Review - Murder on the Nile

Malvern may well be the perfect place to put on an Agatha.  A spa town made up of several villages strung along the shadow of the Hills, it could be said to suffer from something of a split personality, in parts grand, in parts bohemian, in parts just a little eccentric and as a whole, delightful.  

It is the sort of place where, if there were a body in the library, it would have the good manners to be discovered in the ‘true crime’ section.  It is charming and friendly but there is just enough of the history and resort oddness that comes with being a spa town that used to attract a lot of visitors, and just enough of that village sensibility of everyone knowing everyone else's business while simultaneously being a place where secrets are kept, to make it the sort of place where curtains might twitch and they love a good mystery.

Malvern Theatre is a place like no other, with a strong reputation for being the venue that directors take their shows to to perfect them before being unleashed on London, as well as unashamedly providing entertainment for the town.  Here the curtain twitches and then rises, and the people of Malvern do like a good mystery.

And if that entertainment and mystery comes in the form of bloody murder, then so much the better.  Because Malvern is the perfect place for a whodunit, with atmospheric locations, interesting locals, all that grand architecture and plenty of dark corners to hide secrets in.  

The curtain went up on ‘Murder on the Nile’ and we were not in the sleepy, sinister English countryside anymore, rather, we were in Egypt or, to be more precise, the foredeck of a Nile cruiser bathed in glorious sunshine.

Even for an audience of locals who have quite a healthy relationship with water, thank you very much, this vista caused quite a thrill among the audience who, thanks to a constant diet of rain and drizzle over the past months, were overjoyed to see some sunshine, even if it was artificial. Rows A to D were slapping on the factor 40 and spritzing one another with insect repellent, it was that authentic.

What makes a great set?  Well, in my experience gaffa tape and imagination in equal measure but in this case it was the lighting that made the impression.  Instead of a merciless glare we had mellow light, and not just any mellow light but the mellow light of a travel brochure, from a more elegant age.  Because the characters, being English and abroad, decided that the best way to cope with a voyage on a boat riding on a river through the Sahara was to wear as much linen as possible.  This is inspired, if one is going to look uncomfortable and moist, one had better do so elegantly.

As the full house showed, Malvern enjoys an Agatha and this was no exception.  An exceptional cast was in no way outshone by, but without a doubt led by, Kate O’Mara.

There is something about a real star that sets them apart and Miss O’Mara’s performance was flawless.  Looking most of the time like she was trying to ignore an unpleasant smell (insect repellent from the front row?) she was, to the smallest detail and in the widest sense, the grand society lady, travelling.  This was a woman who carried England with her wherever she went and no matter how foreign the land.  So it was here, every phrase clipped and every movement measured.

The plot was a precision instrument and the cast contrived to throw suspicion first one way and then another.  Without a serial Agatha sleuth on board, the audience felt justified in silently speculating about guilt and innocence, not having to worry about second guessing Jane Marple.

The only thing lacking was the unavailability of 'pink fizz' on tap for the audience.  This is what the cast were constantly ordering from the ship's bar, drinking enough of the stuff to float the ship itself, it's a wonder anyone could shoot straight.

It's always impressive to see a great cast enjoying performing a good play, and enjoying the 'sunshine' too.

Looking down

There's a job vacancy at Lambeth Palace as the Funny Hat Wearer In Chief of Agnostics Anonymous has announced that after ten years of people being bitchy about his vestments behind his back, he is stepping down, no doubt to write a series of essays that essentially boil down to; 'I was right, sod the lot of you'. Applicants for this post are a short list of bishops from around the country but, like fishermen, surely the appointment panel (chaired by who, God?) should cast their nets wider. This appears to be a job where the most important role is telling people how to live their lives and commenting on the more pernicious aspects of Government policy, so surely the most ideal candidates are stand-up comedians and bloody bloody tabloid columnists.

These are two professions never short of an opinion, usually uninformed and always unaccountable, ideal credentials for leading a religious organisation, as nobody knows whether your pronouncements about the afterlife are right until it's too late.

The issue exercising the church and the tabloids at the moment is gay marriage. It's amazing that anyone would think that somebody should be deprived of the pleasure of marriage just because they happen to be a ulist. Certainly, it can't be an exclusively heterosexual skill set to continue living with somebody while compiling a never ending list of petty resentments.

It starts with a list, evolves into a book, then at some point becomes the big book of petty resentments. I know couples who can make a whole tragic mime from taking down the Big Book of Petty Resentments from the shelf, opening it up as one would a substantial tome and making an entry. I even know one couple who, when Mrs Big Book calmly announced that their Big Book of Petty Resentments had grown so substantial that they had moved it to a Kindle edition, Mr Big Book responded that he had had to outsource his resentment management to a call centre in Bangalore.

