And so tonight to part 2 of The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies. ITV are suddenly purveyors of top television drama with this being good but not quite as good, perhaps, as Cilla.
It's like Midsomer Murders in reverse because you know the police are wrong already and that D.I. Barnaby isn't just going to realize the answer about twenty minutes before the end. But it's interesting to show their approach, plus that of the headmaster, where Jefferies had taught for 34 years, trying to distance the college as far as he could from any connection to him.
But most monstrous (sic) was a reminder of the newspaper headlines at the time. I remember reading The Times and thinking, the Prayer Society, interested in poetry, oh dear. But one sub headline beneath the overly presumptuous trial by innuendo big headline did say,
Loves culture, poetry.
as if that were admissable evidence.
I don't know in how many other countries that could even be thought of, never mind put into print. Certainly not in France. And by 'other countries', I mean Scotland, Wales and Ireland, too. It could be an English peculiarity. So if there ever is a murder in your neighbourhood, hide the poetry books.
I have nearly 500 of them here ready to implicate me.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
