Taggart team challenge

email to Stense:

S T E N S E !

Do you ever watch Taggart? What am I talking about? With your TV connections, you're probably on Christmas-card terms with half the cast and crew.

I don't watch Taggart. Not really. Jen watches it as a no-brainer way of unwinding at the end of a busy week. So it's on in the room while I'm there, but I'm not really watching it; I'm usually playing on my computer exercising my mind a bit more constructively.

Occasionally, however, little snippets of Taggart slip through my firewall and into my consciousness. Like, last week, it turned out that the motive of the person murdering all these poor women was to prove that his convicted murderer son was innocent. The logic was, if murders with the same modus operandi continued to be committed after the son had been locked up, the police would have to accept that they had put away the wrong man. Totally bonkers or what? I'm glad I don't live in Glasgow, with psychopaths like that walking the streets. Or is it Edinburgh? Same difference.

Anyhow, the other thing I noticed about Taggart last week was a totally fantastic line, delivered in a deep, Scotch accent. It was just perfect. It went as follows:

"THAS BIN A MUHRRR-DUHRRR!"

Bloody brilliant! For a moment, I wondered if it was intended as a tribute to the recent Lord of the Rings film trilogy, where Gandalf the Gay and Co. insisted on referring to the Land of Mordor (where the Shadows lie) as "MOHRRR-DOHRRR!", but then I realised, no, that's just how they speak up in Scotland: "THAS BIN A MUHRRR-DUHRRRR!" Magic mustard! You don't get much better lines than that, do you?

So, anyway, Stense, it then occurred to me that you are a bit of a Scotch TV directrix in your spare time. Who knows, some day soon, you might find yourself directing a scene in which a murder is announced. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to make sure that whoever makes the announcement does so with the following classic line:

"THAS BIN A MUHRRR-DUHRRRR!"

…but here's the subtle twist: the person delivering the line has to be holding a banana carrot as they do so. A bottle of finest malt whisky and a vegetarian haggis to you, should you complete the challenge within five years of this date.

What do you say? Are you up for it? More to the point, do you accept the challenge?

Go for it, mate!

Ri xx

P.S. So that there is a formal record of my challenge, I am going to post a copy of this email on my website. Don't worry, though, I'll edit out the joke about your rash.