the episode in Chinese. I'm not sure if this is just because a British boys school has its own private language or what but I couldn't make out half the words they were saying. There was talk of a game called "fives". "Let's go look on the FIVES court," they would say and then they would walk around these little cement cubicles that looked somewhat like the cement shower stalls you would find at a primitive summer camp. I still have no idea what the game of "Fives" is. Even more confusing was the word "pastoral". "We make sure all your boys have their pastoral needs met," the school claimed. Hmmmm, what does that mean? They mow their fields so the boys can sit out in them and be quiet and reflective? I was so confused. Moving on, I found out some of the boys were called "specs" and could tell the younger boys when to brush their teeth and turn out their lights, among other things. Here in the US, "specs" is an old fashioned name for eyeglasses. Finally, they interviewed someone they thought was responsible for the schoolboy's death and he told them he had parked his van in the graveyard that night because he had just come from the pub and he wanted to get his "kit" off. Hmmmm, ok, this one was a puzzler. All I could deduct was that he had to stop to take a pee. What else could it be? Isn't that the most logical reason for stopping in the wee hours after a night of drinking?

I am sure it will all become clearer the more I watch these shows but for the moment, I'm just glad that the boys in the UK can have fun in the Fives Court (which doesn't even look large enough to even be playing Ones on, if you ask me) and that they are well looked after by bigger boys with excellent eyesight and that if they need to go out to a pasture, there is one provided for them and while they're there, they can even get their kit off.


In further developments today, my fifteen year old has just informed me that she had turned in a paper to her English teacher with a word spelled wrong and she was concerned about it.

"We were doing word definitions," she explained.
"What word were you trying to spell?" I asked.
"Pathological Organism," she replied.
"How did you spell it then?"
"Pathological Orgasm."


Sigh. Next time I see the teacher, I will just have to tell her that that particular daughter is adopted.