Looking down on the city, with a God's eye view, one thing becomes clear, problems on a human scale like just who can get married to whom fade into insignificance. If two chaps want to get married, then who is going to object. Certainly no married chap, who thinks two things, the first being that he doesn't see what all the fuss is about and the second being that if he has to spend Sunday mornings pretending to care about wallpaper patterns and wandering round garden centres, he doesn't seed why anyone else should get away with it just because they are confirmed batchalors, fans of musical theatre and recipients of the occasional cock.

It's important to get perspective on this, and also to see what others are saying. If your views on gay marriage align with those of people who also have robust views about women priests, women voting, women working at all and, indeed, women leaving the house, then you probably need to either realign your views in a hurry or sod off to Afghanistan to live in a cave with lots of other gritty misogynists who quickly find out that without the civilising presence of women, you develop questionable hygiene, your socks rot and you end up having the sort of relationship with one of the other fellows that, ironically, results in your wanting him to make an honest man of you.

There's no doubt that being an Archbishop should have its perks, chief among these being that everybody listens to you. The problem is that being the Archbishop of Canterbury means that everybody listened to you only long enough to work out what it is you are saying so that they can start arguing with you. Ending every day by slamming the office door shut, uncorking the alter wine and muttering 'I bet the Pope doesn't have to put up with this shit' is not conducive to developing the spirit of forgiveness.

Wearing a big hat and living in a palace though, those are some perks, possibly even more fun that telling people how to think and daydreaming about punching Richard Dawkins, really hard. First to do that - gets the job.

Sittin sippin browsin

I have always been a big fan of coffee shops in book shops. Somehow the sensibility seems just right, and I think I now understand why (and its not just about caffeine addiction, its far deeper than that, its about cake too) and, moreover, have finally unlocked the philosophy behind the business (and it's not just about over stimulating consumers, although it occurs that offering a couple of lines of coke on the door of Dorothy Perkins would lead to an increase in sales, although you'd have to remove the mirrors in the store to minimise paranoia outbreaks).

The link between education and refreshment was made for me in childhood, when a trip to Glasgow's museum and art gallery would culminate in a visit to the tea shop. This is Glasgow, so if I tell you that the chocolate gateau they served there actually defied the laws of chemistry by having more calories in it collectively than the ingredients contributed singly (and those ingredients were mainly butter, sugar, lard and batter, and chocolate), and that this had a direct bearing on the taste (simply glorious), then you may be assured that I am not exaggerating. These were in the days before chemical adulteration of our foods, when the term 'trans-fatty' applied to a chubby cross-dresser. Cake tasted like cake because they were made from, and made you, fat. But this was OK, because having just wandered several miles of galleries, one was quite entitled to a few thousand calories on a single spoon.

Back in the present day, it occurs to me that the sort of person who is going to have a coffee in a book shop is the sort of person who enjoys shopping for books. Moreover, they are the sort of person who enjoys spending some time sitting listening to jazz (it's always jazz in book shops, it's the law) drinking their coffee in comfy seats, surrounded by books. Chances are that this is more or less exactly what they would be doing if at home, only with less jazz and fewer books.

The coffee shop in the Waterstones (other bookshops are available) I am currently in as I sit typing this (it's okay, everyone thinks I'm working on my screenplay) is situated in the section which has all their books on art, that is, the expensive large format ones that you just want to take home and leave lying around the place so that everyone will think you are cleverer and more cultured than you really are. And sitting here, looking at the spines of colourful books, some of which have pictures of ladies and gauze inside them, there is, as the latte takes hold, a real desire to own those tomes. Not just the plump, colourful, heavyweight books with gorgeous reproductions of paintings of fruit and so on, but the undernourished, dull, cruel looking books on art criticism that take one hundred and fifty pages to grudgingly admit that despite his many faults, Van Gough could paint.

Because for a balanced reader, fiction is going to be well represented, even foreign fiction thanks to Stig (ten years ago if you asked somebody if they had read a Swedish crime novel recently, you would probably get a negative response. Get a negative response to that question today and you would not be out of order to enquire how their health is now that they are out of their coma). Likewise there are popular books on various branches of natural philosophy, many featuring handsome BBC presenters on the front wearing chinos. The same can be said for history. But art? Not so much.

Which is why you situate your coffee shop in the art section. Not only does it take the browser off the beaten aisle, exposing them to unforeseen temptation, but it ensures the coffee drinkers are not blocking access to the popular and profitable shelves of the store, usually stocked with authors with an umlatt in their name where the book covers have a bloke standing in a snowy field.

Right, coffee finished, I'm off to try and find a book on Scottish baking, and one on how to make your own defribulator.

We're doomed!

