Murder by TV

What a waste of time. I have just wasted a whole hour of my life watching a Murder Mystery program on TV and at the end I am none the wiser.

I want to protest to someone but the chances are that if I write a stiff letter, (on cardboard), to the TV company, the producer, the main actors, or even the writer; none will take me seriously.

Instead, I am writing to you for some sympathy, at least.

No sooner the program started that a man was found murdered in suspicious circumstances. Has there ever been a murder in not suspicious circumstances? I ask myself.

The victim was shot in the chest and buried in the back garden of the local vicarage.

At first the police suspected suicide. Then they looked into the hole where the man was found and decided someone had put him there.

Who was it? Who tried to bury the victim and did such a bad job of it?

Was it the local vicar, the Reverend Cassock, who has a penchant for licorice sweets and growing broccoli?

Was it the church housekeeper, Mrs Murgatroid Tidy, who keeps a hamster in her bedroom and likes to hide in the bell tower drinking herself to sleep?

Was it the local nosey spinster librarian, Gertrude Pepper-Back, (you always need a spinster in a murder mystery), who always looks from behind the curtains of her house to see who is going where and with whom and at what time; and who also grows all her herbs in alphabetical order? At one point the detective asked her where she finds the time, and she replied, "It's next to the sage!"

Or was it the pub landlord, Archibald Brewer,  who often waters down his beer to make it go further and thus cheat his customers who have no other place to go for a drink because it is the only pub for a million miles around?

I hate it when, half way through the program, they introduce new characters and a new sub-plot to the main plot. Like for instance the "Ye Merry Emporium" which serves coffee and English tea with scones and cream and strawberry jam. It is run by Matilda Rowbottom and her lodger/boyfriend/lover/lothario/seducer/Romeo/Casanova/Don Juan waiter and chef named Bacon Risotto who hails from Scandinavia yet is from Welsh descent.

Or the gardener, Ivor Lawnmower, who apparently years ago fathered a child with the spinster librarian, and that child died suddenly, when grown-up, without saying goodbye when a box of Cheerios fell on him at the local supermarket.

At this point, whilst watching this melodrama, I had a craving for Cheerios; but we only had corn flakes in the house. So you can imagine my frustration and anger at this murder mystery with its incompetent detectives.

As you can see, there were plenty of suspects for this murder.

The police have so many potential suspects that Detective Chief Inspector Barnacle does not know where to start. He checks his script to see where to investigate next and finds he has some pages missing; so he makes it along just to keep the TV program going whilst half the population of the village is decimated, (or is it dessicated), by a murderer or murderers unknown. His plan is to wait until the end of the program and the only character still alive must be the culprit.

The police start making enquiries and questioning all and sundry when, (surprise), the vicar is found dead in an industrial washing machine and is thus eliminated from their enquiries; which is a pity since he was the main suspect. At least it was a clean death at 40 degree washing temperature and a spin dry cycle of 1000 revolutions per minute. You should have seen the colour of his cassock after this brutal clean murder.

So the police turn their attention to the church housekeeper whose job includes cleaning the church vestments. But this proves to be a wild goose chase because the lady in question was at the library at the time borrowing a book entitled, "How to murder people using a hamster as bait."

By the time the police go to the library to confirm the housekeeper's alibi they found the librarian dead in the Zoology Section half-eaten by a crocodile which escaped, or was released, from the local zoo.

In any case, the church housekeeper is herself found dead in a barn full of hamsters pretending to be Guinea pigs.

The pub landlord is killed when a barrel of beer fell on his toe resulting in him bleeding to death.

Matilda Rowbottom sells the "Ye Merry Emporium" to a French woman called Madame Leggert.

And Bacon Risotto falls in love with Madame Leggert's daughter, who is only knee-high, only to discover that she wants to live in Portugal instead of being in this Midwinter Village where murders happen every few minutes; including when there is an advert break on the TV programme.

There is no one else to suspect for this series of murders or mysterious deaths except the many cockroaches who inhabit the Tea Emporium. But unfortunately, they all provide alibis for each other thus causing total confusion to the police and all TV viewers who have wasted their time watching the show.