Endeavour and Goodbye to Inspector Morse

I vividly remember watching the first episode of Inspector Morse starring John Thaw as the great Oxford detective and discussing it with a colleague at work the following day. That was The Dead of Jericho, aired in 1987. I really enjoyed it but I never dreamed that the Morse series would keep going, in one guise or another, until 2023. 

Yet that is what happened. Inspector Morse ran until 2000 and although John Thaw died, Lewis, starring Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox, became a huge hit - contrary, I must admit, to my initial expectations. The strength of the writing, the quality of the characters, the acting, the music, and the production values, coupled with the wonderful Oxford locations, all combined to great effect.

I also had initial doubts about Endeavour, a prequel series starring Shaun Evans as the young Morse and Roger Allam as Inspector Thursday, who doesn't get a mention in the books. Again, the combination of Russell Lewis's skilful screenplays plus all the familiar ingredients and strong period settings made the pilot episode in 2012 a hit. And now it's finally come to an end, in a very enjoyable concluding episode which ties up most if not perhaps all of the loose ends. 

These shows have given me a great deal of pleasure over the last 36 years. Colin Dexter was, of course, thrilled by their enormous success. I have a distinct memory of seeing his first novel for sale in an Oxford bookshop - 'By Local Author' - and nobody paying attention to it, when I was a student. Later, it was a joy to get to know Colin a bit. He wrote a story for one of my anthologies and the last time we met, when he was very frail, he was kind enough to inscribe a copy of a Lewis script for me. Colin loved Oxford, as I do, and the TV series certainly did him and the city of dreaming spires proud.

Vigil - BBC TV review

When I was a small boy, I sat through innumerable episodes of an American TV series called Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison. My Dad was a big fan of the show,  which was set on board an American nuclear submarine, but I was rather less enamoured. Suffice to say it was very different from Vigil, a thriller series written by Tom Edge. It's set on board a British nuclear sub and has just come to the end of its six-episode run on BBC TV.

Any series about nuclear submarines is almost certain to involve espionage as an ingredient, but Vigil scores right from the start as it concerns an investigation of a murder on board HMS Vigil, which occurs shortly after the mysterious capsizing of a fishing trawler. DCI Amy Silva (the talented and ubiquitous Suranne Jones) is the top cop sent on board to figure out who killed bolshy crew member Burke (Martin Compston). 

Amy suffers from claustrophobia, so sending her on to a submarine seems rather like an act of cruelty, despite her brilliance as a detective. But of course, in the finest tradition of Great Detectives, she goes for it. She has a complicated backstory, which emerges through a lengthy sequence of flashbacks. Her male partner drowned in a car accident for which she blames herself; she rescued his daughter from the car, but lost custody to the girl's grandparents. She then fell for a younger female cop, DS Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), but that relationship has run into difficulties. While Amy gets embroiled in a complex series of goings-on on board Vigil, Kirsten investigates the murder of Burke's anti-nuclear activist girlfriend Jade on dry land.

The Vigil's crew includes some familiar faces, notably Shaun Evans, better known to me as the young Morse in the highly enjoyable Endeavour (I've seen two episodes of the new series eight so far, and they are definitely up to standard). Suranne Jones and Rose Leslie are terrific, and so is Stephen Dillane, who plays a crafty rear-admiral who knows more about what is happening in the depths of the sea than he's prepared to admit. 

Vigil has proved very popular, but it's also received plenty of criticism, partly because of technical inaccuracies, partly because the final revelations were regarded by some as disappointing, and partly because of a perception of political bias. I enjoyed it with very few reservations (the main one being that the final fifteen minutes felt more like a conscientious soap opera than a thriller). Unlike all too many six-part series, it was packed with action and didn't outstay its welcome. Of course this means that some aspects were convoluted and over-the-top, but a story of this kind demands the suspension of disbelief and I was more than happy to suspend mine. 

