(lively music) - Oh.
- The murder mystery is quintessentially British, essentially because we sort of invented it.
- It's like a tradition about, you know, the Brits, it's the darkness they carry maybe.
It's the land, the weather.
- Maybe it's because the English are supposed to be so reserved and controlled, that then when you get these kind of horrific sort of, I don't know, whatever happens in whatever mystery it is, it's what lurks underneath.
(lively music continues) (covers flapping) (staff gasps) - So yeah, you have your beautiful pond with the swans on it, but they're paddling away like billy-o underneath, and the same with the characters in a village that may superficially and on the surface seem to be happy, but it's not.
It covers a multitude of mysteries.
(suspenseful music) Angela Lansbury would rise from her grave and give us a good argument about Americans not being good at murder mysteries.
- American murder crime dramas, maybe they're a bit more urban, and it's the streets of New York or LA or wherever, whereas here, you can have a crime drama and everyone's going, like with "Magpie Murders," "Oh, look at that lovely village in Suffolk.
It's so cute and it's so chocolate box and isn't it lovely?"
So that becomes almost another character in the story.
- Murder and wickedness, it's all around me.
- Even Cluedo, which is a source of, as it were, an American riff on the detective genre is set in an English manor house with a cast of obviously very stalwart murder mystery characters, a diva, a cook, a colonel, a professor.
I mean, it just feels correct, doesn't it?
And that was invented in the '40s, so it was already an established sort of, almost a cliche of what it represents.
- Because you need to have a cast of quirky characters, and I think the sort of small, parochial nature of Britain lends itself very well to that.
You know, we have a lot of these sort of small villages that have these characters.
All these places draw on a small community, and in a small community there are only so many people that could have committed a crime, and as such, automatically you have suspects and you have intrigue.
- When all is said and done, (chuckles) (board claps) despite empire and cricket and all sorts of things, the one thing we can definitely claim we invented was a proper murder mystery.
(laughs) It's our greatest export, murder.
(lively music)