Innovation is what stops us just getting by and helps us undertake activities in a minutely improved way. For instance, the invention of the zip fastener not only contributed to the birth of the punk rock movement, but allowed any chap bursting for the loo speedier access to his gentlemen’s siphon than buttons (and when it comes to trousers, the zip fastener is an unusual example where innovation has stopped, at least for the present, because the application of the next stage in fastening technology, Velcro, never caught on in the trouser department - the last thing that a chap wants to hear from down there is any kind of ripping noise).

Innovation has given us, well, just about everything really. But it comes at a price. Fire was invented when Prometheus stole it from the gods. It has now been developed to a degree that it can be safely carried on aeroplanes from Mt Olympus and carried in torch fashion through a different country every four years, carried in your pocket in handy Swan Vesta or Zippo form or, the pinnacle of conflagration innovation, the patio heater. The price of using a patio heater, essentially trying to heat the world, is a hell of a lot of gas being used, so depleting a finite resource in order to keep smokers warm, a questionable aim anyway because these are people already huddled around a tiny heat source never more than six inches from the tip of their nose.

Innovation marches on for two reasons. The first is mankind’s’ altruistic need to better the lives of others signally or collectively. The second, dominant, driver is the predisposition of certain types of scientist to just not bloody well leave well enough alone. This is the mentality that produced the large hadron collider (‘what happens if we combine this particle with that particle, at nearly the speed of light?’ The answer is: ‘the same thing that happens if you combine anything at near the speed of light – a sudden and dramatic release of energy. You could do it with two pots of yoghurt and, if they are moving fast enough, you’re still going to be scraping the results of your experiment off the ceiling at Christmas).

Hence my coffee beaker the other day. For years I have been getting by drinking my coffee from a cup – a straightforward design best described at as a cylinder closed off at one end with a handle on the outside. Then, a few years ago, lids began appearing on the take-away coffee scene. Like toddlers with Tommy Tippee beakers, we were not trusted to walk and drink at the same time, so lids appeared with a large hole to slurp through on one side and a pinprick to allow insufficient air to replace the lost liquid on the other.

And there innovation halted, until some bored beverage boffin obviously thought that what the world really needed was a lid with, wait for it, a slide that would allow you to close off the hole you drink through!




I have spent too much time considering why, but can only assume that it was the same quest for perfection that led the genius behind the packaging design for the biscuits I had the other day to come up with a design that allows the biscuits to actually stand vertical in their packaging.

That’s it, horizontal biscuits can go fuck themselves, once you’ve had a biscuit that stands up in its bespoke biscuit presenter, anything else seems archaic. Now, can somebody invest the ‘dunk-thru-lid’ for my coffee please?


The most enthusiastic exponent of innovation, is Marks & Spencer. Dedicated to convincing the world that their food is special, this message driven home by inaccessibility, M&S food being so over-packaged it requires a controlled explosion to open a packet of fish fingers.

The world will not end with a bang (not even a yoghurty one) or a whimper. It will end with a mountain of landfill landslide engulfing the last square inch of the planet still open to the sky. In such a circumstance, it’s time to fire up the patio heaters and innovate improvements to subterranean living.

Lookin' up

The clear skies recently have given the great British public unobstructed views of a meteorite streaking across the night sky. This caused a lot of people to call the police, who duly logged the calls as ‘UFO nutbag’, ‘drunk’ and ‘fiery messenger of doom seen streaking towards Salford’. That the public responded by grabbing their phones rather than their cameras shows that the people behind ‘Stargazing Live’ probably have more work to do.

The meteorite was clearly visible because the sky, the very vault of heaven, was unobstructed by cloud. Certainly this is true at night, but not so much during the day. On a cloudless day, the perfect blue is criss-crossed with the vapour trails of jets. What’s amazing is the sheer number of them. I thought that there was supposed to be a recession on and that everyone was too poor to travel, and if they were travelling at all they were travelling by National Express, an experience so traumatic that one can only conclude that these things are usually chartered by Satan.

Looking up, one can’t help but try to picture what’s happening inside those metal tubes crossing the sky and criss-crossing each other’s path. Personally, I used to rather like aircraft travel. A few years ago international air travel used to consist of sitting in a seat and being brought endless, and free, snacks and alcoholic beverages while watching movies. Maybe life is still like that if you turn left rather than right on entering the aircraft, but for the mere mortals paying for their own tickets, the experience is now cramped, noisy and breathless, because to save on costs the airlines cut down on recirculating the fresh air, meaning that the majority of the air is actually recycled through flatulent tourists. And if you try to open a window, even on the ground, they get really sniffy.

