‘Borecore’ is having a moment – and this zippy Agatha Christie whodunnit is bang on trend

Have you heard about “borecore”? Hugely on-trend at the moment. All the rage in your glossies and your socials. If I understand it correctly, which I probably don’t, it’s the fashionable embrace of all things bland and beige. Pale carpets, mushroom risotto, Keir Starmer. Gwyneth Paltrow’s courtroom wardrobe: big cream turtlenecks, belted cardigans and clumpy Prada shoes. That sort of thing.

“Borecore” is not the same as boring, you understand. That’s why I’m citing Gwyneth Paltrow. There’s nothing boring about taking the stand in Utah because a grumpy optometrist is pretending you skied into him and changed his personality for ever. That kind of thing never happens to me. But the clothes she wore to do it were the very essence of this trend: soft, knitted, colourless and nothing to frighten the horses.

Borecore extends beyond clothing, reaching its fashionable fingers out into lifestyle choices, social habits and cultural taste. It’s been around for a while; I found an article from the Telegraph in 2019 “in praise of borecore”, written by a 29-year-old woman who was “suddenly obsessed with staying in, White Company interiors, antique shops, pub lunches and BBC dramas… I’m thinking a home-cooked meal, maybe a good bottle of red, a film or maybe a board game with my boyfriend. Certainly nothing that will involve leaving the house, engaging with strangers or shouting over loud music.”

I found that a poignant read, I must say. Careful what you wish for! 2020 rolled round and we all got hoist on the sharp end of “nothing that will involve leaving the house”.

You wouldn’t have thought this kind of trend would survive the lockdown years, would you? But the term has resurfaced like a vampire from the coffin, most notably in relation to the multimillion-hit “#vanillagirl” movement on TikTok, plastered approvingly over everything WASPy and expensive.

I’m not a fan of greige knits myself, not least because of the risk of spillages, but I’m having a very fashionable spring season anyway, due to my recent immersion in period murder mysteries. According to the internet, this is the most borecore of TV genres: cosy, luxurious and everyone’s white. (Or, if it’s made after 2018, almost everyone.)

The programmes themselves – and this is a vital if subtle distinction, so please keep up – are not boring. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Hugh Laurie’s three-part adaptation of Agatha Christie that was made for BritBox last year and shown on ITV over the Easter weekend, was tremendously zippy and action-packed, full of car crashes and jump scares. It jostled with delightful performances from people it makes you happy to see: Paul Whitehouse, Jim Broadbent, Emma Thompson and magical Hugh Laurie himself playing a psychiatrist. If you don’t want to see Hugh Laurie playing a psychiatrist, then perhaps you need one. It’s as pleasing as a whisky miniature on Boxing Day.

It also had Miles Jupp as a well-heeled junkie, which is worthy of special mention given his bravura performance in last week’s first episode of the new Have I Got News For You. Do catch up on iPlayer if you missed it; proving that a 30-year-old satire series can be as edgy and hilarious as anything devised this morning, and Miles Jupp is underestimated as a national treasure. I keep laughing retrospectively at the moment when Ian Hislop began to speculate “If Stormy Daniels were, for example, an English pole dancer…” and Miles Jupp chipped in mournfully: “Oh Ian, what have you done?”. He speaks so gently and calmly, yet with such sharp wit and perfect wording; he somehow creates time and space around himself, like the great batsmen. It’s like watching Brian Lara do comedy. Except that would probably be awful.

Anyway, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? was the opposite of boring, yet I understand why they claim it for borecore: all beautiful people in cashmere golfing sweaters, wandering across lovely lawns towards sumptuous teas, every frame as preppy and gorgeous as Gwyneth Paltrow in the dock. It’s so goddamn digestible.

I also have high hopes for Magpie Murders, the Anthony Horowitz series running over Saturday nights on BBC One (though all six parts are available on iPlayer if you prefer to go out on Saturday nights, which would be very unfashionable of you). The action jumps between a classic borecore murder scenario, in which Sir Magnus Pye is found dead at the foot of Pye Hall’s sweeping ancestral staircase, and a modern world where this is all a novel being written by a prickly author called Alan Conway.

Call me a philistine but I could do without the meta side of things. I’d be happy enough just to watch the various suspects at Pye Hall glower at each other over gleaming soup tureens. There are a few infelicities in the movement between contrasting worlds, but I’ve only seen a couple of episodes and, like Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, the jury is out.

Meanwhile, if you want something truly boring I can recommend Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four on BBC Sounds. We’ve been listening to it every night for six months. Reliably asleep within five minutes, every time. We keep starting the playback from wherever we dozed off the night before and it may be 10 years before we finish it. Hard to say why; it’s a great novel, albeit full of language about the tropics that would never be used today (unless I’ve dreamt those bits, in which case I should be cancelled immediately) but one absolutely cannot stay awake for more than a few sentences. Tremendous stuff.