Clueless Cluedo

I have always thought there was something a bit grizzly about making light of murder. As we sit around the table at Christmas playing Cluedo do we ever pause to wonder what someone's head looks like when it has been stoved-in by a monkey wrench?

There is Dr Black, dead in whatever room, his brains spilling on to the carpet, and what are we doing but giggling about the possible culprit. OK, it's only a game and the old-fashioned names and Agatha Christie-like setting remind us that we are several steps removed from reality. It is the deduction that matters.

But if it was just about deduction we needn't have characters or weapons or, indeed, murder. You could use the same logic with symbols, boxes and colours. The murder adds a morbid, human dimension.

New names

Now Hasbro, the US toy maker that owns the rights to the game, in a particularly clueless example of the current obsession with makeovers, has "modernised" the game, introducing new names for the characters, thus Colonel Mustard becomes "Jack Mustard."

But how far should modernisation go? All the original characters were white and middle class. No-one in the new line up looks anything like a suicide bomber although Jacob Green (no longer Rev) could be mistaken for Jean Charles de Menezes if one of your game-playing circle happens to include a member of the Metropolitan Police.

Broken bottle

The weapons have changed slightly to include a baseball bat and a dumbbell. What, no Uzi, sawn-off shotgun or broken bottle?

Murder is dirty, nasty and usually in the family or among "friends." In Cluedo it is clean and sterile. It's not real. Updating the characters in a way that retains the sanitized image of the original is pointless. They should have left Professor Plum as he was. Either that or make him the deranged psychotic that he might be. Instead he has become Victor Plum, a self-made video-game design billionaire. Perhaps he designed Manhunt2. Hasbro take note.