High Table, Lower Orders is a BBC Radio 4 comedy-drama murder mystery written by Mark Tavener and set in a fictional University of Cambridge college in crisis.
[2] Its title refers to the custom of the college's fellows eating at High Table, and the murders and skulduggery that occur in the series.
[3] Both series feature a murder mystery set against a background of satirical references to newspaper and television journalism, politics, government bureaucracy, and academic in-fighting.
He invites Simon Harrison, a brilliant former biology student at the college who is now working in the Health and Safety Executive, a job he mostly finds tiresome, to investigate the suspicious death.
At the same time, Zoe Redmond, a philosophy graduate and Simon's former girlfriend, loses her job as political sketch-writer on a national newspaper and is forced to freelance.
Her reappearance opens old wounds for Simon, who drank himself into oblivion when she left him; he was consequently in no condition for his final exam, and failed to get the first-class honours degree that would have enabled him to pursue an academic career.
In a subplot, Simon becomes so disenchanted with working at the HSE that he turns a speech at a conference in Europe into a denunciation of the nitpicking culture of the health and safety bureaucracy, much to the annoyance of the interpreter, who cannot translate words like "tosspottery".