The sensational middle-class obsession with murder is put under the microscope at The Lowry by “accidental” TV presenter Dr Lucy Worsley.
Dr Worsley – who is quick to point out that this is her hobby, and her day job is curator at Historic Royal Palaces – has clearly been blessed with a naturally engaging style as she bounds onto stage at the Lyric theatre for this lecture.
It’s accompanied and rather let down by a lo-fi Powerpoint presentation, that unfortunately looked as though it was knocked up in half an hour, and was lacking the film, graphics, audio or even animation that Powerpoint masters David Trent or Dave Gorman may have produced.
However, the subject matter is fascinating.
She cleverly traces the history of the morbid national infatuation with murder, focusing on the first recognised ‘serial killer’ notion in the 1811 Ratcliff Highway murders, where a mother, father, infant child and servant boy were all killed inside a shop in London.
Incredibly at this time there was still no national police force – just a series of country bumpkin constables who never spoke to one another – and the public saw fit to write letters to the police telling how they had solved the murder!
Next was the ‘Red Barn’ Murder of 1826 – the first to really monetise the public’s interest.
Worsley spoke of how enterprising people had pulled apart and sold the slats from the barn where the murder occurred, and elicited a groan from the audience when she told the story of how she had handled the blackened, shrivelled scalp of the murderer which is still on museum display today.
This was an afternoon full of quality historical anecdotes.
It linked the likes of Thomas de Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” to the ‘luxury’ of the public being able to worry about fantastically unlikely events such as murder as their living standards got better.
Running us through the ‘stunning good murders’ that shifted papers in the 1800s, to the pillars of detective fiction in Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers, we got a real insights here, and much to follow up in our own time.
The second half of the show is a little more cobbled together – after the interval Worsley is ‘so pleased you came back’ – and given the rather thin nature of this Q&A segment it’s clear why.
Beyond a couple of fan questions, like: ‘Who do you think Jack the Ripper is?’, and an anecdote about meeting Private Eye editor Ian Hislop at the Proms, there’s not much going on here.
It’s a shame, as it takes the edge off what has been a fascinating 50 minutes.
In all, this was a diverting afternoon’s entertainment, but nothing more.
