The Detectorists

I love the Detectorists. For anyone unaware, it is a TV programme about a couple of unlikely misfits, united in their commitment to using metal detectors to find lost treasure in the Essex and Suffolk countryside. It perfectly encapsulates that particularly English eccentricity that can be both charming, infuriating and quite crazy.
 
But I have to confess an agenda. The main protagonist, Andy – played by the excellent Mackenzie Crook, who writes and directs the series – has a wife, and she is played by Rachael Stirling. Rachael Stirling has a voice of pure liquid velvet, a contralto brimming with barely contained fun and, well, sexuality.
 
She is, of course, the daughter of Diana Rigg, who appears in the series as her mother. I remember Diana Rigg in the early 1970s on the London Stage in Ronald Millar’s Abelard and Heloise. Peter Abelard was a famous mediaeval philosopher who seduced one of his pupils – Heloise – and paid for it, literally, with his vitals. But the play was brilliant and had a scene when Abelard, played by Keith Michell, and Heloise walk on to the stage from either side completely naked. It was not, I promise, the reason I went to see the play, but it was a memorable moment; Diana Rigg was breathtakingly beautiful.
 
Well, ok, but you cannot expunge these memories.