Murder on the Homefront / Foyle’s War knitwear

ITV seems to be doing quite a lot of programmes with a wartime setting now; a new drama, Murder on the Homefront, is set to be broadcast tomorrow night (8 May). Unlike Foyle’s War and The Bletchley Circle, this one’s based on real life, in particular the memoirs of Molly Lefebure, who was secretary to the Home Office pathologist Keith Simpson, so I've been looking forward to the programme since I first heard about it.

My enthusiasm has been dampened since ITV put out a press release on the programme, and the case mentioned in the release bears no resemblance to any of the better-known cases Simpson worked on. It looks very much as though the central case is completely made up, with the overblown elements and rapidly-rising bodycount modern crime dramas seem unable to be made without. Still, we shall see how it all turns out tomorrow night! Perhaps it will be better than I’m expecting. I'm going to watch it anyway.

Foyle's woollies
There’s been some interest on Ravelry in the knitwear worn in The Bletchley Circle, which has just been shown in the US. I don’t have any shots of that, but I did take a couple from the recent three-episode series of Foyle’s War, which I thought you would enjoy. If you’re on Ravelry, there’s a group for Foyle’s War, and one member’s recently completed knitting a cardigan based on Sam’s green one from the episode ‘All Clear’ (series six). Nisse at What’s In A Treehouse has done a blog post showing a lot of the knits from earlier series of Foyle’s War, including the green cardigan.

Anyway, here's a couple of nice knits from series seven.
From episode 3, 'Sunflowers', this lady wore a red jumper with openwork V's
and little embroidered flowers

Sam also had some nice woollies. This looks like a bed jacket to
me - the little tie at the throat gives it away. Note the khaki
shade: leftover wartime yarn?

Having seen a few 1940s-set dramas of late, and enjoyed seeing other people’s reactions to shows I love, and been working hard on the Wartime Farm tank top, I’m craving a Fair Isle cardigan of my own. But it must wait! First I have to finish the tank top (and it’s taking a LOT of work; I’m started to get scared I won’t finish it on time despite working on it every day) and then my navy cardigan.

Comments

  1. Thanks for this, I love looking at the knitwear in period set dramas. Did you see the great cardigans in the 1940s set sections of Lightfields?

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a shame they couldn't use a real case. However (and this is an area of expertise for me) crime drama and crime fiction has, since its earliest examples, had a ludicrous body count when contrasted against real life. It is part and parcel of the genre and, whereas if one is writing about a famous criminal their behaviour will work as drama (as they will have killed/robbed more than others) with a highly skilled detective, the issue becomes that usually what makes them effective results in very poor drama indeed: keeping calm, noting detail etc'.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts