Death Under Glass: Taggart, 'Black Orchid' (STV, 1995)

Taggart was a long-running Scottish crime drama built around the titular Detective Chief Inspector Jim Taggart, which ran from 1983 to 2010 and stubbornly retained its eponymous detective's name even after actor Mark McManus died in 1994. It is perhaps best known internationally for a single line, "There's been a murder," delivered with such committed Glaswegian gravity that it became a cultural shorthand for the series. The long-standing joke being that even us Scottish people put on an accent to say it. You have to roll those rs in murder!

The show inspired a fierce and occasionally eccentric loyalty, and in 2013, a man won a prize at the Scottish Tattoo Convention for his Taggart-themed back tattoo, which might just well be my favourite tattoo of all time. If that isn't dedication to Glasgow's favourite detective, I don't know what is…

Not a series, then, typically associated with visual flamboyance. Which is why I was so surprised by the staging of a murder scene in the 1995 episode 'Black Orchid'. In the scene, an intruder enters a man's hotel room and shoots him in cold blood as he tans on a sunbed. The camera captures the moment in all its lurid detail: cold blue fluorescent light flooding the tanning machine, blood spraying across the perspex as the lid slowly comes down, and that wonderful final image of the man’s lifeless face still wearing his tanning goggles as blood trickles from his mouth. It's an image that, dare I say it, would sit comfortably alongside the cold technological elegance of a late 80s Italian giallo like Obsession: A Taste for Fear, clinical, eerily beautiful, and entirely unexpected from a show best remembered for dreich Glasgow proceduralism.

This is precisely what Afterimages is about: a personal catalogue of moments I find visually interesting, whether from the expected places or more unlikely ones!