I’ve been watching Blacklist lately (preposterous show, but I’ll watch anything with James Spader), and I spotted a puzzle! It’s all white, but with some variation in tone, in fact, it could be a photo of the marble table. The pieces look thick (you can tell from the shadows), so it might be a wooden puzzle. Reddington calls the puzzle “infuriating”, and I might well feel the same way…
I didn’t write down what episode it was, but it was in the first half of season 4.
I’m preparing for the upcoming Downton Abbey movie by rewatching the entire series, and AHA, there’s a puzzle! The Dowager Countess of Grantham and Mrs Crawley are having some sherry while doing a puzzle. You can’t make out the image, and they make no reference to the puzzle, but you can see that the pieces are wooden, and it seems the countess has done the edges first.
Mrs Crawley has her own little section to work on.
My grandmother, who was also a puzzler, once told me that Queen Elizabeth is a keen puzzler and that she has an enormous room with many tables with puzzles on them, and even though she is too busy to spend much time puzzling, she sometimes walks through the room placing a piece here and there. This may not be true (except for the part about Queen Elizabeth liking puzzles), my grandmother liked the kind of magazines with royal gossip where much of the content is entirely made up by the “journalists”.
I’ve heard that Queen Elizabeth likes puzzles elsewhere as well, although it’s difficult to verify – it’s not like she gives chatty interviews about her hobbies 🙂 According to a story in the Telegraph from 2010, it is even said that Her Majesty prefers her puzzles without an image on the box in order to make it more challenging.
Anyway, we seem to be in very good company 🙂
The most famous on-screen puzzle must be the one in Citizen Kane (photos and analysis here), but here are some that I recently came across on TV:
On Dallas, Christopher and John Ross are being told off for playing with a gun. In the background, there’s a 500-piece puzzle. It looks like an MB, but I’m not sure. And yes, I recently rewatched Dallas. All of it, while puzzling of course 🙂
2. The Fall
On the great British show The Fall, a serial killer amuses himself with a puzzle. You can’t see what puzzle it is.
3. Bad Blood
In Bad Blood, Series 1, Episode 6, gangster Vito Rizzuto is doing a puzzle and recounts how he used a puzzle to teach his son about life. Again, you can’t tell what puzzle it is, this is the best shot of it.
Vito: “I sent the new guy out to get me a puzzle and I told him to throw away the box so now I don’t know what it is. ”
Declan [henchman]: “What?”
Vito: “When Nico was a kid, I did the same thing, I threw away the box and we sat there for, like, about two months. You know, trying to do it, it was nothing, nothing, nothing, and then finally, you know, you get the right piece… snapped into place… [he places a piece] and you see the whole landscape. It was like… like a revelation. I was teaching him a life lesson. About patience, tenacity, work ethic… When it all came together, I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody that excited in my life.”
Puzzler1909 