I SEE that Midsomer Murders is back on TV. Well, I see that over the top of the newspaper I am pretending to read. The paper is lowered so that I can deliver unnecessary remarks. It’s an annoying job but someone has to do it.

Last week’s episode, the first in a new series, had at its centre a crime-writing festival. To my eye, the banners and posters seemed to have been influenced by the artwork for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place in Harrogate each summer, over a few days in July.

It is fair to say that there the resemblance ends.

At the Luxton Deeping Crime Festival, the crime writers hated each other with such a passion that it was hardly a surprise when the killing began. The bloody chaos was caused by the discovery of a new novel by the deceased Midsomer crime-writer George Summersbee, author of the best-selling Dagger Club novels.

The manuscript was stolen and two women met the sort of complicated end that only happens in Midsomer, where murder arrives in fiendish ways. In this case, the victims were electrocuted by booby-trapped roulette wheels.

The literary events were small in scale, featuring few people, and the writers spent all their time being bitchy to each other, delivering scathing put-downs or loud and bitter heckles.

At the Harrogate event, most of what is bitter comes in pint glasses. There are so many people you can barely move, with many hundreds of crime-writing fans pouring into the main events at the Old Swan Hotel. As for the writers, they are likely to be found sharing a drink rather than loudly doing each other down.

They are for the most part a friendly bunch. The brittle egotism and tongue-lashings of the Midsomer version are nowhere to be seen. Or, rather, if they exist it is at a more subtle level, with the less successful writers milling around hopefully while Ian Rankin and the like deservedly win most of the attention. If there is a sense of disappointment or envy, it vibrates rather than shouts, hums rather than bellows. The rivalries hide behind the friendly chat and voices are not raised in anger.

In that, the real thing is more interesting than the bile-filled pantomime represented on Midsomer Murders. No one is pretending that this ITV drama worries too much about reality.

Yet a murder drama set at a real crime writing festival would surely have legs.

The great crime writer PD James, who died last November, was honoured at the Harrogate festival one year, and she reckoned the town would have made a fine setting for a murder story.

Each year a leading crime writer chairs the festival, and this summer the task will fall to Ann Cleaves, writer of the Vera novels and the Shetland series, featuring Jimmy Perez. Both of these have ended up on TV.

Not much has been announced yet, but one event will feature the actor David Morrissey in conversation with Mark Billingham. This is another TV tie-in, as Morrissey played Billingham’s Tom Thorne for Sky TV 1.

As far as I can recall, Midsomer Murders has yet to make an appearance in Harrogate.

 

EVER since Tony Blair said that his top priority was going to be “education, education, education”, it is hard not to conclude that politicians have meddled too much in teaching.

Now it is the turn of the Tories, with Education Secretary Nicky Morgan waging war on illiteracy and innumeracy, and Prime Minister David Cameron declaring “all-out war on mediocrity”. He also promised that his party would “turn every failing and coasting secondary school into an academy, and deliver free schools for communities and parents who want them”.

Once again, the politicians are turning bellicose on the teachers. The war-like message to parents seems to be: who you gonna trust? Well, funnily enough, I’d rather trust teachers with education than politicians. Then again, my three are all beyond school and one is now a primary school teacher.

As for Ed Miliband, he says he won’t cut school budgets but isn’t letting on how he will find the money.

 

I WALKED out of York City Screen after a daytime screening of Inherent Vice at the weekend. A group of young women were standing about in high heels and short skirts, glammed up and attractive. One of them said cheerfully to a man nearby that her friend was “barfing”.

Indeed she was, all over the wall of St Martin’s Church. Sometimes York on a Saturday afternoon is less lovely than you might suppose.