Endeavour: Girl - ITV review

If Broadchurch has, as I said in my last post, underlined the continuing appeal of the whodunit, then Endeavour does not only that but also highlights the seemingly endless potential of Inspector Morse spin-offs. I enjoyed the pilot episode when it was screened, and the first episode of the first full series, Girl, was a high quality murder mystery.

A great deal of credit has to go to Russell Lewis, the writer, who has taken the essence of the original series,and the character as played by John Thaw, and given us a very appealing prequel set in the sixties. The plot of Girl was clever and the revelation of the culprit's identity took me completely by surprise. Pleasurable surprise, I must add. As I said yesterday, it is good to be fooled fairly, and I thought Russell Lewis paced the plot twists perfectly. There was even a neat little code which provided a crucial clue to that person's name. Colin Dexter would have been well pleased, I think.

The acting, too, is very good. Shaun Evans catches the young Morse's bolshie but vulnerable personality, and Roger Allam, as DI Thursday, is humane and believable. Some comic relief is offered by Anton Lesser's prissy disdain for the young cop. Sophie Stuckey, playng a suspect with epilepsy whom Morse fancies, handled the tricky role of the girl of the title very well.

Setting counts for a great deal in so many TV crime shows,and of course the Morse franchise has the inestimable advantage of being set in one of the most photogenic of cities. I wonder sometimes if people who are less keen on Oxford than I am may get bored with the endless flow of cop shows set there, but all the signs are that demand for those shows is as strong as ever. Yes, the broadcasters are playing it safe, and that's why a less conventional series like Broadchurch is so welcome. But if subsequent screenplays are as sharp as this one was, there is a good chance that Endeavour will run and run.

Endeavour: review

Endeavour, shown this evening on ITV, is a relative rarity in detective fiction, a prequel. You can guess from the title that it concerned the early days of Colin Dexter's much-loved Inspector Morse. We have, of course, seen attempts at the early life of Sherlock Holmes, although as yet we've been spared stories about the youthful exploits of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple (though, who knows, perhsaps some TV mogul somewhere is even now thinking about suitably inappropriate casting ideas.)

The first question I asked myself before watching was: do we really need a prequel? It is clearly a money-spinner, but does it really add anything to our appreciation of the character? After all, there are plenty of excellent books (and also some written by me!) that it would be good to see on TV, yet which are unlikely to make the small screen any time soon. You can argue that it's a pity that TV companies prefer the safe, the tried and tested, to taking a risk with something unfamiliar. And, joking and personal bias apart, I do think this is a pity. But it's also commercial reality. TV is a business, and the Morse franchise has been hugely successful. Artistically succesful, too. What's more, although I was initially resistant to the concept of Lewis, I've found it so entertaining that I've become a real fan. So I was more than ready to set aside instinctive prejudice against the concept.

My conclusion is that the experiment was definitely worthwhile. Russell Lewis, the scriptwriter, did an extremely good job (again I find myself doing a bit of teeth-gnashing, since although I've never met him, Russell Lewis was once mooted as a prospective scriptwriter for a TV version of the Harry Devlin stories, which more than once were the subject of an options deal that never turned into something that was filmed.) In particular, I liked the nods to the original stories - not just the cameo appearance of Colin Dexter, or the casting of Abigail Thaw, daugher of the irreplaceable John, but various neat bits of scripting. Oxford, of course, remains one of the most photogenic of settings for a classic mystery.

Shaun Evans did a decent job of the very difficult task of playing young Morse. I also very much liked Roger Allam's performance as his boss, Inspector Thursday. As for the whodunit plot, it followed a formula familiar to Morse fans. I shall say no more! But it was entertaining from start to finish.

The big question now is whether Endeavour will prove to be a pilot for a series. I have mixed feelings, for the reasons I've mentioned. But I did enjoy this show, and I certainly wouldn't bet against our seeing more stories about Morse's early career before too long.

One final thought. I remember clearly watching the very first episode of Inspector Morse. Apparently it was back in 1987, four years before I had a mystery of my own published. Talk about time flying...