This old dog likes New Tricks

The wonderful cartoonist Sydney Padua (author of Babbage and Lovelace, crazy computational comic crime fighters) has designed this badge in honour of Owen Paterson, the Secretary of State for the Environment, who says the badger cull has fallen flat because the pesky predators 'moved the goalposts'.

Should you require more interactive cutting-edge satire, I recommend this game, in which you attempt to score a goal while the badger move the goalpost, as is their wont. If on the other hand you have higher-brow tastes, you might wish to discover which eminent Elizabethan you are. I came out as Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. Dashing, rakish, liked a duel, a hit with the ladies (including Elizabeth I), was beheaded. It's all about the self-fashioning, so keep trying (sorry, little New Historicist humour there). 

I have actually been working today, but I'm also tired (and falling behind in the lecture writing) and now have two colleagues in hospital, so a little light relief is in order. 

And while we're here, I have an argument to settle. Now you may know that I'm a fan of supposedly rubbish TV drama New Tricks, which follows the investigations of some semi-retired cops as they look into cold cases. There are two reasons why I love New Tricks; firstly it's a comedy-drama, which my friends refuse to admit, and secondly, it's clearly written by some left-wing satirists who keep a keen eye on current affairs. 

As evidence, I present the episode 'It Smells of Books', in which a university lecturer dies in suspicious circumstances. It opens with one of our heroes losing his temper in a noisy library, plugs the London Library, promotes reading as the route to enlightenment and wickedly satirises a vice-chancellor more interested in the bottom line than in learning, gets rid of the humanities and staff who defend them and talks of investment, leverage and payback. In the show, the university library is being converted to student accommodation. (You may think I'm having a pop at my own dear institution here, but I'm not: my VC actually wants to rename the Learning Centre as 'the Library', which is rather delightful). Here's the first 10 minutes or so. It's a delightful popular culture intervention which reaches an audience generally resistant to ideological debate. It is, I might say, an interpretation of Newman's The Idea of a University and McGettigan's The Great University Gamble thinly disguised as prime-time detective drama in which the death of humanistic university principles are played out in a murder plot, and I thoroughly recommend it. 

The rest of the episode is available on a popular video-streaming website well-known for copyright fraud. If you like TV campus comedies, you may also enjoy A Very Peculiar Practice. 

The murder in the library

I'm guessing that most of you don't watch New Tricks, the BBC's apparently lame comedy-drama set in a police office staffed by weird old retirees chasing cold cases. It's got Dennis Waterman in it, for a start.

But one of the fun things about popular culture is the way it can very quickly deal with pressing social issues without lecturing people. The most popular example was Melrose Place: unknown to the directors, the art producer was sneaking naughty references into the scenes via the scenery: a watercolour of the Manson murder house, a postal worker's satchel with a fabric ammunition clip sewn underneath ('going postal', get it?), and a duvet cover printed with the chemical formula for the morning-after pill.

This episode of New Tricks is called 'It Smells of Books', which is why I started watching it. The opening scene was of a slightly autistic ex-cop becoming rather upset by the students using their mobile phones, children singing, teens using iPods… all in the library. The show then moves on to investigate the murder of an academic frozen out of an ex-polytechnic university as his department is closed down by a business-school, money-obsessed, jargon-spouting Vice-Chancellor named Jeremy Ventham, suspiciously similar to Jeremy Bentham, inspiration for University College London, famous philosopher and who is still mummified in a public display case. There's lots of plagiarism, suspicion, autistic-academic jealousy, bad essays and all the other aspects of my life. It's very obvious why so many academics write campus novels: all human life is there.

OK, the dead man who spoke up for humanist values turns out to be a book thief (the plot revolves around a stolen book by Henri Duhamel), but the satire is broad and all the better for it: humanism killed by business-oriented ideology. This show's worth 20 demonstrations, and it's a welcome return to the 1970s, when committed lefty television makers inserted political points at every opportunity: even Dr Who!

Very satisfyingly, the humanist academic's murderer turns out to be the evil Vice-Chancellor. Let's hope my new VC (whom I'm told is an avid reader of Plashing Vole) isn't taking notes

Well worth looking up on iPlayer.