Sunday 5th August, 01.09 am!

Yeah, I know it's late and I should be on my way to bed - I was watching what I'm afraid was a truly terrible film (Lake Placid, I would have been so way better off with Gregory's Girl) and then I started - or I went to switch off the computer, and of course before I knew where I was, I was browsing Flickr.

The good news in my life is that I'm on my way to recovery from the gastro-enteritis - the worst is definitely over,  and I'll be back at work soon. Unfortunately I'm not really ok to go home this weekend, so my plans there have changed - going to visit on Wednesday now.

 

So, being ill and all, I've been watching some truly awful television. There's something about being ill that makes dreadful tv about the only thing you can do.  What have I been watching? Oh God, I shudder to tell you. Midsomer Murder - who dreamt that one up?   But it is actually topped by something that for some unknown reason, ITV seem to have taken to showing instead of the kids' tv programmes - what's happened to kids tv by the way?  It appears to have totally gone from ITV, on the beeb has any kind of kids stuff on it.  Anyway instead of it, ITV have been showing something called Rosemary and Thyme. This extremely odd programme is centred around two women who seem to be some sort of gardeners, of which on every single job they take, someone is murdered. Even judging by the episodes I've seen, you'd think word would have got round among their customers by now. Don't hire those two, you'll be up to your eyes in incompetent police officers at any moment. Because not only do their clients get bumped off, the victims have the misfortune of having their demise investigated by the worlds biggest collection of incompetent coppers.

Now I thought Midsummer Murder was about the worst that British tv could get in the line of crime drama. Dear old John Nettles pottering about a disparate collection of picturesque villages with  a higher murder rate than that of the darkest inner city, forget New York, we're talking the Favellas here, followed doggedly by his semi-literate sergeant, as he sets about solving a case that you can be pretty sure was either a) the wife, b) the husband, c) the girlfriend or d) the vicar.  Or some combination therein.  But this is as nothing to this Rosemary and Thyme.  Extraordinarily, these two are played by two actors who really should have known better - and one can only assume that the paycheques for this must have been quite as incredible as the plots.  In the past week, I've seen them  - turn up at a cathedral to re-lay a medieval herbal garden (I think this was the dean being knocked off by the chapter, or was it the daughter that did it? At any rate there was a body in a well, which was momentarily diverting.)  Then there was one set in some species of municipal park. What that council was doing wasting its council tax hiring gardeners is beyond me, when surely they must have a parks department?  This one involved a foreign nanny, being blackmailed into stealing her employer's jewellery at the behest of someone purporting to be a university lecturer. Or at least, that was the best sense I could make of it.  Its by far the most ludicrous piece of trash I've seen in I don't know how long, and at least if I'm confronted by it again, I shall reach for a dvd. Even the most watched, scratched, ancient piece of stuff on the shelves is better watching than this drivel!

 

So that's my blast for the day. Catch you later!