Tag Archives: A Very British Murder

A Very British Murder, Part Three: The Golden Age. Television Review. B.B.C.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Murder is no parlour game likely to be solved on the last page but in act of terrible and terrifying significance.”, so relished with glee Dr. Lucy Worsley as she read from the book that set a new style of British crime fiction, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

The final part of Dr. Lucy Worsley’s fascinating look at the British pre-occupation with murder centred on the Edwardian age and beyond. From the terrible murder involving the seemingly innocuous Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen through to the way that murder became almost sanitised, cleaned and cleansed as parlour games and the rise of cinema and its own Golden Age of Film Noir in which the murderer became the celebrity in classics such as Brighton Rock and the outstanding Alfred Hitchcock film Sabotage.

A Very British Murder, Television Review. B.B.C.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

No matter where you look on television or in the book stalls and shops of Britain, there is always the chance you will come across a programme, factual case or long line of fiction dedicated to the murder. The British seem obsessed with it, so much so that no Sunday night would be the same without one of Agatha Christie’s plots giving the viewer a challenge to find the killer before the spinster or the Belgian and no trip to a book shop would feel the same without picking up the latest crime thriller. Dr. Lucy Worsley’s latest historical series delves into the mind set of our island race’s preoccupation with the despicable act and looks at some cases of the deed in A Very British Murder.