This week’s post was unexpectedly inspired by an old episode of ‘Due South’ I watched by chance on TV last weekend. ‘Due South’, for those old enough to remember, was a Canadian TV crime series from the 1990s about the adventures of Benton Fraser, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Fraser travels to Chicago in order to investigate the murder of his father. He ends up staying there as a liaison officer in the Canadian embassy, and helps solve many more crimes alongside local detective Ray Vecchio. The TV series was broadcast on Greek (and British) television at the time, although sadly I can’t remember the title’s Greek translation now.

I never watched the series at the time, but last Saturday evening I found myself watching the last half hour of an episode entitled ‘Flashback’ (series 2). In it, a jewellery store is robbed and its owner kidnapped. Fraser loses his memory whilst pursuing the robbers/kidnappers in a getaway car, and Detective Vecchio must help him remember again in time to find the robbers. There is a scene where Fraser is sitting alone in the car waiting for Vecchio when the ghost of his dead father appears in the back seat. They start talking, but inevitably the conversation is interrupted by the returning Vecchio who asks Fraser: ‘Has anything happened?’. Fraser replies: ‘In what sense?’. In an otherwise unremarkable episode, this, I thought, was a nice illustration of what it’s like sometimes to live in your head. That scene stayed with me for a while afterwards. In fact, I liked Fraser’s deadpan reply so much that I decided that I had to get Luci, who often has surreal flights of the imagination in broad daylight, to say it.

So, in conclusion, even the most mundane aspects of popular culture sometimes reveal little nuggets of inspiration one can make use of in some way. If you don’t know or remember what ‘Due South’ is all about, here’s the Wikipedia entry for it.