Joy Swift

"I was working in PR and marketing for a small chain of hotels in the North West producing brochures"

"We’d just done a gardening weekend. It went very well and we thought we needed to do more specialist themed weekends, because at that time in the 1980s, it wasn’t really a thing."

"I was driving to work one morning and I heard about a shooting at The Plaza in New York. I thought about how awful it would be if someone was shot in our hotel."

"Then I thought how interesting it would be for the people staying there. A bit scary, but they wouldn’t be able to leave – they would have to give evidence."

"But I discussed it with the chairman of the firm and told him I thought we would get a lot of publicity, and he said yes."

"I thought it was important for the guests to have emotional attachments to characters,” she says. “I didn’t want them to just watch a show."

"Now, there’s so many interactive things like escape rooms – I was doing interactive 38 years before it became commonplace, so I think I was always an innovator."

"I had so much interest from around the world, which proves that the murder mystery weekend idea was new. No-one else had heard of them."