The Sound of Silent Witnesses

I don’t know about you but I’ve got a real soft spot for Silent Witness, the forensics procedural that is now entering its 23rd series. It’s rare for a crime drama to straddle that middle ground between hard-hitting and gritty on the one hand and flabby and unconvincing on the other but SW seems to manage it. It’s quite corny in parts and there’s a lot of telling-people-things-they-ought-to-know-already (for example, last night a HEMS officer asked what diazepam is) but I just blow past it because I enjoy the programme: in fact OH and I have been following it for years.

So what is it about this series that is so appealing? Well, first off is the subject matter. There are a lot of crime and police procedurals but very few forensic ones, and the concept of probing the secrets of the dead is very appealing. Of course as it’s not a gritty drama the corpses aren’t depicted with anything approaching realism but again, we just blow past that because it’s so enjoyable. Like police procedurals the pleasure is in trying to work out the denouement before the characters get there, and the series allows the attentive viewer to twig the outcome just before Nikki and her team.

And that’s the third attraction of this show; the characters. These people are family; there are mother and father-figures (Nikki and Thomas) and squabbling siblings Jack and Clarissa. There’s no hint of sexual attraction between them – any relationships take place outside the team – and while there are tiffs and disagreements, nothing major threatens the coherence of the group.

So much for silent witnesses; less entertaining is what I call the phenomenon of the silent ‘g’. Every time I turn on Steve Wright ‘in the afternoon’ – that’ll be on his gravestone – he seems to be doing a feature called ‘serious jockin’ (no g’). I simply cannot understand the point of this. People text or email saying what they’re up to and add ‘serious’ whatever with no ‘g’ at the end. A typical one might go like this: ‘and here’s Jordan in Scarborough: Dear Steve, we’re heading up to the Lake District this weekend for some sailing. Serious boatin’ – no g.’ Why is this funny? Why do they make such a big deal out of it? OH cannot understand it and neither can I.

It also puts me in mind of the National Theatre of Brent, whose comedy seems to consist in droppin’ the g’s at the end of words.

Hm.

Happy Friday

Kirk out

Serious Thinkin’

Steve Wright-In-The-Afternoon (that is his name isn’t it?) has a rather baffling item on his show where people text in saying what they’re doin’ only without the g at the end.  The item is called ‘serious jockin’ – at least I think that’s what it’s called – and I’ve never quite been able to understand the point, but maybe that’s because I lack the necessary brain cells to completely comprehend Radio 2.  But I like most of the music they play; it being the aged version of Radio 1 which has, so to speak, moved over and taken the listeners with it.  But in fact it’s a lot better than R1 used to be because it’s not restricted to a playlist of the top 20 plus up-and-coming tracks with a few oldies thrown in: R2 plays a wide variety of music and treats its audience with a great deal more respect.  Even so, I used to have R1 on all day long because it was virtually all we had.  On a good day when the wind was in the right direction you could get Radio Caroline, a pirate station broadcast from a boat somewhere in the North Sea, and eventually in London we got Capital Radio which featured the wonderful Kenny Everett who had been sacked from the BBC more times than I’d had hot dinners.

Nowadays I’m mostly a Radio 4 person, but there are times in the day when I need music: when I’m driving and don’t want to put a CD on, or when I’m doing the washing up or the decorating. Nowadays there are a thousand channels you can listen to on your iphone or tablet or laptop or sound system – but back then it was very restrictive.  One of the ways people got round the restrictions was with CB radio.  CB (or Citizen’s Band) radio was very big in the States and had its own language, as shown in this terrible song:

But it was illegal over here, I think because it interfered with police frequencies.  This did not stop enthusiasts from installing them in their cars; the big giveaway being large twin aeriels sprouting from the car.  One such nutter was stopped by the police:

PC Plod:  Excuse me sir, is this your car?

Mad Eddie:  Ay, so what?

PC Plod:  It’s equipped for CB radio

Mad Eddie:  Well I’m equipped for rape but I don’t go out and do it

Soon afterwards it became legal and therefore much less fun (CB radio I mean.)

Kirk out