Vexed Knitting: Knit and Natter??

• Jack: So we’re looking for a homicidal Granny, right?
• Georgie: Have you ever heard of Knit and Natter?
• J: No. What the hell’s that?
• G: People get together in groups and they chat and they knit.
• J: That’s a thing?
• G: Lots of celebrities do it, so apparently it’s a cool thing.
• J: I thought it was just grannies wanting to get back at their relatives for not visiting more often.
• G: Julia Roberts does it; Madonna does it.
• J: Yeah. Like I said, we’re looking for a homicidal Granny.

BBC Series Vexed offers us a different take on our favorite craft: knitting needle as murder weapon. Now, we’ve seen this before — most notably in Ian Fleming’s novel From Russia With Love, in which (spoiler alert!) a Soviet agent attacks James Bond with a knitting needle, and in the Chevy Chase / Goldie Hawn movie Foul Play, which (again, spoilers!) gives us Hawn killing a man with her knitting needles. So it’s not original, and again mass media gives us the “hey, knitting is hip; who knew?” trope, but I enjoyed this episode nonetheless.

While Vexed Series 2 isn’t as consistently good as Series 1 was, it does hum along nicely. This episode sees Jack trying to infiltrate a mothers’ knitting group to solve the murder of the headmaster at their school. We get to hear Toby Stephens say that he’s knitting his mother an egg cozy, while getting tangled up in yarn and needles. I’d say the best moment of the show is when Naz, the crime scene tech, notices that the knitting needles with which the headmaster was killed are handmade and expensive. Is Naz a closet knitter? Only Series 3 will tell us.

Unfortunately, due to baby-related delays (how long until that excuse is worn out?), I am posting this too late for UK residents to watch the full episode on BBC iPlayer. If you’re in the United Kingdom, you can watch a clip from the episode on the BBC website, and people on both sides of the pond can get Series 1 on DVD. [You can also see Goldie Hawn kill her attacker using a knitting needle at the very end of this YouTube clip.]

While we’re waiting for this episode to rerun, why not tell us in the comments what mainstream media depiction of knitting you’ve enjoyed most?