Audio Review: Sapphire and Steel - The Mystery of the Missing Hour

Mystery of the Missing Hour by Joseph Lidster


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This play is kind an odd one. We start off following an upper-class British family at the Cairo Hilton in 1926. The whole thing feels a bit like a parody of Agatha Christie. Soon, someone in the hotel is murdered, and Shuffle and Sixpence, who are apparently famous amateur detectives, are on the case.

It's very quickly apparent that something weird is going on. Not only are our heroes Sapphire and Steel masquerading as Shuffle and Sixpence, but they seem to have forgotten that it is a masquerade. Occasionally they experience flashes of their old lives, but for the most part they seemed to be convinced that they are Shuffle and Sixpence, happily married couple and famous amateur sleuths. But the other guests are behaving equally oddly, from their bizarrely inappropriate emotional responses to the fact that one of them has a habit of fluffing her lines. Finally, Shuffle/Steel figures out what's going on, and the play takes off in a very different direction.

And what happens next is the kind of weird, metafictional, 4th wall-breaking stuff that I'm completely a sucker for. I don't want to say too much about it, because I think it's more effective if you experience it without knowing too much about what to expect.

The play is to some extent a follow-on from Water Like a Stone, and it makes reference to almost every previous Sapphire and Steel play in the range. I think it pays to at least be familiar with Water Like a Stone before listening.




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Some tips for impressing me in a voter information pamphlet

I've just been slogging through my vote-by-mail ballot for the June 8 primary. Once again, I'm frustrated by how little information there is out there about the candidates for the less high profile local offices, and disappointed in myself for leaving it so late to try to figure out who I'm going to vote for for offices like Superior Court judges. Who are arguably really important, but there's astonishingly little info to be had out there.

So, once again, I'm reduced to making some decisions based on a couple of paragraph's worth of text. As always, I'm amazed by the themes that crop up in these candidate statements, and my very predictable reactions to some of them. Such as:

• Unless you're running for school board or some other educationally-related post, talking about your school-age children is only going to annoy me. Regardless of what office you're running for, spending your entire candidate statement talking about your family is going to lose you my vote.


• A candidate who does nothing but brag about how many criminals he/she has put in jail = a candidate who will do nothing about our overcrowded prisons that consume a huge proportion of the state budget. On the other hand, a successful prosecutor who also has some intelligent ideas about crime reduction or rehabilitation strategies is a pretty attractive candidate.


• It's great if you espouse policies that I agree with, but it's even better if those policies actually fall with in the remit of the job you're running for. Alberto Torrico, I absolutely agree with you that education is important, but it isn't the Attorney General's job.


• Saying that you will "cut bureaucracy" or "stand up for the consumer" is nice, but unless you can point to some tiny example of how you've cut bureacracy or stood up for the consumer in the past, my vote is likely to go to someone with an actual track record.


• Endorsements really only count with me if I respect the person or organization doing the endorsing, so "Endorsed by over 100 whatever's" doesn't do much for me.

If you would like an actual intelligent analysis of many of the candidates and ballot measures, I recommend this post by auros, who is much better informed than I am.