Looking at all the snail trails of the fast moving machines, one wonders why so many people would choose to put themselves through that. Of course, alternative forms of travel have taken a bit of a knock reputationally recently, sea travel in particular. In the days of sail the main issue was scurvey and pirates. In the era of the great liners the main threat was icebergs, being snubbed socially or, imagining yourself among strangers, embarrassingly discovering that the purser you have been seeing in the aft lifeboat (not a euphemism) after dark has also been sucking off your village curate, unexpectedly also aboard, between bouts of quoits (again, not a euphemism). This means one of you will have to either stay in South Africa, or go over the rail.

Today the main threats to sea journeys tend to be pirates, running out of chips at the buffet, and the captain trying to do a handbreak turn round an island, at night, pissed, in a ship the size of a mega-mall. That a few weeks later the Costa Lista’s sister ship, the Costa Morra Insurancea Premiuma, then spent three days floating without power, was worrying to say the least. I don’t know much about cruise holidays, but I imagine that electricity is pretty important, not least because the recipe for ice is, as has been famously pointed out, water and electricity. There are only so many room temperature cocktails one can stomach before the ugly word ‘mutiny’ passes somebody’s lips. (By the way, the ‘mutiny’ is two parts rum, one part gin, lots of lime and a distress flare to garnish).

Private jets aside, first or business class probably still counts as luxury travel, involving sparkling wine, natural fibres and little snacks made from scarce ingredients from endangered habitats.

But the one great leveller of air travel, no matter what class you travel, is when you hit turbulence, in the toilet. It’s like being in a portaloo flipped by your drunk friends, if that tipping was happening in a giant blender, full of poo. If you hit an unexpected pocket while doing your business, chances are that you’ll emerge from the loo looking like pilthdown man but smelling much, much worse and resenting the hell out of all the selfish bastards who had chicken as their meal option.

Helen Skelton, action (figure) hero

In the regular polls held to decide who is the greatest Briton, Winston Churchill wins so consistently that a better poll might be 'second greatest Briton'. However, maybe its time he started looking over his shoulder, because the man has competition.

Helen Skelton is a Blue Peter presenter ('Blue Peter' rather than 'children's television' presenter because 'children's television presenter' conjures an image of a twat with highlights and primary coloured dungarees being condescending to kiddies while thinking that while their HND in drama and applied mime from their local 'University', formally a poly, formally a junior school, got them this job, they should, according to the career plan they drew up aged nineteen that's currently stuffed at the back of their sock draw, be playing the lead in 'The Cherry Orchard' at the Old Vic, rather than pretending to be a cloud and getting paid less than the other presenter - a puppet. A Blue Peter presenter could, one feels, if required, easily give an update from the front line of a war zone, they have that sort of calm authority.) who has not only paddled the length of the Amazon in a kayak, but recently skied, kite-boarded and cycled her way to the South Pole.

The girl has, to put it plainly, gumption. On television she comes across as exactly the sort of no-nonsense northern lass that forms the backbone of many a community. If it was all going tits up at lambing time, she's the sort of person one could expect to keep heads cool and soapy water warm. She's also very, very attractive. During her Amazon adventure, she had to get an anti nausea shot in her bum. The resulting footage and strain of simultaneously processing a fear of needles and the sight of a pretty bottom gave many a dad a funny turn.

Certainly, if these achievements are not worthy of the accolade of greatest Briton (something that in this jubilee year may just go to the most famous corgi-botherer in the land) then surely it's deserving of that other most public form of recognition - the action figure.

Action figures are great. For somebody who grew up sending his action man on dangerous missions behind the sofa, the joy of an action figure is in playing with them. They is why I have never understood the practice of issuing pop star action figures or dolls. I mean, just how much fun could you have with a collection of figures only slightly more plastic than their real life counterparts? The only purpose they could serve, I imagine, is to do reconstructions of acrimonious break-ups and backstage spats.

If you are a pop star, and they suggest making an action figure of you, decline. One day, ten or twenty years from now, you will be sitting on a chat show sofa, plugging your memoir, pasta sauce range or release from rehab/prison and the host will reach behind him to pull out a six inch tall reproduction of you in your prime. This is unsettling for two reasons, the first is that it's bad for your confidence to compare the dynamic miniature you to the middle aged balding fatty you currently resident on the sofa, the second that it's unsettling to think that somewhere out there is somebody who has held on to an action figure of you, who is not your mum.

Then the host simulates sex between your doll and a plastic gorilla and you're back on the crack.

Helen Skelton is the exception. She would make an fantastic action figure. First of all, think of the outfits and the accessories! Helen in the Amazon, Helen in the Antarctic, Helen in space! And you could have the studio, complete with pets and cameras, you could recreate your own episode of Blue Peter. Who of us have not, at some time or another, dreamed of stepping into the stilettos of Biddy Baxter and manipulating the young minds of the nation - but for good!

Best of all, Blue Peter being the show it is, they would no doubt show you how to make your own playsets rather than shelling out for them in the shops.