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3 Midweek Longreads: Why Murder She Wrote rules

Longreads to savour or save.

Entertainment - Angela Lansbury - Olivier Theatre, London PA Archive / Press Association Images PA Archive / Press Association Images / Press Association Images

IF YOU WANT a juicy longread to sink your teeth into, you’ve come to the right place.

Here are three to save for a moment of peace, or devour straight away.

1. We <3 You, Jessica Fletcher

Turns out that Angela Lansbury’s character was a feminist boss. Here’s the story behind the show.

(Cleo, mins)

Fischer worried that if Lansbury were cast he would have to alter the project. (“How would Shakespeare rewrite Macbeth to star Billy Crystal?”) But he needn’t have worried. Similarly to many of the show’s criminals—and just as often, the authorities—who routinely underestimated Fletcher, so too did Fischer underestimate Lansbury. But the reason the show works is because of what Lansbury brings to it: she plays the widow with equal parts charming comedic airs and take-no-bullshit feminism.

2. An oral history of Speed 3

The true story behind one of Father Ted’s most legendary episodes.

(DailyEdge.ie, 7 mins)

Because [Pat Mustard] had been shagging all these women on the island, Ted had to figure out who was having all this sex. That’s where the hairy babies came into it. Dougal and Ted were at a bonnie baby contest and Ted noticed all of these hairy babies. It was just lovely how the whole story kind of fell together.

3. Woman at war

Lynsey Addario is an award-winning war photographer, and this is what it’s like to work where many of us fear to tread.

(The National, 15 mins)

 “Look, I felt like I got off easy because I wasn’t being smashed in the back of the head by a gun butt. Yes, I was being groped. Every single soldier in Libya was touching my breasts and my butt. I was terrified I would be raped. But I wasn’t being hit on the back of the head with a gun. The men felt the opposite, like this poor woman is being sexually assaulted. No one has the right to say which kind of trauma is worse. For me just listening to them getting beaten up day after day was the most miserable experience. I felt like I couldn’t do anything.”

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